pwilli3":1dnbqbxg said:
From reading posts for the last few months I gather most everyone here does cow/calf. Anyone out there do stocker only? What is your real world experience of the income difference between stocker and cow/calf? If I run stock only through the Spring and Summer I'm looking at buying high and selling low for the market trends in this area. Has anyone got a better strategy for stocker? Like hay twice in the summer and run stock over the winter feeding the hay? Would this work?
Like others say it depends for your area. We used to do stocker only up here. I find that you're really vulnerable to price fluxuations than for cow-calf, and carry more of a risk in terms of market prices and demand and supply and feed availability. Costs are a bit less with cow-calf (from what I read/was told on here) because of buying/selling, costs for good quality feed & supplements (better than what cows need), veterinary (shipping fever, pneumonia more common with stockers, plus booster shots among others), higher land, labour and interest costs, and transportation and shrink costs.
From what I was reading a lot of stockers around your area are lightweight (probably ~500 lbs) and are grazed on small grains thru the winter, though this can be costly if the winter grazing program doesn't work due to weather conditions both when winter wheat is grown and afterwards, and the stockers have to be fed a costlier roughage, since these lightweight calves need to be fed higher quality feed than the heavier wt calves. Hay would work if its tested to be of high quality (high % protein) comprised primarily of legumes; not only that but since legume hay only tests to have ~12% protein (assuming here), light weight calves at around 500 lbs need ~16% protein diet, so that means you need to supplement with grain to get the needed gain of 1.5 to 2 lbs/day.
When we ran stockers we aimed to buy low and sell high, and have them run thru the whole year, selling them as long yearlings. Hay wouldn't cut the needed ADG for growing stocker steers because of the lower quality than grain silage, thus they were also fed grain silage over winter. Then out to pasture they went, and gained well on good pasture. They were I guess lightweight (~500 to 600 lbs) and finished backgrounding at ~900 to 950 lbs going into the feedlot.