Going Green

By Becky Mills
Progressive Farmer Contributing Editor

Mitch Baltz has four-year-old hay on hand, and it doesn't bother him one bit. The Powhatan, Ark., producer believes the first priority in feeding cattle is letting them get all the nutrition they can from pastures. If that means some hay stays in the barn a little longer, so be it.

Baltz has spent years thinking about the best ways to get the most use out of his southern pastures. Today, he explained his top-of-the-list tools are rotational grazing, stockpiling, clover and the right mix of warm-season and cool-season grasses.

Baltz was already using rotational grazing when he enrolled in the University of Arkansas' "300 Days of Grazing Program" in 2009. But he said the program really helped him get serious about the process. It was at this point he began adding high-tensile wire to divide some 180 acres of pasture into 2- to 3-acre paddocks.

"If you leave them in the whole field, they'll eat all the good stuff and trample the rest in," Baltz said. "Now, after grazing a paddock for a day and a half to two days, we move them and let the forages rest. We try to leave 3 to 4 inches of forage."

University of Arkansas Extension forage specialist John Jennings said there are sound reasons why rotational grazing is the headline practice of the university's grazing program.

"The No. 1 thing it does is help extend the grazing season by higher utilization of the forages produced," he explained. While it's hard to put firm numbers to it, in a continuous-grazing system, only around 35% of forage produced makes it into the bovine's mouth. Rotational systems can boost that to around 65%.

START SIMPLE

Sometimes the idea of having dozens of paddocks turns producers off to the idea of rotational grazing, but Jennings stressed it shouldn't.

"Start simple, and keep it flexible," he advised. "Have as few permanent fence subdivisions as possible. Setting up a system can be as simple as adding a high-tensile fence wire on standoff insulators to existing barbed wire fences. Then use Polywire to set up any size paddocks desired, allowing cattle to strip-graze or rotational-graze. That gives you flexibility and allows you to take the wire down to spray, fertilize, cut hay or overseed."

STOCKPILING PLANS

Stockpiled bermudagrass allows Arkansas' Baltz to ration forage until long past the normal growing season. "We have a 12-acre field where we strip-grazed 29 cows for 40 days. It lasted until the end of December," he said.

The quality of stockpiled bermudagrass is often surprisingly high. Jennings reported crude protein in the mid-teens in October and total digestible nutrients (TDN) in the 60% to 65% range. It is important to use any stockpiled warm-season grasses before winter weather sets in, as ice or snow deteriorates it badly.

To begin stockpiling, Baltz clips bermuda or grazes it close in August and fertilizes. Add a rain, and the bermuda will grow knee-deep. When it's time to move cattle onto the area, Polywire is used to strip off enough for them to eat daily.

Stockpiling also extends to cool-season fescue. Jennings recommended grazing it down or clipping any old summer growth, applying nitrogen in early September and letting forage growth accumulate during September, October and November. He said strip- or rotational grazing can double grazing days compared to letting cattle have the entire pasture. As for quality, by December it is easily 18% to 20% crude protein and 65% TDN.

For producers with Kentucky 31 fescue with the toxic endophyte, it's important to know stockpiling doesn't entirely eliminate the toxin. One way to reduce the fescue toxicity is to add clovers.

"Legumes improve forage quality and, in turn, animal performance," Jennings said. "They help reduce the impact of fescue toxicity, provide a longer growing season and provide nitrogen fixation."

At the University of Arkansas' Batesville station, researchers took September- and October-born calves and weaned them in May on novel endophyte fescue overseeded with red clover. "Red clover does better in the heat," Jennings remarked. "They grazed from late May until early July on red clover and novel fescue, and have consistently added $60 to $100 to the value of the steers with no supplemental feed. The legumes were a big part of the weight gain."

In Baltz's case, he said he appreciates white clover's ability to improve the palatability of endophyte-infected fescue. "With dirty fescue, they won't eat as much. With clover in it, they'll eat it down."

Baltz said about 40% of his pastures are fescue and 60% bermudagrass. He overseeds a winter annual, ryegrass, in the bermuda to stretch out his grazing season even more. Baltz especially likes its spring flush of growth. "When we turn the bulls out, I try to go on ryegrass. Dirty fescue is not the place to be when you're breeding cows."

EXTREME MAKEOVER

A dedicated continuous grazer since 1992, Elaine Bembry was frustrated with the kinks in her system. "We were always broke, we couldn't irrigate enough or apply enough fertilizer, and the grass was getting thin."

After reading an article on a mob-grazing operation and attending a grazing school in Missouri, the Climax, Ga., cattle producer decided to put the unorthodox practice to work.

In fall 2010, Elaine and her husband, John, no-till planted a mix of oats, ryegrass and clover into bermuda and bahia sod. They started out strip-grazing the first of December.

When they were practicing continuous grazing, their pasture size was around 115 acres with a stocking rate of 1.5 cow/calf pairs per acre. A herd would stay in a pasture for weeks. Under the new system, paddock size was measured by square feet, and their stocking rate from the spring flush went to 40 cow/calf pairs per acre, with cattle being moved daily.

"Once we started mob-grazing, we only irrigated three times, and this was the second driest year on record," Elaine Bembry said. "Moisture stays in the ground longer because of the cover. We put out 500 pounds of lime per acre and have had no other inputs. Our out-of-pocket costs, including labor, fuel and feed, dropped 50%. And the cattle stay in better condition."

University of Nebraska Extension forage specialist Bruce Anderson has tried mob-grazing on his own cattle operation. He said the practice can definitely increase forage utilization.

"Since animals don't have as much of a chance to graze selectively when they are tightly crowded, they eat most of what they can get. It also improves nutrient cycling as animals trample lots of grass into the soil and spread manure quite uniformly across the small area they are grazing."

Anderson said in his area, mob-grazing works best when there is a good bit of stemmy growth, especially old growth from the previous year, or where weeds have taken over. He said the practice didn't work well for him when it was muddy because it tended to lead to more damaged forages.

Unlike the Bembrys, Anderson doesn't see mob-grazing as a year-round practice. That difference is largely due to region of the country.

"Here, we might use it for a couple of months or maybe just a day or two. Primarily, it is a way to rejuvenate overgrown pasture here."

(VM/CZ)

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