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I It’s not frost tolerant at all, it freezes and drops its leaves. It does work to no-till drill into mowed off bluegrass sod even on a drought year. The seed placement is a little tricky for a decent stand into sod.

This is a mix of 7lbs sunn hemp 7lbs teosinte per acre on less than two inches of rain, no till drilled behind oats that were taken as silage. It was inoculated and didn’t have nitrogen spread on it. I think the sunn hemp is very worth while (especially in drought conditions), but managing...

I wouldn’t be afraid of buying the land. As long as you pay a fair market price, and don’t lose a bunch of money year to year, you will typically come out okay as land values have a good track record of going up. Agricultural land is also one of the best hedges against inflation. I just payed a...

So the color rating somewhat is based off of the area of interest and a ranking of the soils, the best soil series in the area of interest gets the best color. You can also web search each soil series and find a helpful description, for instance if it has a rock layer 100cm deep. You can look up...

Go to the web soil survey and look up expected yields for the field, web soil survey usually gives lower yields than you can achieve. It will give you soil series and more info that is helpful also.

The removal rate of P for alfalfa is about 15-20 lbs per ton removed, and K is 50-60 lbs per ton. A recent look of fertilizer prices has P costing around 0.59 a lb and K around 0.38 a lb. So at low removal rate on 3.5 tons/acre you end up with about $31 per acre P and about $67 per acre K +...

Doesn’t look bad, make sure you do the math with alfalfa fertilizer removal rates so you don’t slowly run the place down (you can give some credit for your ground mineralizeing some fertility), alfalfa is a hungry crop. Boron likely needs to be one of the fertilizers in your mix also, just FYI ...

What kind of hay are you growing? Is that a long term price per ton average? Can you consistently get good hay made?

I think two shots of 50 units of N a year one being very early and the other dependent on rainfall later, along with a little P (should be recycled within pasture when not haying), and enough K to keep the grass from lodging would be how I would approach fertilization. Our hills are naturally...

I plant it with teosinte (long season corn would be similar), to graze. It could be seeded alone. Teosinte takes a bit of water to germinate, more than corn. I have also planted it with forage sorghum, but don’t like worrying about Prussic acid.

Sunn hemp does need to be innoculated, as it is a nitrogen fixing legume. I think recommended seeding rates are a little high, but I seem to alway plant it after a silage small grain into dry soil and then get little rain. The thinner it is planted the bigger each plant gets, much like soybeans...

I don’t know that it matters much on Sunn hemp varieties, the plant is very good at conserving moisture because it will completely fold up its leaves at night if it needs to.

It might be a year that will pay for a Tmr wagon quickly. A little distillers and corn stocks or straw can really help stretch your pasture. If you are going to seed an annual, I would recommend Sunn hemp. It needs hot weather, but is very drought tolerant more so than corn or sorghum in my...

I saw a pharo bull at stud once, I was not envious. I like using Wye bulls to down size. They seem to have the convenience traits and make some nice cows. A couple more obscure bulls that I liked for down sizing were Spartan grandeur O and I also had a nice Spur Emulous Master son.

Most pastures here are where people don’t want to, or can’t take equipment.

We use some Wye genetics also, I think they bring a lot to the table as functional cattle. Our herd is probably about 30% Wye by pedigree. We do select for a little larger cattle than some, and our calves which we finish have averaged over 1450 lbs on average of steers/heifers, and are often...

Sounds like you need to spread your cows out a bit, close to zero dystocia shouldn’t be too hard our pull rate is about 1:80 counting heifers, all presented wrong, all angus. Some cows will try to raise twins and some won’t, but in that case you usually have a poorly cleaned bawling calf running...

Curious, what genetics are you having success with?

Reading through some of the posts. A few things come to my attention; 1)the longer you leave the calf on the cow, the harder it is on the cow 2) steers and heifers need less protein than bulls 3) some people are making a lot of extra work during calving season 4) just grazing calves on grass...

Why do you check them so often?