Post by bluetigers on Feb 25, 2011 15:00:31 GMT -5
Animals Thrive When You Manage Your Grazing For Maximum Plant Energy Harvest
By Greg Judy
CLARK, Missouri: One of the most limiting factors with grazing animals on pasture is energy.
Livestock do not care about producing meat, milk or calves. The only thing that they care about is surviving in their environment so that they can take a breath of air the next day.
If your livestock are not getting enough energy from their grazing they can never perform to their full potential. If you have to purchase some form of energy, your pocketbook is in trouble.
Buying in feed destroys profitability in a grazing operation. Therefore, we must concentrate on getting a constant supply of energy through our livestock every day from our forages.
Also, as long as animals have the opportunity to select for high energy plants your animals will seldom have any health issues.
There is normally plenty of protein in our cool-season forages, the lacking component is energy. Where is energy located in the plant? It is always located in the tips of mature plants because the tips are the closest to the sun.
Four years ago when we switched to Holistic High Density Planned Grazing, we bought a refractometer and begin monitoring our brix levels (energy) in the mature plant tips. The brix measurement gives you a reading of the sugar content in the leaf tips. Every year our brix levels continue to go up.
The reason the brix is going up in our mature plant tips each successive year is that our microbial activity is increasing in our soils. Why is the microbial activity increasing? I sincerely believe that with the massive amount of litter that we are trampling on the soil surface daily, the soil microbes are exploding with this constant litter smorgasbord.
The increased animal dung concentration, more kinetic energy from the animal hooves to incorporate this into the soil is happening as well. We have a higher energy flow, things are happening quicker.
Litter and manure pats are being consumed much faster, which gives us much higher energy in our plant tips.
The neat part of this whole equation is that I did not have to buy anything from anybody to get these higher levels of energy in our mature plant tips.
WATCH THEIR MANURE
We monitor our mob daily to make sure they are getting enough energy. One of the easiest ways to do this is to watch their tails and manure pats. If your tails have runny manure on them and the manure pats look like one inch tall sheet cakes, your cattle are getting too much protein and not enough energy.
I want to go over a real life example of how cattle performance can be affected when we limit energy.
First of all we have to remember that excess protein is located on the bottom section of the plant, the section located closest to the roots. This was really driven home to me a while back. I isolated a group of beeves that we had sold onto a fully recovered pasture to await the arrival of the new owner.
The first several days that the calves were on the pasture their manure piles were perfect. They had the pumpkin pie consistency with a slight pond shape in the middle. Their tails and rear ends were perfectly clean.
After the fourth day, the full length of their tails started to collect runny manure. The manure pats turned runny and looked like one inch sheet cakes. You could tell the calves were losing body condition.
Upon further investigation, I could easily see that the calves had harvested all the energy (plant tips) the first three days. They were now being forced to eat the lower sections of the plants where the protein was located.
The calves had lost the luxury of selecting energy and they were losing weight. Once the calves were moved to rested fully recovered mature plants, the manure pats went back to normal and their tails cleaned up.
There is very little energy in immature plants, this is why cattle are so runny on spring immature grass. All they are getting is protein and the rumen cannot function properly.
This is why it is critical to have some winter stockpile left over in the spring when your spring grass is being grazed. The livestock get a mixture of dry stockpile and new green grass with every bite. It is impossible for a cow to take a bite of grass without getting both. With this bit of dry matter mixed in with each bite, the cow’s rumen can convert some of the high protein grass into energy. It is effectively diluting the excess protein in the rumen.
Many livestock folk put a bale of dry hay out in the pasture in the early spring to get the same results. We do not own a tractor, so setting out hay in the wet spring is not an option for us.
We must calculate our stocking rate at the beginning of winter to make sure we have enough stockpile left over in the spring excess protein period.
ONE MOB MAKES LIFE EASIER
We are finishing up our second year of grass finishing beeves in the cow mob. We stay focused on getting as much energy through the beeves every day as possible.
It still amazes me how they have put on so much weight and fat while competing with the cow herd for energy. It sure has taken a lot of the work and headache out of having to handle two different groups of livestock.
When you place livestock together hat higher densities they graze differently. There is no lax grazing behaviour, they are much more aggressive grazers. We moved the mob one evening before they actually needed to be moved because we had a dinner date that evening. I stood at the next paddock and called to them to coax them to the gate. Not a single animal moved, they were all full and not interested in moving at all.
I knew I had to get them moved because there was not enough high energy plant tips in this particular paddock to last them until morning. I went up to the mob and hooked onto their mineral feeder. The mob calmly fell into file behind the mineral feeder as I towed it toward the new paddock.
The paddock that they were going into was a riparian area that was fenced off on both sides. A creek ran right down the middle of the paddock with a massive jungle of vines, giant ragweed and numerous other mature forbs. Thinking back, it looked more like a rain forest than it did a pasture. There was a thick canopy of fescue and clover under the jungle canopy of what we would call junk forage. The mob attacked the vines, giant weeds and various other small bushes. They acted like they had not eaten for a week.
Every single animal including baby calves were just ripping and tearing down the canopy of leaves. There were cows smashing forward into the jungle with vines hanging out of both sides of their mouth that touched the ground on both sides. Even with their mouths full, they were shoving forward into the canopy to reach their tongue around the next victim.
I had two fellows who had stayed after our grazing school to witness the mob move. Their mouths were open and amazed at what they were witnessing. The mob literally tore up and shredded the entire area of plant foliage in less than an hour.
And, this was done with a mob of cows that were full and not even hungry. I looked at their paunch area as they entered the new paddock and it was visibly full.
Why did the mob go into such a feeding frenzy? High energy plant tips were everywhere and they ate every inch of leaf area that they could get their tongues around.
It appeared that there was a competition going on to see which animal could consume the most leaves. It was an amazing display of aggressive grazing behaviour going after high energy plant tips.
The next morning it looked like you had run a rotary mower over the area. Everything was stripped of leaves and the rest was trampled onto the ground forming a nice litter bank.
This particular riparian area has been healed in four years with high density grazing. When we leased this farm the banks were bare soil with eroding banks that were falling off in the creek every time it flooded.
Today the banks are covered with a tight sod formation holding the banks in place. The stream now has flowing water 12 months of the year. The areas above the creek are catching all the rain water and slowly releasing it to the underground water table that feeds the creek.
We now have fish and frogs that live in the previously dry creek. The cattle have pushed the banks together which makes the pools of water deeper and keeps the water cooler.
I am not a proponent of cattle having access to the same riparian area 365 days of the year as this is a disaster waiting to happen. What’s critical is the density and the time that they are exposed to the area, followed by a full recovery period before re-grazing. We have healed all of our previously eroding creeks with our mob of cattle.
Let’s get back to the subject of energy.
COWS WILL SELECT FOR ENERGY
Let’s imagine that we are inside the rumen of the cow and can watch the process of the forage that is being delivered into the rumen tank. From our front row seats we can watch this constant stream of plants that are being dumped into the cows’ rumen tank. As we watch more closely, we will notice that there is a constant flow of high energy plant tips being delivered. Several hours later the cow lays down and ruminates. Now she is hungry, her rumen is asking for more food. The cow is still on the same paddock and has not been moved to a new fresh paddock. We take our front row seat on the rumen wall and anxiously await the arrival of the high energy plant tips on the conveyer belt. What we immediately notice is that the conveyer belt is bringing in forage that is much lower in quality. Very few plant tips are in the mix, the majority of the tips were grazed when they first entered the paddock earlier in the day.
Now the rumen has to switch from digesting high energy palatable plant tips to lower sections of the plants that have more protein. The rumen has excess protein and the cow’s digestive system is not functioning very well.
This is the reason that animal performance suffers when the cow does not have the opportunity to select a balanced diet.
If you are using any kind of 2-3 day rotation at a fairly high stocking density, the animals will be limited on energy, the longer time frame a cow is exposed to a paddock, the lower the amount of energy you will get through your livestock.
We witnessed another dramatic effect of mob grazing behaviour with high energy plants at the end of September.
We were grazing a large field of mature Aster which is considered a weed be many. My neighbors clip it with a rotary mower to get rid of it but our cows love to eat it, so we let them. The Aster plant is covered with tiny white flowers that are very sweet in flavour. The plant grows to heights of four feet tall.
This particular Aster canopy had a massive sward of fescue and clovers growing underneath it. I had given my intern Justin directions to move the mob every hour all day long. Justin packed his lunch and lived with the mob.
The mob was given a fresh break of grass every hour and they continued to graze all day. Every time it looked like they might lie down, Justin would expose another section of fresh forage. The mob would immediately begin grazing the newly exposed area.
Justin noticed that the mob would solely go after the Aster and ignore the grasses buried down in the canopy. Once the mob consumed the Aster, they would walk back several previously grazed strips and begin eating the fescue/clover mix like candy. Justin’s curiosity got the best of him. He decided to take some brix reading with the refractometer to see what was going on.
First he took brix samples from the fescue that was buried down under the aster canopy before the mob grazed it. The buried fescue sample gave a brix reading of three!
Next Justin walked back to the area that the cows had removed the Aster from three hours earlier and took a brix reading from the newly exposed fescue. The brix reading was nine! Could it be, the cows were that smart? Heck yes, they are the knowledge masters of their environment.
I believe we can out-stupid our cows but never can we outsmart them, not when it comes to selecting what is best. The mob knew exactly where the highest brix plants were and went after them like gang busters.
Once the Aster canopy was removed, the fescue/clover sward was exposed to sunlight. After three hours of being exposed to solar power, the leaves had risen from a sugar content of three to nine and were being consumed like candy.
Justin repeated this process throughout the day and the results were the same.
I need to brag a Justin a little bit here. Not every person would have picked up on what the mob was doing. Justin not only observed what was happening but knew exactly what to do to prove what he was witnessing! Great job Justin, keep up the great work.
In wrapping up, I will just say that our livestock are making a lot better living for themselves and us since we started focusing on harvesting high energy mature plant tips. We continue to add more cattle to our mob to eat all the grass. We are simply doing what was popular for thousands of years, building top soil with high energy plants.
Greg Judy is a full-time grass farmer in north central Missouri.
He is the author of Comeback farms and No Risk Ranching.
The Stockman Grass Farmer
January, 2011, Volume 11, #1
By Greg Judy
CLARK, Missouri: One of the most limiting factors with grazing animals on pasture is energy.
Livestock do not care about producing meat, milk or calves. The only thing that they care about is surviving in their environment so that they can take a breath of air the next day.
If your livestock are not getting enough energy from their grazing they can never perform to their full potential. If you have to purchase some form of energy, your pocketbook is in trouble.
Buying in feed destroys profitability in a grazing operation. Therefore, we must concentrate on getting a constant supply of energy through our livestock every day from our forages.
Also, as long as animals have the opportunity to select for high energy plants your animals will seldom have any health issues.
There is normally plenty of protein in our cool-season forages, the lacking component is energy. Where is energy located in the plant? It is always located in the tips of mature plants because the tips are the closest to the sun.
Four years ago when we switched to Holistic High Density Planned Grazing, we bought a refractometer and begin monitoring our brix levels (energy) in the mature plant tips. The brix measurement gives you a reading of the sugar content in the leaf tips. Every year our brix levels continue to go up.
The reason the brix is going up in our mature plant tips each successive year is that our microbial activity is increasing in our soils. Why is the microbial activity increasing? I sincerely believe that with the massive amount of litter that we are trampling on the soil surface daily, the soil microbes are exploding with this constant litter smorgasbord.
The increased animal dung concentration, more kinetic energy from the animal hooves to incorporate this into the soil is happening as well. We have a higher energy flow, things are happening quicker.
Litter and manure pats are being consumed much faster, which gives us much higher energy in our plant tips.
The neat part of this whole equation is that I did not have to buy anything from anybody to get these higher levels of energy in our mature plant tips.
WATCH THEIR MANURE
We monitor our mob daily to make sure they are getting enough energy. One of the easiest ways to do this is to watch their tails and manure pats. If your tails have runny manure on them and the manure pats look like one inch tall sheet cakes, your cattle are getting too much protein and not enough energy.
I want to go over a real life example of how cattle performance can be affected when we limit energy.
First of all we have to remember that excess protein is located on the bottom section of the plant, the section located closest to the roots. This was really driven home to me a while back. I isolated a group of beeves that we had sold onto a fully recovered pasture to await the arrival of the new owner.
The first several days that the calves were on the pasture their manure piles were perfect. They had the pumpkin pie consistency with a slight pond shape in the middle. Their tails and rear ends were perfectly clean.
After the fourth day, the full length of their tails started to collect runny manure. The manure pats turned runny and looked like one inch sheet cakes. You could tell the calves were losing body condition.
Upon further investigation, I could easily see that the calves had harvested all the energy (plant tips) the first three days. They were now being forced to eat the lower sections of the plants where the protein was located.
The calves had lost the luxury of selecting energy and they were losing weight. Once the calves were moved to rested fully recovered mature plants, the manure pats went back to normal and their tails cleaned up.
There is very little energy in immature plants, this is why cattle are so runny on spring immature grass. All they are getting is protein and the rumen cannot function properly.
This is why it is critical to have some winter stockpile left over in the spring when your spring grass is being grazed. The livestock get a mixture of dry stockpile and new green grass with every bite. It is impossible for a cow to take a bite of grass without getting both. With this bit of dry matter mixed in with each bite, the cow’s rumen can convert some of the high protein grass into energy. It is effectively diluting the excess protein in the rumen.
Many livestock folk put a bale of dry hay out in the pasture in the early spring to get the same results. We do not own a tractor, so setting out hay in the wet spring is not an option for us.
We must calculate our stocking rate at the beginning of winter to make sure we have enough stockpile left over in the spring excess protein period.
ONE MOB MAKES LIFE EASIER
We are finishing up our second year of grass finishing beeves in the cow mob. We stay focused on getting as much energy through the beeves every day as possible.
It still amazes me how they have put on so much weight and fat while competing with the cow herd for energy. It sure has taken a lot of the work and headache out of having to handle two different groups of livestock.
When you place livestock together hat higher densities they graze differently. There is no lax grazing behaviour, they are much more aggressive grazers. We moved the mob one evening before they actually needed to be moved because we had a dinner date that evening. I stood at the next paddock and called to them to coax them to the gate. Not a single animal moved, they were all full and not interested in moving at all.
I knew I had to get them moved because there was not enough high energy plant tips in this particular paddock to last them until morning. I went up to the mob and hooked onto their mineral feeder. The mob calmly fell into file behind the mineral feeder as I towed it toward the new paddock.
The paddock that they were going into was a riparian area that was fenced off on both sides. A creek ran right down the middle of the paddock with a massive jungle of vines, giant ragweed and numerous other mature forbs. Thinking back, it looked more like a rain forest than it did a pasture. There was a thick canopy of fescue and clover under the jungle canopy of what we would call junk forage. The mob attacked the vines, giant weeds and various other small bushes. They acted like they had not eaten for a week.
Every single animal including baby calves were just ripping and tearing down the canopy of leaves. There were cows smashing forward into the jungle with vines hanging out of both sides of their mouth that touched the ground on both sides. Even with their mouths full, they were shoving forward into the canopy to reach their tongue around the next victim.
I had two fellows who had stayed after our grazing school to witness the mob move. Their mouths were open and amazed at what they were witnessing. The mob literally tore up and shredded the entire area of plant foliage in less than an hour.
And, this was done with a mob of cows that were full and not even hungry. I looked at their paunch area as they entered the new paddock and it was visibly full.
Why did the mob go into such a feeding frenzy? High energy plant tips were everywhere and they ate every inch of leaf area that they could get their tongues around.
It appeared that there was a competition going on to see which animal could consume the most leaves. It was an amazing display of aggressive grazing behaviour going after high energy plant tips.
The next morning it looked like you had run a rotary mower over the area. Everything was stripped of leaves and the rest was trampled onto the ground forming a nice litter bank.
This particular riparian area has been healed in four years with high density grazing. When we leased this farm the banks were bare soil with eroding banks that were falling off in the creek every time it flooded.
Today the banks are covered with a tight sod formation holding the banks in place. The stream now has flowing water 12 months of the year. The areas above the creek are catching all the rain water and slowly releasing it to the underground water table that feeds the creek.
We now have fish and frogs that live in the previously dry creek. The cattle have pushed the banks together which makes the pools of water deeper and keeps the water cooler.
I am not a proponent of cattle having access to the same riparian area 365 days of the year as this is a disaster waiting to happen. What’s critical is the density and the time that they are exposed to the area, followed by a full recovery period before re-grazing. We have healed all of our previously eroding creeks with our mob of cattle.
Let’s get back to the subject of energy.
COWS WILL SELECT FOR ENERGY
Let’s imagine that we are inside the rumen of the cow and can watch the process of the forage that is being delivered into the rumen tank. From our front row seats we can watch this constant stream of plants that are being dumped into the cows’ rumen tank. As we watch more closely, we will notice that there is a constant flow of high energy plant tips being delivered. Several hours later the cow lays down and ruminates. Now she is hungry, her rumen is asking for more food. The cow is still on the same paddock and has not been moved to a new fresh paddock. We take our front row seat on the rumen wall and anxiously await the arrival of the high energy plant tips on the conveyer belt. What we immediately notice is that the conveyer belt is bringing in forage that is much lower in quality. Very few plant tips are in the mix, the majority of the tips were grazed when they first entered the paddock earlier in the day.
Now the rumen has to switch from digesting high energy palatable plant tips to lower sections of the plants that have more protein. The rumen has excess protein and the cow’s digestive system is not functioning very well.
This is the reason that animal performance suffers when the cow does not have the opportunity to select a balanced diet.
If you are using any kind of 2-3 day rotation at a fairly high stocking density, the animals will be limited on energy, the longer time frame a cow is exposed to a paddock, the lower the amount of energy you will get through your livestock.
We witnessed another dramatic effect of mob grazing behaviour with high energy plants at the end of September.
We were grazing a large field of mature Aster which is considered a weed be many. My neighbors clip it with a rotary mower to get rid of it but our cows love to eat it, so we let them. The Aster plant is covered with tiny white flowers that are very sweet in flavour. The plant grows to heights of four feet tall.
This particular Aster canopy had a massive sward of fescue and clovers growing underneath it. I had given my intern Justin directions to move the mob every hour all day long. Justin packed his lunch and lived with the mob.
The mob was given a fresh break of grass every hour and they continued to graze all day. Every time it looked like they might lie down, Justin would expose another section of fresh forage. The mob would immediately begin grazing the newly exposed area.
Justin noticed that the mob would solely go after the Aster and ignore the grasses buried down in the canopy. Once the mob consumed the Aster, they would walk back several previously grazed strips and begin eating the fescue/clover mix like candy. Justin’s curiosity got the best of him. He decided to take some brix reading with the refractometer to see what was going on.
First he took brix samples from the fescue that was buried down under the aster canopy before the mob grazed it. The buried fescue sample gave a brix reading of three!
Next Justin walked back to the area that the cows had removed the Aster from three hours earlier and took a brix reading from the newly exposed fescue. The brix reading was nine! Could it be, the cows were that smart? Heck yes, they are the knowledge masters of their environment.
I believe we can out-stupid our cows but never can we outsmart them, not when it comes to selecting what is best. The mob knew exactly where the highest brix plants were and went after them like gang busters.
Once the Aster canopy was removed, the fescue/clover sward was exposed to sunlight. After three hours of being exposed to solar power, the leaves had risen from a sugar content of three to nine and were being consumed like candy.
Justin repeated this process throughout the day and the results were the same.
I need to brag a Justin a little bit here. Not every person would have picked up on what the mob was doing. Justin not only observed what was happening but knew exactly what to do to prove what he was witnessing! Great job Justin, keep up the great work.
In wrapping up, I will just say that our livestock are making a lot better living for themselves and us since we started focusing on harvesting high energy mature plant tips. We continue to add more cattle to our mob to eat all the grass. We are simply doing what was popular for thousands of years, building top soil with high energy plants.
Greg Judy is a full-time grass farmer in north central Missouri.
He is the author of Comeback farms and No Risk Ranching.
The Stockman Grass Farmer
January, 2011, Volume 11, #1
