Management

Intentional Forage & Grazing Management

Think about the three P’s of grazing management.

Intentional management is premeditated, preplanned and purposeful. Hugh Aljoe believes it is their intentional management that sets the most successful managers apart from the rest of the pack. At the 2020 Cattle Industry Convention in San Antonio, Texas, Aljoe encouraged a Cattlemen’s College audience to be more intentional. He and fellow Noble Research Institute Pasture and Range Consultant Jeff Goodwin shared advice for becoming more intentional about managing a grazing enterprise.

Breeding soundness examinations incredibly important to determine bull’s potential to breed.

Many factors play a role in bull fertility and breeding ability, so it’s wise to make sure every bull has a breeding soundness examination (sometimes referred to as a BSE). Even if a bull was fertile last year and sired a lot of calves, he should be checked again because he may have a problem this year.

Managing feed and health costs while optimizing marketing strategies are keys to success.

Cow-calf producers, stocker operators and feedyard managers all have the same end goal in mind: raise high-quality beef profitably. Experts at the Kansas State University Beef Cattle Institute say there are many ways that producers can do that successfully. Stocker cattle are typically newly weaned calves weighing between 300 and 800 pounds. They are often commingled with other calves and developed on a forage-based system with some feed supplementation before moving to the feedyards for finishing.

Measuring pasture production serves stocker and cow-calf operations in good stead.

It’s not uncommon to hear managers of grazing operations talk about year-to-year differences in range or pasture forage production. It’s an easy segue from conversation about the weather, because it’s during the years of abundant moisture, or scarcity, that producers notice just how much the accumulation of precipitation affects forage production. So it’s not uncommon for a producer to declare twice as much forage production in a wet year. Conversely, a dry year can bring claims that pastures yielded half as much as normal.

Maximizing your forage mix means longer and more productive grazing.

A stocker manager’s bread and butter is in forages. Grazing should be able to efficiently grow a young calf with few feed costs. Finding the right mix of forages takes some thought and some legwork, but it is valuable time spent.

In Part 1 of this series, our authors focus on facility tips for receiving stocker cattle.

Stockering describes a management system that takes young, lightweight calves to a desired weight or adds weight to market cows and bulls. This is done primarily by using forage-based diets. After calves reach a desired weight or at the end of a grazing season, they are sorted into uniform groups and placed in feedyards or used as herd replacements. Market cows and bulls are often shipped to harvest after a stocker phase.