That is used guard rail around the waterer and I would highly recommend it. But it didn't start out that way! This pad is part way down a slope and had to be built up. It has a 2% slope down hill to the left in the photo. The railroad tie posts were too short on the down hill side and placed 8 ft apart for treated lumber by the incompetent crew I had put the posts and some fencing in. They put some cheapo treated soft lumber rails up and even I could almost push through them. Spacing is also dead wrong for prepunched standard guard rail. Finally decide to make the change to guardrail and do it myself. This is not a project you want to do more than once.
It's not really a pen but a split central watering area. The cattle come and go as they please with different groups on each side. This is the only water for them on the farm. Lanes converge so I can rotate pastures but they can always get back to this area. I never confine them there. The corral is much higher.
Guard rail: 1) make sure you get the true highway grade guard rail, not the cheapo lightweight new looking stuff with poor galvanizing. 2) make sure your posts are setup for standard guard rail punched hole spacing (6'-3") and lengths (12'-6" or 25'-0). Life is much easier! As you can see I had to plate up the too short rails and cut and drill a lot. Because I didn't think of guardrail from the start it took me about 3 times as long to complete. Here is a link with dimensional info on std highway guardrail:
http://www.southernguardrail.com/guard_rail.html see the "W" rail spec at the bottom.
2) About height - in a corral I would agree they need to be 6 ft to the top. However around the waterer here I think this is about 4-1/2 ft. IF there is one of my cows or even a bull that even looks like he is thinking of jumping that fence he will be hamburger as soon as I can back up the trailer! I don't want cattle like that.
Wide loads - I appreciate the comments that they look about normal for Herefords due to calve in about 7 weeks. I don't remember the group as looking that wide in the past but maybe I just wasn't watching as close as I am this year.
Snow - keep in mind this is Wisconsin. We had 4-6" Fri night and Sat. It was about 20 deg F high today and windy. It is 11 deg F outside as I type this. I like snow and cold. It's Wisconsin! I don't like mud! I'd like the weather to go from 10-20 deg F and snow cover to 65 deg F and green grass to graze in about one week! It may look nice but this time of year there is a lot of bovine fertilizer under that nice white snow.
I can't type too much but here are some more photos from today. Added another bale feeder for the heifer yearlings. I like the Common Sense cradles but needed more bale feeder spaces. I bought a Bexla feeder to try. I noticed on my standard rings they eat the bale from the top down and often never eat the bottom. This one makes them eat from the bottom in a head down position. We'll see how it works. This is the first bale in it. Looks like it might be more flexible in tight locations than the big cradles.
We posted earlier about bale sleeves and packing bales tight or loose end to end etc. This time of year last year I had an enormous amount of bale spoilage on netwrap only July bales. Even I was coughing and had red eyes from removing the netwrap and 6-12" of moldy outer layers.
This past summer I put black plastic bale sleeves over the bales as I brought them in and packed tight end to end based on a suggestion here. As you can see the bales on my tractor, the sleeves and end to end tight worked beautifully! Almost no waste. A lot of green showing even on the outer layer of these bales wrapped in July. I purchase all hay so I need to minimize losses.
Grazing standing corn has also been something I got into by accident. As a Feb update, I pulled the cows out on advice from Angie and Knersie a couple weeks ago. Steers and bull are still in the corn. Steer #76 is about 10 months old and about 1000 lb. I am thinking I'd like to harvest him and a couple others at about 1100 in a month when the frost goes out and they need to come off so I can strip till more corn in between these rows.
They have eaten most of the ears in the area I opened to them. They are now eating husks and leaves and stalk tops along with whatever ears they can find. The steers and bull have hay available to them but have barely touched it in the past two weeks. Which is fine by me.
I'll start with the grazed corn pics and add a photo of the same general area from Oct when I started this experiment.
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