The Moos Room™

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Dr. Joe Armstrong: Hello, everyone. We're about to get started with episode two. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Joe Armstrong. Just a few housekeeping things to take care of right away before we get going. One of the things we want to let you know is that all of the information in the podcast is usually available online at extension.umn.edu. That's extension.umn.edu. If you're interested in the topics that come up or we don't cover quite everything that you wanted to know, you can always find more information there on our website, extension.umn.edu.
If you have questions for us or anyone on the podcast, you can always get ahold of us through our email, themoosroom.umn.edu, that's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M dot U-M-N dot E-D-U. That's all I have for now, hope you enjoy the episode. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Episode 2 of The Moos Room. We are going to jump right into a grazing topic. This is the first of a three-part series about grazing. We'll start with a general grazing episode, we'll move into a dairy episode next, and then we'll finish with a beef grazing episode. As always, there's three of us here. I'm Dr. Joe Armstrong, Emily Wilmes is here, and so is Brad Heins. Dr. Bradley Heins.
Bradley Heins: Grazing expert.
Joe: Grazing expert.
Emily Krekelberg: Something that.
Joe: Brad's going to carry us today. Hopefully, his back doesn't get too sore. He's the expert in all of these things.
Emily: Lift with your legs, Brad.
Joe: Thank you for joining us. We're going to jump right in, get to the basics of grazing. First off, I think if Brad could walk us through why we graze in the livestock industry in general, both beef and dairy.
Bradley: Well, I think grazing is very important. I think even more so today with dairy and beef producers, I think it really comes down to feed cost. Most people are grazing because it's cheaper feed. It might not be the easiest thing to do, it requires different management, but feed cost is pretty important. I think you'll find many beef grazers, dairy grazers probably tell you that it's just a cheaper way to produce milk or meat.
Joe: In addition to that, I think marginal land is always something that comes up for me when I'm talking about grazing. We're using land that we can't use for crops anyway, so in some cases, we're putting animals on land that we can't grow crops on, other than grass. That's another way that for me, grazing is super important because that's just a land use issue, a sustainability issue as well.
Emily: Land stewardship.
Joe: Yes.
Bradley: I'll disagree with you a little bit. I think you can also graze good cropland and work that into a pasture rotation and maybe we'll talk a little bit about that in a few minutes about rotating your cropland into pasture land and having more productivity overall which I think is a benefit with grazing. You can use grazing as a tool for animal agriculture really.
Joe: Well, and that relates into what we want to talk about next is why having a plan for grazing is important. I think we see a lot of people in the industry that don't have a plan going into grazing season or when they graze, they just put animals in certain spots and so why is it important to have a plan, Brad?
Bradley: Well, I think it's important to have a plan because you can only grow so much grass and you don't want to waste your forage out in your pasture. Really having a plan is probably the biggest thing because if you use all your grass, you probably have to go buy feed and that can be pretty expensive for some farms and especially in the middle of the winter trying to find hay or silage or whatever you might have can be pretty expensive. Having a plan is number one.
I've gone to some farms where I think plans can range a lot from just moving from one pasture to the next where they have a fence or you can practice rotational grazing. Some farms do continuous grazing, it's really different, but having a plan probably recording your plan is number one, being able to track your plan.
Joe: As far as a plan goes, I think part of that, we talk about the grazing wedge which is a concept that we use to help people figure out when to rotate, when to move animals when pastures are ready. Can you walk us through what the grazing wedge is?
Bradley: Well, the grazing wedge is really all about measuring your forage on your farm and understanding what your pastures are producing. Really it starts out with the beginning of the year, you want to go out to measure all of your pastures to see what pastures are productive, which ones are growing grass now, and how much forage is out there.
Then you can track through the whole season and it gives you an idea of you go to one pasture where that's not so much grass, go to another one, there's more grass, so you plan your animals on what pasture you want to go to. You can actually grow that, make a grazing wedge. When you start with one pasture, you know that 21 or 28 days or 40 days, whatever your rotation is, you'll be back on that pasture again.
Emily: Do you have any quick tips or general ideas, Brad, that people can use or implement at low or no cost to measure their pasture? I'm guessing it goes beyond just, "Oh, here I'm going to visually look at my pasture and this looks sparse and this one doesn't." What can they do to really measure what might be out there? I know it might not be completely accurate, but what are some things they can do?
Bradley: Good point. There are many different ways you can measure grass in the pasture. Some of the newer technologies compared to just going out there and seeing what's out there, you can use rising plate meters, you can actually go out and clip your grass. There's a lot of innovative ways to do that. Clipping your grass is easy. You could take a bowl from your kitchen, go out build a square so you know what the area is, clip the grass in it, and actually measure it to see how much is out there.
If we go to New Zealand, they do a lot of grazing there with cattle and sheep, and they have sophisticated infrared technologies that cost lots of money to be able to monitor grass production. They do a very good job at doing that, but there's a cost to it. I don't think there's one size that fits all as far as being able to measure the grass, but that's probably the key is knowing what you have out there in the pasture because if you don't know what you have, it's hard to feed your cattle or whatever species you have, especially if you're feeding some supplement during the summertime.
Joe: With that supplement, how do you know when you need to supplement or if you need to supplement?
Bradley: That's a good question. I think there's many different things that you can think about when you're trying to supplement. One of the things that I like to tell farmers first is they should measure the forage quality of their grass. If you don't know the forage quality of your grass, then you don't really know when to supplement or how to supplement. I think it's a misconception that most of us think we shouldn't go out and measure our pasture, but we measure the forage quality in our corn silage, in our haylage, in a lot of our grain, so why not do it in the pasture? Really.
Joe: That makes a lot of sense.
Emily: Is that something you recommend people just do it once at the start of the grazing season or is it something that would need to be done more than once?
Bradley: Yes, I think you could probably do it three times, the year you'd probably want to do it at the beginning of the grazing season, probably the middle, and maybe towards the end just to see what the forage quality is and it's pretty cheap. You can get it done for $15 or $20 at the laboratory.
Joe: Are you measuring it at different times just because the grass grows in a different way throughout the year?
Bradley: Right, the protein in the grass is really high in May and June. We've measured some at Morris and our grazing pastures at 30% or higher protein which is unreal.
Joe: That's super.
Bradley: It's really high and you get towards the end of the season and it's down to 18 or 20. In the middle, it's in between so you want to be able to tell if you are supplementing and really if you aren't supplementing, you want to know that you have 30% protein in your grass because there's lots of other effects that might happen to cows, especially when I think of dairy cows, that might be problems.
Joe: Well, and that makes a lot of sense. Like you said, test everything else. There's no reason not to test your pasture to make sure you know what you have. I guess that feeds into what we're talking about is a kind of a active management. Pasture isn't a passive thing. You have to be on top of it and like Brad said, maybe that's just going out there and at least looking at it to see what's there, it can be very simple. It doesn't have to be super complex like New Zealand, it can be a yardstick, and knowing what's out there can be as simple as it can be.
Bradley: I agree, and there's nothing a good grad student to go out and measure the pastures for you.
Joe: That's what they're for, right?
Bradley: That's right.
Emily: Do you know a lot of producers with grad students?
Bradley: No, I don't. I don't.
Emily: Are you going to [crosstalk]
Bradley: I've had some good grad students that have measured lots of forage quality in pastures and they've done very well at it.
Joe: Well, good. I think it's just big to know that it seems a little complicated sometimes and it can be a little overwhelming, but it can be boiled down to something pretty simple as just knowing how tall things are and what's out there and you can get a lot of information from that.
Bradley: I also think you need to think about what type of grazing you're doing. Are you going to do rotational grazing? Mob grazing is a big one in the beef world, the dairy groups tend to do more rotational grazing. Yes, there's a lot of people that do continuous grazing yet which, well, there's a lot less forage production. Good quality, but not much there. I think you have to think about what species you're going to use and how you're going to graze as far as what and that really drives forage quality too. What type of grazing that you have.
Joe: What's the danger of grazing too hard or overgrazing as you might think that happens in a continuous system more often?
Bradley: I think it happens more often than not. You drive by lots of farms in the upper Midwest here and you'll see lots of pastures that are lots of bluegrass. Kentucky bluegrass is probably the biggest species in overgrazed pastures so you're just not having the forage production and then you end up either having to move your animals off that pasture or having to supplement them. Continuous grazing is it works in some situations if you're landlocked and don't have much land, but overall, you're going to sacrifice probably in feed costs. You're going to pay a lot more if your continuous grazing.
Joe: With that, I know there's different systems out there and we're talking about overgrazing being a problem, is there also an issue with under grazing? If you don't put enough animals out there, if your stocking density is really low, can that be a problem as well?
Bradley: We don't know a lot about what happens after that. I think you get lots of other species in there. You get woody species, so trees start to grow in your pasture if you don't graze it or if you're not grazing some pastures, they're just not productive anymore. I'll give you an example here. When I started at Morris, we had a pasture that was about 20 acres. It was just big blue stem and I think hairy vetch or something like that in there and it really was unproductive. You couldn't totally graze on it one day, there was just no feed value there for the cattle because it hadn't been grazed in three or four years.
We went out there and started to rejuvenate the pasture, put more cattle on there, we grazed it with heifers, plowed some of it up, put some warm season grasses in there, and really rejuvenated that pasture and now it's one of the more productive pastures on sand that we have just by putting animals out there. By not grazing it, the land became stagnant and it just didn't grow anything and wasn't productive at all either, and you start to get other species that come in there that are probably undesirable and maybe weeds too.
Joe: Is that the blueprint like you just talked about of making a poor pasture better, get animals out there, and then figure out a strategy to reseed everything?
Bradley: That's right. I think when we talked about getting animals out there, we're talking high stock density, lots of animals on a small acreage to really hammer the grass, get some hoof action in there and rejuvenate some of that, the land that's there. There's lots of other species out there and in the seed bank that could come up because of that.
Joe: You said warm-season grasses and I think of cool-season grasses in a pasture, is a combination of the two a better idea?
Bradley: I think there's lots of grass species that you can put in a pasture. Boy, that's another podcast that we could do on grass species mixes for pastures.
Emily: Sounds riveting.
Bradley: Yes, exactly. Exactly. I think a lot of people use warm-season grasses to fill the forage gap in the summertime when it gets really hot out. Sorghum-sudangrass is one that a lot of people use, Japanese or pearl millet or others. At our research center, we've had most luck with BMR sorghum-sudangrass, it grows a lot. It produces about three ton an acre, dry matter basis, so there's lots of forage for those cows to graze on.
It actually fills a need, some years better than others when it rains a lot. Warm-season grasses don't do very well. When it's cloudy, the summer tend not to do as well as they have in other years. You can't predict the weather, I wish we could because then we'd be able to plant all the species we know. There's different grass species that you can use for any type of grazing system.
Joe: Now, the weather in the last couple of years has been quite interesting and mud being the biggest issue, what do you do if things don't go as planned? What's the backup plan? Do you just take a pasture and say, that's the one I'm going to destroy? What do you do?
Bradley: Mud is probably the worst thing on a grazing farm especially if you have milking cows we do at our university dairy. It's always an issue, we tend to probably sacrifice some pastures, so we do destroy little sections of some. We probably move our cattle a lot more often when it's raining and muddy out. We graze some pastures earlier than maybe we should, just to keep the cows going and keep them off the mud.
It's always nice if you have a barn or concrete slab or something like that that you can bring the animals to. Some grazing farms do have those, so they're lucky in that way that they can pull their cows off pasture. There's quite a few farms that don't have that and mud is an issue, so you can bed them on pasture and that's what we do.
Joe: Well, that's good to hear that even the university has the same issues as the rest of the producers out there. Mud is just a huge struggle and it has been the last few years especially. Brad, if you had the ideal setup and money, time wasn't an object, can you walk me through briefly how your pasture setup would go?
Bradley: Well, there's lots of good things that we could all have. Obviously, we're probably more interested in growing grass, so we want to be able to grow lots of forage, so have the right species mix, cool season grasses. Grasses and clovers and legumes probably are the key for that to grow lots of grass and then really watch the pasture. Pasture management is number one, so being able to determine what the grass growth is to go there. There's lots of nice fun things that we could have. Concrete lanes, high tensile fence. Some people have high tensile fence, others don't, to make paddocks.
That's always nice, we're lucky that we do. There's lots of government programs that you're able to work with NRCS and get equip funds to get high tensile fence and water lanes, things that. One thing that we have done is have water on pasture. Especially for milking cows, we want them to have access to water at all the time. The bad thing on pasture is the water gets warm in the summertime during the day.
If I had all the money in the world, I would put a chilling system into my water lines in the pasture, so cows can have cool drinking water instead of water that's 80 degrees and warm and they don't want to drink it. That's one thing that we find is our cows don't like to drink warm water.
Joe: Well, that seems that water's always a challenge on pasture too because if your pasture's too big and animals will tend to congregate on that water, and for me, I like this if you can, the heavy rotation with smaller paddocks is my choice mostly because you utilize most of the pasture if you can because they're not just sitting around the water and grazing that down real hard and leaving some of the other pasture to do nothing.
Bradley: I agree. We talked to a lot to farmers and Emily probably has too. Water on pasture, it can be good and it can be bad. They don't like cows to congregate around the water because they create mud holes, but you want to have water access to your cows at all time, so it's kind of what do you do? I guess it works for some and some others they keep water around their buildings and the cows come up. We've chosen to have water on our pasture and I think it works. It's just it's not perfect.
Emily: On the flip side of Joe's previous question on if you had all the money in the world and you could build things how you wanted and you mentioned a lot of stuff, a lot of things that would make it easier, but I think part of the appeal too of grazing systems is they're considered a low input system or can be a low input system. If we're thinking of it really from that way, what would you say are still some of the considerations producers need to make?
Bradley: Good question. Fence is number one. You need to have good fence. If you don't have a good fence and a good energizer, cows are going to get out or whatever you have, calves are going to get out and roam wherever you don't want them actually. Fence is a must for a grazer. Some farms choose to use more fence than others. Labor is a big one too. You can spend all day fencing if you want. Some people don't like to fence all day so it depends on how you set your paddocks up.
There's lots of little toys that you can use to batwing gates, things like that that are a little bit easier for cows to move between paddocks, things like that, but you've got to have a good fence. My two things are good fence and water-run pasture, and then high-quality forage and pasturing, being able to manage your grasses. That makes a good grazing.
Joe: From there it can really be as high input or low input as you want. The fence has to be there, the water has to be there and then you can get as much out of it as you put it into it as far as active management.
Bradley: I agree. There's lots of other things that you can do too. You can fertilize your pastures, whether you want to use manure. You can use inputs if you want to fertilize your pastures. There's lots of different things you can do. Depends on how much time, effort, and management you want to put into it.
Joe: There's a lot of things that I think can go in and the last thing we want to do is tell a producer to add more time to their day, but I think some of these things can be worth it and the return on the investment is definitely there, especially if you're on top of your pastures.
Bradley: I agree. I agree.
Joe: Well, I think we're going to wrap it up there. I think that was a great intro to grazing and we'll get a lot more specific into dairy next episode and then we'll move on to beef in the episode after that. Thank you for listening to episode two of The Moos Room. Look for the next episode in our three-part grazing series and we'll catch you next time.
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