Post by jrgidaho on Apr 6, 2010 23:05:47 GMT -5
Hi Eric & others. I've been away for awhile, so I'm sorry for the long delay in responding. I also apologize for the length of the message, but I think it is important stuff. Foundation of good dairy grazing manangement, supplementation, and all that jazz.
My responses follow your comments below and should all be in blue font.
With a basic understanding of management-intensive grazing gained through a few year's experience (and some reading, pasture walks, shortcourse), yes, I think you should be able to do this. No, you would never accomplish this with continuous grazing or traditional 3 or 4 pasture rotations.
It seems like you're advocating contradictory goals. You can't force a cow to graze small areas intensively without limiting "pasture allocation," right?
Absolutely not right! The size of the area is not really that important. It is the time they are there. In our operation, usually we are not forcing cows to graze anything. We are allowing them to graze to the degree we want and then move them to the next allcoation. With our beef cattle, we usually move every day. Most of the dairy folks I hang with all move at least twice a day (after each milking) and sometimes more. We rarely ask the cattle to utilize more than 50% of the forage. Except in winter when we are maintaining dry, pregnant cows we'll go up to 70-80% utilization.
If the idea is to force your cow to graze everything in a small area, so as to prevent the less palatable forages from out-competing the more palatable forages, then don't you have to marginally starve your cow into eating the less palatable (and typically less nutritious) forages.
Only if you do it over an extended period of time (a week or more??). If the good, the bad, and the ugly all go into the rumen at the same time (on the same day??), the good forage acts as the supplement that allows the rumen bugs to digest the bad stuff. Your livestock can do remakably well on pasture that looks like garbage if you give it to them one day at a time. We have been doing this for many years and utilizing forage the text books say wouldn't even provide maintenance feed.
That's the opposite of the "as long as she gets enough" emphasis, i.e. "[not] allocating enough pasture each day."
Once again, allocation is more about time, not space. We usually graze between 50 - 80 cows/acre/day. It doesn't look like much space, but the timing is right.
Is crabgrass going to come up through a healthy stand of established fescue?
We did it for many years when we lived in Missouri. Of course one of our objectives was to make the fescue much less healthy! We started with a lot of pastures that were over 90% fescue and when we left 23 years later most of the fescue was under 30%
How hard are you proposing to graze the fescue in advance (while maintaining 35 lbs/day on just pasture)?
We start grazing early and we graze hard, but remember we are moving off immediately after biting the fescue down. We generally tried to get two grazing cycles done in the first 30-40 days of the growing season. Grazing this hard also greatly reduces fescue toxicity and allows legumes as well as crabgrass to flourish.
It doesn't seem very feasible.
One's imagination or vision is the only limit to what one can accomplish. We don't accomplish anything with crabgrass in Idaho only becasue there is no warm season here for it to grow!
And then the weather only allows for limited time periods for good seeding, right?
When we were in MO we experienced about one year in seven when extremely dry conditions prevented crabgrass from growing.
Could a significant number of rotations (tether circles) be seeded in a year?
I have never actually done tether grazing so I can't answer from personal experience, but I don't see any reason why you couldn't get the necessary grazing impact on a multitude of circles.
What do you mean by 35 lbs if not an average?
Poor phrasing on my part. Yes, 35 lb is the average. I was trying to say milk yield is not a constant value. The peak is greater while the tail is lesser.
What basis do you have for saying this? Is this just a theory you have?
No this is not my theory. It is a well researched and documented phenomena commonly referred to as the negative associative effect of starch on the rumen. Basically the research says you can feed up to about 0.3% of bodyweight as strach and not affect rumen function. Or you can feed over 1% of bodyweight as starch and alter the rumen bugs to the extent feeding starch actually becomes beneficial. However, if you feed starch at levels between 0.3 and 1%, the starch alters the rumen microflora just enough to lower forage digestion to where the net effect of the starch supplement is nil.
Think about a 1000 lb Jersey cow. The range of starch (grain) supplement that is of little or no value would be from 3 to 10 lb. What do most of you feed? The metabolic partitioning of carbohydrates in a dairy cow is such that additional energy from moderate amounts of starch generates more milk, not body fat. Hence, feeding small amounts of grain seem to only exacerbate the problem of skinny cows. Either just let them have apsture or feed them a lot of grain to maintain good body condition.
Google "negative associative effect" + paterson and you will get a number of publications explainging what I am talking about. Dr John Paterson is a ruminant mutritionist who worked at both U of MO and Montana State U. Other prominent researchers working in this area are Monty Kerley at U of MO and KC Olson at Kansas State. Sorry, I am much more familiar with the beef nutritionists rather than dairy.
It's certainly an appealing theory for the naturally inclined keeper of a family cow, but is there compelling evidence that it's true?
My responses follow your comments below and should all be in blue font.
It seems like you're advocating contradictory goals. You can't force a cow to graze small areas intensively without limiting "pasture allocation," right?
Absolutely not right! The size of the area is not really that important. It is the time they are there. In our operation, usually we are not forcing cows to graze anything. We are allowing them to graze to the degree we want and then move them to the next allcoation. With our beef cattle, we usually move every day. Most of the dairy folks I hang with all move at least twice a day (after each milking) and sometimes more. We rarely ask the cattle to utilize more than 50% of the forage. Except in winter when we are maintaining dry, pregnant cows we'll go up to 70-80% utilization.
If the idea is to force your cow to graze everything in a small area, so as to prevent the less palatable forages from out-competing the more palatable forages, then don't you have to marginally starve your cow into eating the less palatable (and typically less nutritious) forages.
Only if you do it over an extended period of time (a week or more??). If the good, the bad, and the ugly all go into the rumen at the same time (on the same day??), the good forage acts as the supplement that allows the rumen bugs to digest the bad stuff. Your livestock can do remakably well on pasture that looks like garbage if you give it to them one day at a time. We have been doing this for many years and utilizing forage the text books say wouldn't even provide maintenance feed.
That's the opposite of the "as long as she gets enough" emphasis, i.e. "[not] allocating enough pasture each day."
Once again, allocation is more about time, not space. We usually graze between 50 - 80 cows/acre/day. It doesn't look like much space, but the timing is right.
Is crabgrass going to come up through a healthy stand of established fescue?
We did it for many years when we lived in Missouri. Of course one of our objectives was to make the fescue much less healthy! We started with a lot of pastures that were over 90% fescue and when we left 23 years later most of the fescue was under 30%
How hard are you proposing to graze the fescue in advance (while maintaining 35 lbs/day on just pasture)?
We start grazing early and we graze hard, but remember we are moving off immediately after biting the fescue down. We generally tried to get two grazing cycles done in the first 30-40 days of the growing season. Grazing this hard also greatly reduces fescue toxicity and allows legumes as well as crabgrass to flourish.
It doesn't seem very feasible.
One's imagination or vision is the only limit to what one can accomplish. We don't accomplish anything with crabgrass in Idaho only becasue there is no warm season here for it to grow!
And then the weather only allows for limited time periods for good seeding, right?
When we were in MO we experienced about one year in seven when extremely dry conditions prevented crabgrass from growing.
Could a significant number of rotations (tether circles) be seeded in a year?
I have never actually done tether grazing so I can't answer from personal experience, but I don't see any reason why you couldn't get the necessary grazing impact on a multitude of circles.
What do you mean by 35 lbs if not an average?
Poor phrasing on my part. Yes, 35 lb is the average. I was trying to say milk yield is not a constant value. The peak is greater while the tail is lesser.
The level of grain feeding many peole talk about on this forum (3-5 lb/hd/day) is often just enough to exacerbate the low body condition problem of the one family cow.
What basis do you have for saying this? Is this just a theory you have?
No this is not my theory. It is a well researched and documented phenomena commonly referred to as the negative associative effect of starch on the rumen. Basically the research says you can feed up to about 0.3% of bodyweight as strach and not affect rumen function. Or you can feed over 1% of bodyweight as starch and alter the rumen bugs to the extent feeding starch actually becomes beneficial. However, if you feed starch at levels between 0.3 and 1%, the starch alters the rumen microflora just enough to lower forage digestion to where the net effect of the starch supplement is nil.
Think about a 1000 lb Jersey cow. The range of starch (grain) supplement that is of little or no value would be from 3 to 10 lb. What do most of you feed? The metabolic partitioning of carbohydrates in a dairy cow is such that additional energy from moderate amounts of starch generates more milk, not body fat. Hence, feeding small amounts of grain seem to only exacerbate the problem of skinny cows. Either just let them have apsture or feed them a lot of grain to maintain good body condition.
Google "negative associative effect" + paterson and you will get a number of publications explainging what I am talking about. Dr John Paterson is a ruminant mutritionist who worked at both U of MO and Montana State U. Other prominent researchers working in this area are Monty Kerley at U of MO and KC Olson at Kansas State. Sorry, I am much more familiar with the beef nutritionists rather than dairy.
It's certainly an appealing theory for the naturally inclined keeper of a family cow, but is there compelling evidence that it's true?
