Hey all! I live in north Idaho and I'm leasing 50 acres that had last had cattle on it in 2023. Im just starting out with a few steers and doing rotational grazing and I'm wondering if I have enough feed for them. Its prairie land so its a lot of tumbleweed type stuff and weeds, I hardly have any good grass. Should I supplement with hay? the stuff growing is all pretty tall and thick and I plan to try to harrow and seed this fall. I just want yalls opinion on if i should keep feeding hay along with whatever they can graze.
Not enough grass
- Thread starter Isabelle
- Start date
mwj
Well-known member
Watch there condition closely and move as needed.If you feed hay from the start they will be lazy in there grazing. If they need hay give it on as needed ''limited''basis.
4hfarms
Well-known member
Good grass hay with seed does multiple duties as you feed it in mutiple places around the pasture. It creates top soil.
Feed the animals, animals fertilize, hay reseeds and adds organic matter to hold moisture in the ground, and the cycle continues. Let them eat then feed hay.
If you rotate them, cut it after they move on the the next pasture. Old neighbor told me his life lesson.... "if you want grass to grow, you have to cut it"
Just my experience in creating pasture out of crap ground. Hope it can help.
Feed the animals, animals fertilize, hay reseeds and adds organic matter to hold moisture in the ground, and the cycle continues. Let them eat then feed hay.
If you rotate them, cut it after they move on the the next pasture. Old neighbor told me his life lesson.... "if you want grass to grow, you have to cut it"
Just my experience in creating pasture out of crap ground. Hope it can help.
Thanks for sharing! This helps a lot!
I will definitely start doing this as I move them around!
farmerjan
Well-known member
If it is that tall and grown up from not being grazed in a year or 2, mowing will improve the rate the earthworms can incorporate the residual back into the ground making topsoil...and open up the canopy for things like clover and such to sprout also.
The more you cut your grass, the more it grows if it gets some moisture.... and if you cut the weeds before they go to seed, then the grass gets a fighting chance...
Don't "make them" eat down to the dirt, but don't give them hay if there is decent growth.... @mwj has good advice... watch their condition... and rotating will do more for the ground than anything in the long run. If it gets dry, if there is not enough moisture to keep the grass "growing" then supplement with hay as @4hfarms suggested... moving where you feed so it can enrich the soil and spread some seed if there is any in it. But they are a grazing animal... they need to rustle their own grub....
The more you cut your grass, the more it grows if it gets some moisture.... and if you cut the weeds before they go to seed, then the grass gets a fighting chance...
Don't "make them" eat down to the dirt, but don't give them hay if there is decent growth.... @mwj has good advice... watch their condition... and rotating will do more for the ground than anything in the long run. If it gets dry, if there is not enough moisture to keep the grass "growing" then supplement with hay as @4hfarms suggested... moving where you feed so it can enrich the soil and spread some seed if there is any in it. But they are a grazing animal... they need to rustle their own grub....
Great thank you! I really appreciate the advice! This helped a lot, I started moving the feed spots and rotating them more. Now if we could only get some rain lol
Don't just move the feeding spots, try to unroll the hay is possible. Spread the benefit out over an area and cut down on the recovery time of the "feeding spots."
Mrcopier
Well-known member
Unrolling hay can in some case save you hay as well
NIdahoShorthorns
Well-known member
How many cattle do you have on the 50 acres? And what's your plan for winter? Get them off or create a throw away holding pen? We're sitting at 30% rainfall in North Idaho, you can't let them eat it to nothing unless you plan on starting over anyway. I've been feeding hay for a few weeks already and was at a sale yesterday and the talk of the barn was lack of pasture. It's a rough year to be grazing cattle around here.
Will do! I was just reading some other articles on here about unrolling the bales, so this was perfect timing. Thank you!
Mark Reynolds
Well-known member
@Isabelle, be cautious of where your recommendations are coming from based on the state. The recommendations are not necessarily wrong, at least for where they originate, but Idaho is very different from Tennessee, Virginia, and Illinois. The one major difference I suspect that you may have here is that you have warm season bunch grasses and there is cool season sod forming grasses in Tennessee, Virginia and Illinois. Pasture management needs to be quite different as precipitation amounts and patterns are quite different. I would reach out to @Dave on this forum directly (or he might respond here with me calling him out) @NIdahoShorthorns would be good to listen to as well. There aren't many individuals that can speak effectively to both the 'east' and the 'west'. You might be able to say I'm one of those 'well rounded' (maybe more ways than one? :LOL:) as I grew up in Indiana and completed Bachelors degrees at Purdue, completed a MS at Oregon State, worked as a rangeland management specialist in Washington and Nevada, and am working/have worked as a grazing specialist in Ohio and South Carolina.
Would you be able to post some pictures of the area that you are currently grazing and/or the area that you are talking about here? Rotational grazing is always a great recommendation for any piece of ground, but it can look (should look) entirely different between sod forming grasses in Tennessee and bunchgrass habitat located in Idaho. I'll do some thinking on what you have said here and hopefully @Dave will add a word or 2.
Would you be able to post some pictures of the area that you are currently grazing and/or the area that you are talking about here? Rotational grazing is always a great recommendation for any piece of ground, but it can look (should look) entirely different between sod forming grasses in Tennessee and bunchgrass habitat located in Idaho. I'll do some thinking on what you have said here and hopefully @Dave will add a word or 2.
Dave
Well-known member
I try to avoid giving advise to people with entirely different grass than I have so I won't comment on that. That said rotational grazing is a good thing no matter he environment you are dealing with. You voiced a concern about having just a single shade tree. Invest in poly wire, a reel, and step in posts. That way you can change your cross fencing to always include the shade tree. Portable fences don't need to be a straight line. You don't need a big super powerful charger to operate that small of a fence. And cows which are calm and tame train themselves pretty quickly to a hot wire fence (just as you will).
NIdahoShorthorns
Well-known member
As Dave said each site is going to be different. There are at least 3 different sub climates in North Idaho. Mine is dominated by evergreen forest, and heavy clay soils but I get the orographic effect by being near the Idaho/Montana border so I get about 30" of precip a year. 30 miles southwest you're on the Palouse and have great top soil but 12-15" of precip. Go a little further south and you can get into the snake and clearwater canyonlands and you might get <10" of precip. So you you have to evaluate which of these you property is most like.
I mentioned feeding hay already because, for me, I would rather give a little relief to my pastures now, it should bounce back with some early fall rains and cool weather and I'll get extra grazing in October and November. But depending on where you are that might not work.
I mentioned feeding hay already because, for me, I would rather give a little relief to my pastures now, it should bounce back with some early fall rains and cool weather and I'll get extra grazing in October and November. But depending on where you are that might not work.
Dave
Well-known member
Try farther south in Idaho to the Owyhee where it is 50 feet between blades of grass and 50+ miles between roads.
NIdahoShorthorns
Well-known member
I refuse to cross the time zone bridge. ;)
Dave
Well-known member
That time zone line is about 20 miles east from here. I can't tell you how many times I have been an hour late to something happening that direction.
I only have 5 steers right now that will be finishing this fall. I've been moving them consistently to keep the ground from being overworked and grazed to short. I have also started to throw hay out to them for about a month now.
It is a rough year up here! I was just talking to a farmer who said its looking like there will be a shortage of hay this year in our area because of drought.
My property is on the Rathdrum prairie so I'm definitely closer to the 15" - 20" zone. Once we get into fall I'll have much cooler weather and hopefully plenty of rain! There is a five acre section that has bounced back really well and has greened up nicely. However the other 45 acres were grazed and run pretty hard by the last guy who had 160 head on them.
Mark Reynolds
Well-known member
Unrolling the bales is great. Don't unroll more than one in the same spot each year. Preferably 3 years apart.
Mark Reynolds
Well-known member
5 steers sounds like an appropriate number to start, but I don't know the ground. You have indicated you might be starting a drought cycle. You will want to 'slow down' your rotational grazing with longer rest periods. Rotational grazing is great/essential, but there are all different 'intensities' of rotational grazing, and you need to know why you are rotational grazing and what your objectives. There are two topic threads on this forum that are about the 'Four Never Fail Rules of Grazing'. They are the 'basics' of rotational grazing boiled down into a 'thumbnail'. They are designed based on sod forming perennial grasses for the most part east of the Mississippi, although work for sod forming grasses with 'uniform' precipitation on a year round basis pretty much anywhere. The concepts in these rules are universal. The rules might require some adaptations to other grasses and precipitation regimes. The rules are meant as a place to start with rotational grazing are the 'bare bones minimum' required to make a rotational system work, and they do work. They turned a skeptic about rotational grazing (his plan was implemented about 15 years ago) into a very grateful believer and advocate this past year in Southeast Ohio. I'll tell the story if anyone wants to hear.
M.Magis
Well-known member
Unless you have an unroller so you can just roll out a specific amount and save the rest, don’t roll out hay for 5 steers. Most of it will be wasted. Rolling hay out is just a way of limiting feed, but its only beneficial if you have enough animals to quickly eat everything you roll out.
