The Moos Room™

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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG three is here, Emily, Brad, and myself. Brad's all the way in Chicago. Emily's at home in Rochester. I'm here in the Twin Cities, still getting together to bring you The Moos Room. There's a big important update that we need to get. Brad put his whole family in the car and drove all the way to Florida. How did that go? Bradley?
Bradley: Actually, it went quite well. On the way there, it wasn't the big problem. On the way back, I think we were all tired and we all-
Emily: Sick of each other.
Bradley: We all lost it one night trying to find a place to eat and we just ended up eating at McDonald's. That's how bad it was. Fun times, though. It was [unintelligible 00:00:54] [crosstalk]
Joe: Family bonding. Yes.
Emily: Bless your heart, Bradley. That's all I can say.
Joe: That's a long drive.
Bradley: Yes. It's a long drive, but much cheaper.
Joe: Yes. That's the whole reason behind it. Well, today, we thought we'd cover something pretty timely. Everyone's dealing with the mud. Everyone's dealing with the rain and the snow and all that kind of thing right now. We talked about mud already a couple of weeks ago, but we got to figure out okay. The thing I see every year is everyone is just itching to get to grass. They want their cows on grass and I want everyone's cows on grass all year round if I can help it. Brad, describe that feeling for us because I don't have cows. You have cows. What's that feeling like? What's that impatience like?
Bradley: It is very impatient right now. That is the problem. We just want to get our cows to grass. We're sick of the mud, we're sick of feeding TMR the whole year. I think the cows can just sniff it too. They walk down the cow lanes to the parlor now and it's like they have to stop and nibble along the fence line. Everybody's getting the sense that spring is coming and cows just want to be outside and roam and not be confined anymore. I think it's time, but I think we have to wait a few more weeks.
Joe: What's the problem if we kick them out too early, Brad, because I feel like that happens a lot, but what's the problem with it?
Bradley: It does. The problem is is that you let your cows out too early, and they're going to chew down the grass. It doesn't give the time for the grass to grow and that affects growth for the whole year. If you think about pasture dairy, you have to think about grass growth the entire year and not necessarily one time or early in the spring. Really the first grazing sets the tone for grass growth for the whole year and can affect it. If we have a grazing that goes into October, it can really set growth the whole year. You have to be thinking about it early enough, and especially right now.
Joe: That's the same thing on the beef side when we talk about it. If you kick cows out early, especially if you have just one big pasture, they're going to wreck portions of it, just because they're going to, and they're going to spend a certain amount of time on certain pieces of it, they're going to chew it down and hinder that growth for the whole year. Like Brad said, setting the tone is key. Brad, how do you make that decision? How do you know it's time? How do you know, if I walk out in that pasture, and I guess today looking at it, measuring it, what do you do to say, "All right. It's time. Cows can go out?"
Bradley: One thing is that we know when our average date to first grass is. In most, it's about May 12th. That's based on our last 15 years of when we turn the cows to grass. We have an idea of when we would like the cows to go to pasture. Today, as we do this, we're about three weeks away, maybe a month away yet, but then we can go out and start looking at the grass and trying to decide what pastures we go to first. We have an idea of what pastures grow the fastest, which are drained well, so we're not mucking up the pastures as well.
We can tell where we should be going first based on grass growth but we have to be watching. We have to go out there once a week and watch the growth of the pastures and actually get an idea of where we want to go. I'll tell you, I've been inching it down as the years have gone by. I used to turn cows out and grass when it was 12 inches. Now it's getting closer to six to eight just to start cows grazing and we maybe go through pastures a little bit faster in the spring just to get their feet wet and get the cows in the room and adjusted to grass. I maybe cheat a little bit now.
Emily: Your impatience is really on display there, Bradley.
Bradley: It is. That's the hard part, trying to figure that out where to go to grass.
Joe: You can get away with it, though, Bradley, because you rotate and you rotate so intensively. You can get down to six to eight inches when you turn them out because you're going to get them off that too. If you weren't going to rotate very often, that wouldn't be part of your options.
Bradley: Right. It's called lash grazing, so we can make a big area, let the cows out. Maybe they're on it for 12 hours, 24 hours. We're talking 80 cows on six acres and just run them through it for the day, then they have to come off, just to get things going and start the rotation. The problem we have, I have, I had it many times and I see it on other farms if they wait too long and then all of a sudden, June 1st comes, and they have eight pastures ready to go and it's like, "Oh, well, now what do we do because we don't have enough cows. We got too much grass. Do we bale it or do some other things with it?"
Then your grass goes to seed, which causes lots of other issues. I've had lots of farmers telling me, it's an art and it's not a science. Sometimes I believe that.
Emily: A little bit of both.
Bradley: That's right.
Emily: Column A, column B. One thing I want to go back to Brad that you said right away, was one of the first things you do and you go back and you look at the data you have and what you did in years previous. Obviously, you are a research facility so really good record-keeping is super important, but on this show, we really press record-keeping and good record-keeping and that does not just apply to things on the cattle side. That also applies to pasture and other things that you're doing so that you have that good frame of reference. Anything else you want to add, Bradley, about the record-keeping aspect for your pastures?
Bradley: It's essential to know what pastures you start with and you can get an idea of what the grass growth is a year. I'm becoming more into measuring the grass just to seeing where it is. I think knowing where you start with your cows every year and what the grass growth is like and keeping track of it will help you make those decisions so much easier for next year. Because otherwise, you're haphazardly doing it, which is what I did when get thrown into the grazing world. It was like, "Oh, well, I don't know," and then records have helped all of us decide what to do from one year to the next. It's a lot easier, I'll tell you that.
Joe: Brad, do you keep everyone in the same rotation from year to year mostly or do you switch it up and they go in a different direction or a different order of pastures every year?
Bradley: We're keeping it in the same rotation from year to years now because we know based on grass growth and where we go. Sometimes, it also gives an idea of what pastures we may need to reseed every year. If we're in that rotation, then that screws that rotation up a little bit, but it helps to get an idea of what's going on.
We try to keep it the same. Most of the pastures turn out the same way, but we're doing a little things differently with some pastures now where we're trying to graze winter rye. This week in Minnesota, there was snow where we were at. We had an inch and a half of snow in Morris on our pastures. I've been grazing on April 17th before and now we're a month away. We're trying to stretch the grazing season earlier by looking at different species and redoing pastures.
Joe: I had one question before we get wrapped up here. This is someone I was talking to earlier today, actually. They got too muddy where they were calving and they just had to pick something to sacrifice. They had a really old stand of alfalfa, knew they were going to have to redo everything there anyway, so they kick cows out to about half of it and just destroyed it, but they needed someplace to go with the cows to get their calves healthy and everything. That's fine. It's a beef farm. When someone asks to do that, they have to make that sacrifice area.
What's your big suggestion, Brad? Is that area just dead for the year or what would you do with an area like that, that we've kicked cows out on, they mucked it up, made it muddy? Nothing's going to grow that was there. What would you do with an area like that for the rest of the year so it's not just useless?
Bradley: Well, that's a good suggestion. We're dealing with that now and have done some of that in the past. I guess two suggestions. One, we've gone to a warm season grass, pearl millet. I've used sorghum-sudangrass that you can plant once and then get those pastures back into the rotation, or you could set it up for a fall grazing, maybe plant some oats. You can plant oats any time really to just jumpstart the grazing and then maybe go back into permanent pasture.
It happened to us this year, so much mud. We've got to move cows out. We've abandoned some places, so we moved some cows and we put some heifers out on a pasture that we had about eight acres. We've got 90 heifers out there right now because we didn't have anywhere else to go with them but I selected that pasture that I knew I wanted to redo and reintroduce. It had maybe a few more thistles than I want it to, and the grass was getting down in production.
It's like, well, we'll put heifers out there, it gets lots of urine, manure out there, which can help in grass growth. I'll go out there in three weeks, four weeks, and reseed it, no-till grasses and legumes back into that pasture and it'll rejuvenate itself. I think there's two different ways to do it and some people are afraid to rejuvenate pastures but I think it really helps and it'll help in grass growth in many years to come. We've been redoing pastures and we've seen a lot of benefits to that. We can be proud that we have pastures that are 25 years old and we haven't done anything to but I think helping to intercede and rejuvenate them provides lots of grass growth into the future.
Joe: I like that. I'm going to start using that term instead. It's not a sacrificial pasture but it's just a chance to rejuvenate that pasture-
Bradley: That's right.
Joe: -by putting cows on it. All right.
Bradley: That's right. Here's my sensor talk. We'll use sensors, maybe we can discuss this another podcast episode, but we've been using satellite images to track grass growth and we started it last year. We're going to do it this year. There's lots of satellites flying over us all the time. It goes over our research station once a week so we can take a picture and we're actually able to measure by reflectance how much grass is in the pasture. We've been starting to measure it now already for the last two weeks, we know what level of grass out there. We're at mid-April and there's about 500 pounds of dry matter per acre on our pastures right now, which is not enough to sustain cattle or anything, but we're able to start measuring all of our pastures and look at grass growth throughout the season.
That's the new upcoming way to measure pasture, is satellite images and we call it satellite grazing. We're at the forefront of trying to figure that out and see where we go with trying to measure forage disappearance and forage in pastures. We can do it at our computer and-- I just shouldn't say we shouldn't have to go out in the pastures, we still have to do that, but we're able to get an idea of what that is from a satellite image perspective.
Joe: What are you using as the gold standard for that, Brad? What is the measurement that you use to calibrate the satellite or to make sure that it's right?
Bradley: Well, in years previously we measured, we've used a rising plate meter to do it but this year we're going to go out and use a rising plate meter and then we're going to clip it by hand and see how accurate that is. We'll go out and get one measurement for the pasture and see how well it's doing. It's actually pretty accurate. It's not perfect but we've been able to go out and measure that and some pastures not so good, some pastures good. It all depends.
There's a lot of other things that go into it. You have a nice square pasture and a nice square field, it does quite well but trees and lots of other things cause issues with satellite images. It's our fun little project that we've been working on. It's totally fun.
Joe: Awesome. That sounds like a great way for people to save time if we can get it working well. I'm all about it.
Bradley: I agree.
Emily: Grazing management for the 21st century.
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Bradley: That's right. That's what it is.
Joe: All right. Well, I think we've given everyone a bunch to think about. Be patient. Wait to put your cows out there. It's really important. Em, wrap us up.
Emily: If you have any questions, comments, or scathing rebuttals about today's episode, email us at themoosroom@umn.edu.
Bradley: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Emily: You are right on, Bradley.
Bradley: That is the second time I got it right.
Emily: [laughs] If you would like, or if you have a question you'd like us to answer on a future episode of The Moos Room, you can call and leave us a voicemail. The number for that is 612-624-3610. You can follow us on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety. I thought I was going to say something else but nothing else was coming.
Joe: That just didn't come out.
Emily: I was just like, all right, I'm done.
Joe: It's time to be done?
Emily: [laughs] Yes. Bye. [laughs]
Bradley: Bye.
Joe: Bye.
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[00:15:44] [END OF AUDIO]
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