Need Advice On Cattle And Hay Business

[historyfan]

If you go cow/calf, you could AI those cows & not have a bull. With 30 acres you don't have much extra room. You would otherwise have to have a stout pen to hold said bull when you didn't want him breeding. Ranches tend to have two fences & even a highway separating bulls from cows.

Rotational grazing is only way to maximize use of pasture. You can do it pretty easily with cattle using just one hot wire on steel posts with insulators & a solar cell &battery on fence charger. You could do a wheel grazing with water tank at center.

Talk to extension about best improved pasture legumes for your area...you need look at trefoil specifically. Winter rye is another that will hold more protein into winter.

The goats comment was worth listening to...you can add one sheep or goat to any cattle grazing operation. If the land supports 10 cows and stays in good shape---not overgrazed by doing this--you can add 10 sheep or 10 goats without ill effect. Goats prefer brushy feed, sheep prefer broadleafs, and cattle prefer grass. Goats would be my choice as added species in Texas due to general lack of rain. The goat market is strong right now unlike the cattle market.

[justanokie]

Originally Posted by cowdog

Thanks everyone for the responses. Just to add to the knowledge base here....
I have everything needed to run cows. I would only need to add a cutter, rake and square baler for the hay. Don't even have to have a rake, but it would make it's money back fast.

I have tractors, trailers, barn, ponds for water. I can get all the hay stuff for around 5K and start taking up repair payments! Yes, we have our pasture baled every year and we even help them. It's a lot cheaper than mowing it ourselves.




I guess this is the most help I need. My family always ran black cows with white faces .... mentioned above in a post. Only had to pull calves every other year or so. Sometimes only one, maybe two. They did bring the most at the sale.

I'm more interested in the cow business. It's better to have a few with a bull than to buy and feed them without a bull? That is what I get from your post. That is what I need to know.

Around here it's suppose to be 3 acres for one cow. So I'm looking at 10 cows. However, my family always had over 40 cows but we always had another 30 acres leased to put them on when needed.

The pasture I own has a line of hay balers asking to bale it, every year one of them find out it's a bad deal! I'm not going to mention why on this forum but I want to change that. Yet after changing it I want to bale it myself!

Except when snow is on the ground (which is rare) I have grasses growing all year. They say alfalfa will not grow here but I want to experiment with it too.

You also mentioned goats, which I have no plans for now but they are the reason I want square bales!

We call those cows black baldies around here and they do well. Black angus cow mated to hereford bull gets them. People will generally start like that and then start replacing culls with the black baldy heifers.

I have had great success running feeder calves. Thats where you buy them around 3-400 lbs and sell around 7-800 lbs. That success was 20 years ago. If I remember right we were selling around $60 to $75 for feedlot ready calves, for several years in the mid to late 90s. I just looked and sell price now is about $110. Not much difference for 20 years. What makes it really bad is that land prices have went up nearly x10 fold during that time. Ammonia, Nitrogen, Potash, Herbicides, Seed, Fuel and etc have all increased several multiples of what they cost then. Its ridiculous. We are at a point where you cannot buy land and run enough cattle to make the payment. Its like owning a 300K house and only collecting $1000/mo rent for it. At some point your gonna make more money just selling the land investing in something else. When that happens in other markets it usually means a big correction is coming. But I digress.

Given how much all the inputs cost, it just doesn't make sense to do feeder cattle to me unless you are running a few thousand head, and you plan on owning them through the feedlot up to slaughter.

When your doing feeder calves its all about how fast you can get weight gains. The longer you hold them the more lbs of food it costs you for the weight gain, the more inputs you have to consume to grow the food, the more goods you consume doctoring and caring for them. Then to top it all off, you can have a great setup, and the market drops $10 bucks, or a drought cuts your available food making you feed more, etc etc. All your profits are up in smoke, the banker still gets paid but you don't.

With a cow calf operation much of that risk is removed. You can build slowly buying with more cash instead of debt. This lets you time the market better, if you see it starts dropping you can still round up what you have and sell them even if they are just weaned, or you can hold them for as long as you have the grass to feed them. Even up to 800 lb feedlot weight.

And if you want you can keep your calves and finish them up to 800 lbs just like you would with a feeder operation.


Maybe this isn't as big a deal with a real small operation but we usually bought about 5-600 head of feeder calves each year. We burned a lot of cash in vet supplies and medicine. When you start continually buying calves at sales and bringing them home, you wind up bringing home a lot of diseases they get exposed to.

Think of it like this. A feeder calf operation is very similar to buying gold holding onto it for 10 months and then reselling it and trying to get a profit. Whereas a cow calf operation is more like mining gold and selling whatever you mine every year. Not exact but it gets the point across.

Now for a cow calf operation you can rent a bull, do AI or just buy a bull. For 10 cows I would see if I could rent a bull from a neighbor, then check about someone doing AI and last of all, purchasing your own bull.

Yes you have to watch out for custom balers. They will try to ********* if they can. Its a negotiated service though. If you have them knocking on your door asking to bale your field I would make an offer that favorable to you, if they say no, then they can hit the road.

If you have grass growing all year then I would urge you to make as little hay as possible and stick how many ever head of cows you need to graze 100% of the land. Remember rule #1. It will always be cheaper for cows to feed themselves than for you to feed them.

The sooner you realize that this is more about grass and soil management than animal management the better your gonna do. You will be able to toss that 1 cow per 3 acre "rule" out the window and step out into your pasture and look at your grass and have a real good idea of how many lbs of forage you have and how many animals that can support.

here is some info from a previous post of mine that you may find interesting. I see you are in TX. If you are in the Noble foundations area of operation I urge you to take advantage of their services.

You should inventory your pasture and see how much forage you have available. You can measure the avg height and account for the type of grass you have then use an online calc to determine how much forage you have on your pasture.

If your going to raise a calf from say 300lb to 1000lb then you would use an avg weight of 650lbs. So you would need 650 * 3% = 19.5lbs/day for 1000-300 = 700 then 700 / 2lb per day = 350 days. 350 days at 19.5 lbs per day = 6,825 lbs of feed. Now of course that a rough guess but its a mark you should strive for. If the feed is low quality then you will need more of it and it will take longer. If they don't get enough forage every day then it will take more feed and longer time. So to minimize costs you can see its worthwhile to provide high quality feed.

Now here is an online calc to help you.

Reserve Herd Days Calculator

Video demonstrating how to use it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTMYjvbwtA0

Using a rotational grazing system is a huge help in managing pasture production and getting high quality pasture with much lower inputs. I would recommend you check into that.

Also make sure that you provide plenty of quality water, salt/minerals as needed.

sorry for another long post.

[MTSilvertip]

Really good information there justanokie

Small cow calf operations can work well, especially if you have pasture year round so you don't have to feed hay, although some supplements are usually needed to meet 100% of the cow's nutritional needs especially when she's pregnant and while the calf is nursing.

Not a huge fan of AI due to the fact you have to really know your cattle to hit them when they're just right for the process, and the semen from good bulls can be expensive with no guarantee of the cow catching. Bulls can be a pain in the neck, but they do their job well and you don't have to worry about it. Just have the vet preg test in the fall so you're able to can the open cows you don't want to feed through the winter.
One good bull can handle 20 cows, so they do earn their keep.

If the pasture can be irrigated, it makes a lot more feed, and a drip system is pretty cheap especially when the grazing is rotated.

For a small operation, although it's more work, doing custom meat where you feed up to slaughter weight and either sell the animal to an individual or slaughter and sell the meat is usually a good way to make more money per lb. than you get though the sales ring.
These days, selling beef that hasn't been fed antibiotics and injected with hormones for weight gain and is grass finished is a good way to get a premium price for the product.

As to breeds, any of the standards work. I like Herefords for their ease of handling, Simmental or Limousin for big weights. Red Angus and Charolaise are usually fairly easy to handle and have good growth.

Black Angus are dumb, bad tempered, love to ride the fences, a high percentage aren't real good mothers, you end up doing a lot more work to keep them alive and healthy, but the Black Angus association really runs a good marketing campaign so "Angus Beef" appears all over the place even thought the meat is just medium quality.
They are easy to find, lots of them out there for breeding stock, easy to replace, and you benefit from the effective marketing done by the association, but after handling them, they are probably the last breed I would choose to have.
Production breeds are bred for fast weight gain to increase profits, but usually require a lot of vaccinations, hormones are used to maximize weight gain, they're force fed corn they can't metabolize well so it forces fat into the muscle to offset the poor quality of the meat. The quality of the beef suffers, but you can produce a lot of it quickly.

You could choose a heritage breed which people really like in conjunction with novelty, can be finished as grass fed, they are more disease resistant and while many take longer to finish, produce a really high quality beef. They can be hard to find, so breeding stock and replacements can be tricky to buy, but they can offset that with their demeanor and ease of handling and calving.

There are a lot of heritage breeds out there to choose from, Ancient White Park, Red Devons, (the Pilgrims brought these to America), Short Horns, Belted Galloway, Kerry's, Randall, Texas Longhorn, or hundreds of other choices including the breed I raise, Scottish Highland.

Heritage breeds have a lot of benefits from the standard production breeds. Many, aside from excellent beef production, are also good milk cows, some like the Randall are good draft animals.
Small operations can benefit from hitting a niche market of people that want premium beef that has has no need for a lot of vaccinations, hormones or antibiotics, Plus, you can sell breeding stock to people that either have the breed or other small operations with the same goals of premium beef, milk or for draft stock.
Heritage breeds can do well on rougher forage too, many are light grazers, and some like Dexters are very small so you can have more animals/acre.

Most heritage breeds take longer to finish than the endemic black-whiteface. Most don't do well in feedlots, but they're usually easier to handle, better meat, the breeders have a longer productive life so you get more calves/cow, ( for instance, I've had Scotty Cows producing and raising calves when the cows are 20+ years old, most production breeds, the cows are burned out by 10 or 12 years old and have to be replaced), and many have special qualities that the production breeds don't have such as lower cholesterol or less saturated fats so people that have medical issues or allergies can eat the beef you produce where they can't touch the stuff from the stores. Plus, if you finish them out, they've never been exposed to the diseases that exist in feedlots and sales rings.
Those are very positive points for health conscious consumers.

You need to do your homework before making a decision, but it can be a lot of fun and really rewarding having your own cattle herd.

[David A Stone]

You can learn a lot by reading other people's experiences ( proof of that is in the great information shared here)

However, just as you can learn from other people's success, you can also learn from other's mistakes.

When I was farming and thinking about trying out something new or looking to put up a farm building, I always ask........"what would you change"?

Nearly everyone will say............."If I had to do it over, this is what I would change "
It maybe something very small, but you can benefit from his experiences.

[justanokie]

Originally Posted by MTSilvertip

Really good information there justanokie

Small cow calf operations can work well, especially if you have pasture year round so you don't have to feed hay, although some supplements are usually needed to meet 100% of the cow's nutritional needs especially when she's pregnant and while the calf is nursing.

Very true. Nursing cows and feeder calves have the highest nutritional demands. One way to mitigate this is to plan your calving to happen during your best grass growing season. Of course that will be spring for most people. Weird how mother nature works like that .

Now some people like to fall calve so they ween in the spring and have all that good grass to feed the fresh weaned calves.

I prefer spring calving because the calves do better, the cows get better feed, and I can look at my pasture and see how many calves I can winter and how many I need to sell.

If you irrigate a field of cool season grass during the fall growing season you should be able to get plenty of high quality forage stockpiled to winter fresh weaned calves with little feed inputs. Or you happen to live in a high rainfall avg area.

Originally Posted by MTSilvertip

Not a huge fan of AI due to the fact you have to really know your cattle to hit them when they're just right for the process, and the semen from good bulls can be expensive with no guarantee of the cow catching. Bulls can be a pain in the neck, but they do their job well and you don't have to worry about it. Just have the vet preg test in the fall so you're able to can the open cows you don't want to feed through the winter.
One good bull can handle 20 cows, so they do earn their keep.

I am not a fan of AI either. Its difficult to get right and all the people I know that do it wind up with a finishing bull to clean up misses anyways. But you can get a large portion of your herd calving at the same time, combining that with above and you get some good results.

If the op builds up to 15 cows I would get a bull hands down.

Originally Posted by MTSilvertip

For a small operation, although it's more work, doing custom meat where you feed up to slaughter weight and either sell the animal to an individual or slaughter and sell the meat is usually a good way to make more money per lb. than you get though the sales ring.
These days, selling beef that hasn't been fed antibiotics and injected with hormones for weight gain and is grass finished is a good way to get a premium price for the product.

Selling your product directly to the consumer will always net you the most profit.

You might be lucky enough to live where you can get them processed and inspected for sale. Of course there are ways around it by selling it on the hoof and delivering to a custom processor. This is whole new topic to itself but can be very good way to maximize small farm profits. You have to be a good marketer and salesman though, or get someone to do it for you.

Grass fed beef gets a bad rap sometimes but when its done right its a good thing. You got to have lush high protein forage for them though and lots of it when finishing them.

[David A Stone]

Originally Posted by justanokie

Very true. Nursing cows and feeder calves have the highest nutritional demands. One way to mitigate this is to plan your calving to happen during your best grass growing season. Of course that will be spring for most people. Weird how mother nature works like that .

Now some people like to fall calve so they ween in the spring and have all that good grass to feed the fresh weaned calves.

I prefer spring calving because the calves do better, the cows get better feed, and I can look at my pasture and see how many calves I can winter and how many I need to sell.

If you irrigate a field of cool season grass during the fall growing season you should be able to get plenty of high quality forage stockpiled to winter fresh weaned calves with little feed inputs. Or you happen to live in a high rainfall avg area.



I am not a fan of AI either. Its difficult to get right and all the people I know that do it wind up with a finishing bull to clean up misses anyways. But you can get a large portion of your herd calving at the same time, combining that with above and you get some good results.

If the op builds up to 15 cows I would get a bull hands down.



Selling your product directly to the consumer will always net you the most profit.

You might be lucky enough to live where you can get them processed and inspected for sale. Of course there are ways around it by selling it on the hoof and delivering to a custom processor. This is whole new topic to itself but can be very good way to maximize small farm profits. You have to be a good marketer and salesman though, or get someone to do it for you.

Grass fed beef gets a bad rap sometimes but when its done right its a good thing. You got to have lush high protein forage for them though and lots of it when finishing them.

Your last sentence really nailed it !

[cowdog]

Originally Posted by historyfan

If you go cow/calf, you could AI those cows & not have a bull. With 30 acres you don't have much extra room. You would otherwise have to have a stout pen to hold said bull when you didn't want him breeding. Ranches tend to have two fences & even a highway separating bulls from cows.

Rotational grazing is only way to maximize use of pasture. You can do it pretty easily with cattle using just one hot wire on steel posts with insulators & a solar cell &battery on fence charger. You could do a wheel grazing with water tank at center.

Talk to extension about best improved pasture legumes for your area...you need look at trefoil specifically. Winter rye is another that will hold more protein into winter.

The goats comment was worth listening to...you can add one sheep or goat to any cattle grazing operation. If the land supports 10 cows and stays in good shape---not overgrazed by doing this--you can add 10 sheep or 10 goats without ill effect. Goats prefer brushy feed, sheep prefer broadleafs, and cattle prefer grass. Goats would be my choice as added species in Texas due to general lack of rain. The goat market is strong right now unlike the cattle market.

I use to have 12 goats about 25 years ago. They were fun but also a headache. I used them to clean off the 4.6 acres my house is on. How do they get along with cows?

I've been looking into rotational grazing and like it and think it would help me with costs. We use to have the pastures fenced at 10 acres each and the cows would be moved to each section but I never understood the timing back then. If the whole place was going to be bailed the cows went to a lease.

My fencing for the grazing land will not keep a goat in right now.