How do you farm?

[cow pollinater]

Personally I'm more interested in listening to farming from around the country than I am in beating up Sim.ang.king over weaning weights. When I came to the board I saw him doing some breed bashing and it apears to have stopped so I'm inclined to offer help rather than beat him up over it. If his calves are light then lets help him get them up to weight but that's not the purpose of this thread. Tell us about farming in your corner of the universe instead so that we can learn a little more and as cowmen we can all figure out how local farming applies to weaning weights in various parts of the country.

[Isomade]

I own 275 acres in South Central Oklahoma and lease another 120 down the road. I run brangus and brangus baldy cows with Char bulls. Sold some calves last week straight off mama at 4- 7 months old no creep, never owned a creep feeder. Steers averaged 663 heifers averaged 532. I do implant once at around two months old. Sold the last Char bull last week and have moved to Angus to hold back heifers.

[Galloway2]

We currently run 60 cows, mostly registered Galloways. We have a few registered Angus and a few Galloway X Angus females.
I have had cattle all of my life.

We both work off the farm 5 days a week.

We are mainly seedstock producers (US and Canada). We have sold Galloway breeding stock, semen, all over the world. We sell some embryos. The bottom end of our cattle get sold directly to meat customers.

We currently rent 160 acres that we graze, as well as hay parts of it. We rent 50 acres of other grass hay meadows.

We live in a very crop orientated part of the country, so pasture and hayland is marginal land. We graze our cows until the end of January on cornstalks if available. We get a lot of snow and are typically very cold during the winter, while our summers are warm and very humid.

[Dave]

Very little farming (as in tilling the soil) left in my area. We grow two things well; grass and trees. It is a terrible place to winter cows if you don't have them under a roof and on concrete. Rain nearly every day and temperatures in the upper 30's are tough on cows. I only winter 20-30 cows. In the late winter/early spring I pick up another 20-30 older broken mouth cows primarily from the high desert country. I baby them through to grass and then those old girls have never seen grass like this. In the fall the old cows and all the calves go to town. The cows will have gained enough that I generally get as much for them as a kill cow as I paid for them as a bred cow in the spring. And one thing about those old girls and where they come from, they didn't get to live that long by raising poor calves. My Feb/March calves average (steers and heifers) a little over 600 pounds when I sell the first week of October. No creep. Nothing but momma's milk and grass.
I buy all my hay mainly because I can buy it right down the road for almost the same price as making it myself. And I don't have to spend my summer making hay.

[HOSS]

I raise a mixture of registered Gelbvieh cattle and commercial angus cross cows that I use a Gelbvieh bull on. I run 30 momma cows on 75 acres or so. My calves routinely wean from 600 to 750 lbs on just milk and grass. I have the occasional 800 pounder. This is usually 6 to 6.5 months of age. I have culled hard on the poor do'ers and light weaning mommas. Sim King......I am familiar with your neck of the woods. I spend allot of time up there in Pope and Johnson Counties and know tha S.I. produces some quality cattle. I would be really concerned if I had the weaning weights that you posted especially with Simi cattle which are no to be heavy rascals. PM me and maybe I can help you pin-point things that may help you increase your efficiency.

[kenny thomas]

I only own 80 acres and lease whatever else I need. Grazing land is readily available in my area.
My numbers vary from 75-125 cow/calf pairs and as few as 10 to as many as 200 calves according to market conditions. These numbers vary sometimes weekly as I trade several cows also.
This has been a hard trading year because the cow numbers are way down in this area.
Oh and I buy several hundred calves each year for other people.

I started feeding hay March 10th this year. Fed until April 10th. Just cant seem to get past the 11 month grazing while still working full time. Think when I retire in a couple years I can rotate more and make it 12 months.
And I will cull any cow that raises a calf weaning less than 550. Yep im hard on them but in low price years they just dont pay their way.

[houstoncutter]

Well at present I am out of the cattle biz... Some of the land I have purchased but the majority goes back to the orginal Spanish land grants and some is land that was given to soldiers of the Texas Revolution... Years ago some of it was in rice production. Today it is used for F1Brafords and F1 Brangus momma's covered with Limousin bulls... Most times I would get a calfs to 400 lbs and they went to town, uncut and unvacinated. I have at times depending on the market retained ownership of calves through the feedlot. Over the years I found for me it was more profitable to try to run more cattle per acre than most, but to sale calves at an early age. I have always purchased my hay to supplement annual ryegrass and clover. Have always tried to keep equipment to a minimum.

[M5farm]

I own 40 acres and have access to 80 more acres of family land behind me. I have had a few 5-10 cows for the last 13 yrs and sold the yearlings to break even and keep everything running . up to last month I ran approx 40 head goats. just Sold the last 8. I bought 13 bred cows in march from a local guy at slaughter price. It brought my total to 19 head. I work a full time job and everything I own is paid for. I plan on keeping the heifers out of this bunch and to start culling some of the cows. I usually sell the calves at 400 to 500. I buy my hay or rent my bull out for hay.

[gizmom]

We have three locations the home place where we started has 38 acres and we now use this for a bull development facility. The main farm is 400 acres this is where we maintain our cow calves then we lease another 120. The 120 is used for haying and our open heifers we move them as soon as they wean then they stay until we palpate. If they are pregnant they go to the farm if open they go to town. We do rotational grazing but need to get better at it. Next week we will wean our calves and give them their final shots. We run about 110 mamma cows but add in the bulls and heifers we usually have around 200 head.

Gizmom

[Chi496]

Well I own 1.5 acres in a subdivision and have a 30 year lease renewable on a yearly basis on 100 acres of improved pasture where my recip cows are, I lease another 100 acres of hay and crop land. My donor cows live at my parent which I can see from my deck. In a normal year I market 30 to 50 yearling bulls and a solid dozen show prospects. And yes my calves weaning weights are higher than 300 lbs. The avg yearling weight on the bulls I market is in the neighborhood of 1400 not a fat 1400 but a well developed weight. In the past 6 years I have had only 5 bulls not pass their breeding soundness exams in my mind that ain't to bad.

[showing71]

We run 170 pairs on the land around the home place which is right around 500 acres. We lease the 100 acre heifer/young cow pasture and a few other small pastures. Cows are calved in the 40 acre area right next to the calving barn (we aim to have the majority of calves born in February), and they stay in the area until we are finished AI-ing and implanting embryos (middle of May) and are fed hay during this time. Then the pairs are sorted into the other pastures with the herd bulls that match up best with the cows (typically into 3 groups) and are rotationally grazed. Cows and calves are on grass until late August or early September, depending on how long the grass lasts, and then calves are weaned (average is right around 600 lbs). Cows then stay on grass until corn harvest is done and then they go to stalks. Steers and heifers are backgrounded and sent to the feedlot. Replacement heifers and bulls are dry lotted and are given a grower ration during the colder months, and then are fed hay until they go to pasture or are sold. The top ~ 15% of the bull calves are kept to sell private treaty. We typically keep the top ~25% of the heifers as replacements (purebreds and commercials). We keep 10 head or so of the lighter weaned calves to feed out and sell for meat.

We also have around 1000 acres of alfalfa and grass hay. We keep the hay we need (at a surplus) and sell the left over. We have 300 acres of row crops that we have custom planted and harvested for feeding the animals, surplus is sold.

[Beef Man]

wE OPERATE IN A SEMI ARID REGION OF N.E. Montana. We farm about 2000 acres mostly feed which can be peas,sweet clover, alafalfa,hay barley, and recently some corn.Also .ofcoarse a little wheat.We lease a lot of our grass and use about 3500 acres of our own rougher praire to winter on. A lot of our harvesting is done with 400 breeding cows and usually 35-50 replacements. We produce breeding cattle Hereford so summer over 40-50 yearling bulls. Most of our leased land is grass and consists of about 6100 acres. One of our biggest headaches is fenceing as mostly all herd district so we have to build and maintain all fences, also do all our own water,salt and mineral. Keeps 1 man busy. Our commercial cows are hereford bred red angus or red angus cows bred to hereford bulls. We honestly feel that this is a super cross and have found them very easy to handle and from my observation make wonderfull feeder cattle and these heifers are excelent cows. All of them can walk a mile or better to water every day and can make the winter the winter on some native grass or sometimes just good straw and a good quality cake.[I bet some of you thought I was going to say that we K, Pharo'd them ] Not many years ,here , does a cow winter on nothing.This is mostly a open and windy area and 1 of our old hands says it is 9 months of winter and 3 months of poor sleding.I really wonder what it would be like to run a pair to the acre or something like that. I guess i better explain something. One of you is going to ask why we dont run more cows on the amount of laand we control. We always try extremely hard to leave , about 40% of the grass opn every pasture. Some years like this one do'snt get the moisture or timeing is wrong for our native range and then we have a problem. Anyway it has been interesting to read about each of your operations.

[ALACOWMAN]

good posts.... mine is like a petting zoo campared to yall

[Jake]

Everything we run we own. There are right at 2000 acres total, around 650 tillable and the balance is pasture and creeks. Cedar trees are a significant issue with the pasture ground and we are in the process of reclaiming pastures and maintaining those in which we have cleared. The tillable acres are corn, wheat and alfalfa. The cowherd consists of high percentage angus cows bred to angus bulls, there are all of 5 red cows in the herd. The marketing plan on the calves changes year to year based on market conditions and ROI if they were to be backgrounded. We are in the process of looking at succession plans which is may easily turn out to be the most stressful and toughest events a family can go through.

[IluvABbeef]

Like houstoncutter I am not in the cattle business either, though would hope to be back in it again if it's still in the stars for me. We have 320 acres of land that is rented out to a neighbor who runs a dairy operation and who uses the land mainly to plant corn, wheat and canola on and run a few cattle in the pens in the summer to keep the grass down.

Before we had to go rent (before dad passed on), we had a mixed farm running stocker steers and crops. We'd get around 80 to 90 head of steer calves (around 500 to 600 lbs) of mixed breeds (Angus, Red Angus, Charolais, Simmental, Shorthorn, Hereford, Limousin, etc.) in late fall to early winter (purchased via private treaty) and feed them in the corrals for the winter months on chopped barley and timothy-alfalfa-brome mix hay. We went from feeding chopped barley to barley silage in the winter which seemed to help increase weights and make the calves grow a bit more over winter than with a grain-hay ration. We still fed hay along with the silage though. Then come May we'd kick them out to pasture (around 120 acres in total) and have them graze in a rotational-continuous system from May to September, rarely to October or November. Usually around September to October would be to time to sell them, since most of them would be reaching around 900 to 1000 lbs by then. They'd go to a local feedlot where they spend the last few months of their lives getting fattened up before being shipped south to be slaughtered at the Cargill/XL foods slaughter plants around Calgary.

Meanwhile we'd be using the fields not used for hay and silage production as crops. Dad had access to another 160 acres (not exactly rented, since it was his DB's land) to use for barley and canola, both being raised as cash crops. We'd have around 80 to 100 acres of hay land, 40 for silage and the rest for cash crops. Since corn will never be king where we live, barley is the best crop to produce and sell up here, and just as good for cattle as corn. Canola was grown and sold on contract, and barley grown and sold to the local feedlot were we send our backgrounded steers.

I could post about my plans for this farm on here as well, but since this is mainly about past and current operations I'll have to refrain from that for the time being.