Moved the wire in the grazing corn today (pics)

[SRBeef]

In the ongoing grazing corn experiment, I moved the wire today to open up another section to the cows and bull.

I know I should have the steers and heifers on it but this saves more expensive hay for now. I'll switch them in a couple weeks. The calves are doing fine on very good hay and mineralyx.

One of the issues in the north this year is that with the cool summer and wet weather, almost all corn is VERY late maturing and drying down. Safe storage moisture for corn (to put in a bin) is about 14%. Most corn still in the fields ( and there is a lot of it) is still 25% or higher in my area of WI. This is very difficult to combine and almost too wet to dry in a dryer - at least it is very expensive to dry. Elevators don't want to take much more wet corn. This corn has not dried significantly in the past month or so with the weather as it is.

Moldy corn is also a problem in many areas. I made a point of checking mine. Most of the center of the field is almost mold free. It seems to be mostly around the edges where the corn was damaged by deer, turkeys, you name it. Having the woods nearby sometimes I feel like I am running a wildlife all-night diner...

I am thankful to have the cattle to harvest it this year. It is dry enough for them. They love it.

I just open one section at a time or they will trample the whole field looking for ears before they eat anything else. The first picture shows the section they just finished. They do have hay and mineral available to them also. I am limiting the amount of hay I put out for the corn group and have the hay feeders in a bit of an inconvenient place (for them) - they have to walk quite a ways to get to it. I want them to eat mostly corn and stalks for now.

Here are some pictures form today. I still get squeemish about driving over good standing unharvested corn with the 4 wheeler but they do seem to get it all eventually.

I checked on them later and as I walked nearby one of my target cows stuck her head through the stalks as if to say "thank you". Here are some pictures from today.

Jim

 

[MO_cows]

She's not saying thank you, she's saying what else you got?

You have worked out a good system. Wouldn't work for everybody but you seem to be making it work very well.

 

[jedstivers]

Lookin good Jim. I turned some stocker calves into harvested corn stalks with 8" tall wheat growing in it and they are doing great. I ran a wire across it to do frontial grazing and cannot believe the amount of time I am able to leave them on it. I have 32 calves on about 4 acres for a week tomarrow and don't have to move the wire yet. They still haven't learned to eat the ears laying on the ground yet though they have gone through the wheat pretty hard. Will have the wire in a few days though.

 

[SRBeef]

Lookin good Jim. I turned some stocker calves into harvested corn stalks with 8" tall wheat growing in it and they are doing great. I ran a wire across it to do frontial grazing and cannot believe the amount of time I am able to leave them on it. I have 32 calves on about 4 acres for a week tomarrow and don't have to move the wire yet. They still haven't learned to eat the ears laying on the ground yet though they have gone through the wheat pretty hard. Will have the wire in a few days though.

Thanks for the kind words, Jed. Sounds like yours is going well also. I think it is probably good to have the wheat AND corn stalks for grazing - gives them some variety.

The key is to limit them with electric wire otherwise they will trample the whole field looking for ears or other goodies. "Clean up your plate before asking for seconds (or dessert)" sounds like something my Grandmother used to tell me at Thanksgiving dinner...

Jim

 

[Aaron]

Few questions for you Jim,

What variety of corn are you using for grazing?

How many days are you getting of grazing an acre of corn? With how many and type of head?

What are the complications of mold in standing corn and are certain ages of cattle more susceptible to it? :cowboy:

 

[alisonb]

Jim-looking good as usual!

What I have experienced when grazing cattle in a corn land as you are doing is that they rush the corn cobs and gorge themseves.It is not as if they are hungry but a cow is a greedy animal.

I have 2 major concerns-
High protein/carbohydrate intake in the initial stages which then fluctuates/deminishes as camp gets eaten-not healthy.
Bloat-whether mealie is clean or mouldy,I would not sleep.

What would your comments/experience be?

 

[SRBeef]

Few questions for you Jim,

What variety of corn are you using for grazing?

How many days are you getting of grazing an acre of corn? With how many and type of head?

What are the complications of mold in standing corn and are certain ages of cattle more susceptible to it? :cowboy:

Aaron,

This is a very good but very expensive 96 day RR-triple stack from a local WI seed company. It stands unusually well and is paletable. As you can see from the first picture, the only thing left in the finished section is stalks. Very little leaf and husk left. The seed is Kaltenberg 4663VT3 and you can see details of it if you scroll down here: http://www.kaltenbergseeds.com/hybridcorn.htm

This might actually be a good fit for Ontario. Doing this (continuous corn for grazing) however is asking a lot from a corn plant: good standability, good yield, disease resistance, paletability, RR for low cost weed control, etc.

I am finding I get about 350 cow days grazing per acre when grazed to the point shown in the first picture.

These are bred cows and my bull for now. I should have the steers and heifers in there but don't want to shock the calves too much at weaning in Nov. They will switch places in January when the March calving cows come over to hay only and the steers and bull focus on corn. I want to harvest a group of steers coming fresh off of corn in March just ahead of when the frost leaves the ground.

This field has been continuous corn now for about 5 years. One key is to get the cattle off of anywhere being planted to corn before the ground thaws in the spring.

Moldy corn or feed basically makes them stop eating anything. Cattle have the good sense to refuse to eat most stuff that is not good for them. I would imagine its like us with a stomach ache. In any case they just seem to stop eating at all and gain stops. There may be other effects but going off feed is the main one I am aware of.

Here is a bit of a calculation on my costs of grazing corn compared to purchasing hay. For a number of reasons I am not able to make my own hay. All hay is purchased.

Costs of grazing corn:

Thinking about the cost to grow this corn - soil tests last spring (2009) indicated no need for additional P or K. I had surface applied dry DAP and 0-0-60 + sulphur and Boron ahead of spring strip tilling in 2008. That along with the manure/urine left by the cattle as they graze left me ok except for N.

When you think of it, very little is leaving these clay hillside fields!

My pH is ok. All I needed this year was N which was applied as about 30 gal/a of 28% banded with my strip till a day ahead of planting. That's about 100 units of N and at about 50 cents/unit = $50./acre. I'm taking a guess rather than looking up the receipts.

The corn seed I planted was one of my largest expenses at about $300/80,000 seed bag. At 32k /a that works out to about $120./a This is a very good Kaltenburg 96 day RU-triple stack seed and I only buy a few bags so price is what it is. There were then just 2 passes with Roundup + AMS with my 3-point mounted 30 ft sprayer and that's it.

If we ignore the fact that I have access to a 6R30 mounted strip till system as part of my day job testing, and have owned a 6R30 mounted planter for many years, this corn probably cost me a bit over $200/acre to grow as it is shown above.

Compare that to $75 a 1600 lb 5x6 bale for good mixed hay locally, one way of looking at it is that the corn pictured above, per acre, had an out of pocket cost to me equal to about 3 BALES OF HAY.

Three 1600 lb bales = 4800 lb of hay. If we assume a 1400 lb cow eats 2.5% of her wt = 35 lb of hay per day, then 3 bales of hay = 4800/35 = 137 cow days of feed.

I am getting well over 300 and probably 350 cow days of grazing out of the corn above when grazed to the point shown.

So without arguing the fine points of my calculations, I am getting about 2.5 times the grazing/feed from grazing this corn than I would from an equivalent dollar amount of purchased hay. I think in my situation this grazing is a very competitive way of getting value out of this corn.

Seed cost is high but the plants are standing much better than some other corn still in the field and is remarkably paletable for a stack. The key to this operation is the reason we started this experiment: being able to consistently spring strip till corn on corn at reasonable cost. The only tractor I own is 95 hp.

I hope this helps.

Jim

 

[SRBeef]

Jim-looking good as usual!

What I have experienced when grazing cattle in a corn land as you are doing is that they rush the corn cobs and gorge themseves.It is not as if they are hungry but a cow is a greedy animal.

I have 2 major concerns-
High protein intake in the initial stages which then fluctuates/deminishes as camp gets eaten-not healthy.
Bloat-whether mealie is clean or mouldy,I would not sleep.

What would your comments/experience be?

Alison, To be honest, I did almost kill a couple cows when I first tried this in fall 2008. Nitrate poisoning was my main problem. I was forcing them to eat corn which was way too green yet with no alternative feed available. I had grazed harvested stalks only earlier with just mineral but that is a whole different ball game. Fortunately I caught it and put them on hay only for a couple weeks and they recovered nicely. They went back on corn with all of us a bit wiser.

This year I am going with smaller areas and always have good hay available to them. I did put the hay in a fairly inconvenient spot so they have to walk to get to it.

You are correct in that the cows will gorge themselves on ears. Only then will they move to eating husks leaves and the upper part of the plant. You do not want to force them to eat the lower stalk of the corn plant. If you notice, that is about all that is left in the first photo.

I strongly believe cattle will learn to regulate their diet - they seem to know now that they need a bit of hay also. And grazing corn, they necessarily end up eating the cobs and a bit of husks - all of which are excellent roughage and decrease the grain to roughage ratio.

Mold in corn is not generally an issue except for the very unusal weather in the northern US cornbelt this past season. Way down on heat units, very wet.

As far as bloat, just limit them to small areas at any one time and make sure there is hay available too. It is not a problem. My main problem right now is getting up my courage to drive down very good standing unharvested corn so I have a lane for my wire!

Thanks for the kind words. Jim

 

[Aaron]

Thanks for the info Jim. As far as soil prep, what is the regular protocol for breaking new corn bed and reseeding a grazed one?

I have heard of that RR variety with good results. In my situation, I don't think I would go to that extent (RR variety) based on the fact that I would not have the equipment to be spraying it. Everyone in this area that is experimenting with corn is taking it off as silage and lets the corn control the weeds itself through shading. I would be one of the first to try grazing it in this area. :cowboy:

 

[alisonb]

It would seem that you have a pretty good balance by incorporating hay but I would seriously investigate possible acidosis and the long term effects thereof (laminitis etc).When there is rapid ingestion of excessive carbohydrates (cereals) it leads to all kinds of complictions.Here is an interesting link on the subject.http://www.iowabeefcenter.org/pdfs/bch/03500.pdf
Good luck

 

[SRBeef]

It would seem that you have a pretty good balance by incorporating hay but I would seriously investigate possible acidosis and the long term effects thereof (laminitis etc).When there is rapid ingestion of excessive carbohydrates (cereals) it leads to all kinds of complictions.Here is an interesting link on the subject.http://www.iowabeefcenter.org/pdfs/bch/03500.pdf
Good luck

Alison, to quote a paragraph on page 2 from the reference in your link:

Obviously, level of roughage is an extremely important
factor affecting acidosis. In general, as the level of
roughage increases, the incidence of acidosis decreases.
However, cost/gain usually increases as level of
roughage increases because roughage is poorly digested
in high-grain finishing diets...

That article, while it briefly mentions "grazing stalks" is almost completely aimed at feedlot finishing. Grazing standing corn is a very different situation form the standard feedlot where they really are on very high grain/lower roughage (because of cost concerns as stated above) ratios. I am not concerned about roughage turning into manure, in fact I welcome it. Cattle turn cobs etc into fertilizer for next years corn. Feedlots look at roughage as a cost and waste disposal problem.

Even when I first open a section of unharvested corn as pictured above, the cattle necessarily eat the entire cob, whole. Watching them, they chew it extensively. It all goes down to the rumen, grain and cob. In addition I was watching them this morning and they were all over at the hay feeders rather than in the corn. They seem to have this daily routine: graze corn for awhile, hit the hay feeders for awhile, get a drink, ruminate, repeat in the afternoon....

If you are careful to offer a balance, there is no problem with acidosis. I see nitrate poisoning as a bigger potential problem. I reduced my applied N this year (from what is usually used to maximize shelled corn grain production) and waited until the plants were not so green before opening it up and this year no sign of any problem.

As mentioned and shown above, the ears were not quite as large as last year but the leaves, husks and upper stalks are far more paletable and less likely to cause nitrate poisoning. Nitrates in the plant increase the closer to the ground you go. So I don't force them to eat much of the lower stalks.

I grazed harvested stalks for a few years and now am in year 2 of this grazing standing corn experiment. There are some things to learn and watch out for but that is true of about any new endeavor. All the best,

Jim

 

[SRBeef]

Thanks for the info Jim. As far as soil prep, what is the regular protocol for breaking new corn bed and reseeding a grazed one?

I have heard of that RR variety with good results. In my situation, I don't think I would go to that extent (RR variety) based on the fact that I would not have the equipment to be spraying it. Everyone in this area that is experimenting with corn is taking it off as silage and lets the corn control the weeds itself through shading. I would be one of the first to try grazing it in this area. :cowboy:

Aaron, One of the keys to making this work is to be able to get a good stand of corn at low input cost. But you do need to make sure that pH and fertility are up to snuff or you are wasting money and time. Corn can be pretty finicky. You also need to control weeds in the stand, especially early. Corn does not like grasses in the row. I think RR is a low cost way of controlling weeds. I bet there is a coop/fertilizer dealer who would spray the corn for you at fairly low cost. Or you could cultivate. But if you are new to corn you probably do not own a heavy duty/high residue cultivator.

I have raised corn on these same fields for five straight years. And contrary to what some would have you believe, this has improved my soils tremendously. Lots of residue, lots of worms and other biological activity breaking the residue down, Corn, especially in northern areas like both of us are in, really likes a black strip. I use something called strip till.

This is a system that clears works and fertilizes in one pass without turning the soil over. I strip till in the spring, usually one day ahead of planting them plant the next day. Here is a picture of my strips in the spring as i was making them. This was in late May. Should have been several weeks earlier but my day job with this type of system keeps me on the road in the spring.

Here is a photo of the corn coming up a couple weeks later. Note the brown/dead weeds from the first spray (right after planting). Then I make a second pass with the Roundup + AMS (for hard water) when the plants are about 5-6" high. Roundup has no residual, it only works when it lands on a green leaf, except for corn!

I hope this helps. If you try it just do a small area the first time. Maybe some corn growers near you could help you at first. There is nothing wrong with using conventional tillage to get the corn established. In time however if you think the system is worth pursuing you could look at other methods.

And if all goes well, in November you end up with this:

Best of luck to you. Jim