WASHINGTON,
March 16, 2016 - An array of cost savings and market premiums are enticing
American cattle ranches and dairy farms to extend their grazing seasons by a
month or two, or even to graze year round.
“The biggest
carrot has been the premiums,” said Joel McNair, who publishes Graze magazine in Belleville, Wisconsin. He
says most of the Upper Midwest has too many ice- and snow-covered months for
year-round pasturing, especially with dairy cows, which need robust feed while
lactating. But, he says, a lot of small farmers are finding ways to keep cattle
on pasture or hay all year round, so they can directly market “grass-fed” beef
themselves or sell cattle to branded beef packers or small cooperatives. USDA
says carcasses of most grass-fed steers and heifers have been fetching $270-$350 a hundredweight, versus about $205 for
conventionally fed cattle.
The soaring
demand for “grass-fed” labels on meat choices serves as a handmaiden to
expanding grazing. The growing U.S. bison herd, for example, lives exclusively
on forage, or nearly so. Sheep are also natural grazers. “It’s easy with
lambs,” said Peter Orwick, American Sheep Industry Association
executive director. While grain is part of many lamb-fattening diets in
feedlots, lambs thrive naturally on forage, he said, and a lot of producers are
pocketing premium prices by simply eschewing grain for their lambs.
Allen R. Williams, an industry consultant in Mississippi,
says grass-fed-labeled beef reached 7.2 percent of American beef consumption in
2015. But almost all is imported. The 225,000 head of grass-fed cattle
slaughtered in the U.S. in 2015 represents just 0.8 percent of domestic
slaughter, he says. Still, the number of operations touting grass-fed herds has
zoomed from a handful about two decades ago to 3,700 today, he estimates.
Meanwhile,
Nathan Weaver, a small dairy farmer in Canastota, New York, is pocketing $5-$6
per hundredweight premium from Organic Valley for milk. That comes after nearly
10 years of building pasture soil fertility, reforming his forage program and
adopting smaller-cow genetics (a blend of Jersey, Milking Shorthorn and Dutch
Belted) to fit his forage-only operation. Now, when he tallies up his no-grain
cost savings and adds his milk check premium, “I think we are as profitable, or
more profitable, than if we were feeding grain,” he says.
Livestock
experts recognize the challenges to total-forage dairying. Marilyn Noble,
communications manager for the American Grassfed Association, says AGA, which audits and certifies
all-forage livestock operations, will soon post a new, more attainable set of
standards for grass-fed dairy standards.
Many cattle
operations in northern states join the country’s shift toward forage diets, in
part, by what is called bale grazing. It involves building soil fertility and
forage productivity in pastures and hay fields to accommodate extra weeks of
grazing, but then also harvesting bales that can be hauled to cattle in winter
pastures.
Nationwide, says
Jim Gerrish, forage and grazing consultant who runs American GrazingLands Services, says most grazing season expansions are happening in latitudes more
friendly to year-round grazing. He does workshops and coaches farmers and
ranchers on forage systems nationally, and he sees most of the new attention to
improvements in grazing techniques “South of I-80 and north of I-20,” a band
south of the Great Lakes and north of cities such as Jackson, Mississippi, and
Dallas.
Gerrish says he
has helped even northern ranches that have historically fed hay for five months
of the year reduce hay feeding to just 45 to 60 days in an average winter.
However, he suggests the first change for northern ranchers wanting to trim
winter hay demands is to switch calving from February or March into May, when
pastures are again flourishing. “That will dramatically decrease the cow’s feed
requirements because she won’t be lactating or carrying a calf in winter
months,” he points out. (New York dairy farmer Weaver does just that, drying up
all cows in mid-February, ahead of May calving.)
Plus, Gerrish
suggests selecting replacement cows that will weigh a modest 1,100 to 1,200 pounds
at maturity will slash winter feeding costs as well.
While Gerrish
guesses that a third to a half of participants in his grazing management
workshops and meetings are either total grass-fed operators or aspiring in that
direction, a majority are pursuing the bevy of cost savings and improved soil
health that come with an expanded forage program.
Indeed,
Gerrish’s writings about “kicking the hay habit” and his workshops focus on letting
animals, rather than equipment, harvest the forage. “Most farmers have
historically managed their fields at a higher level than they have their
pastures,” he says, so ramping up a forage program starts with fresh efforts to
build healthier soil. Assuming a good forage program, he says, “I’d expect
grazing costs to be 30 to 40 percent of the costs of feeding hay,” at least in
the country’s mid-latitudes. And farmers in the North, he expects, can cut
forage costs by at least a third in the long term by improved pasture
management and extending the grazing season. That assumption might not hold, he
notes, in years when hay is especially plentiful and cheap.
In general,
modern improved forage program techniques are lumped together as “managed
grazing,” and typically mean brief grazing periods and frequent rotations
through movable grazing cells bounded by an electrified wire. It features
robust rest periods for pasture cells. Cattle are often grazed in close quarters,
trampling forage into the ground to help enhance soil health. Such systems
often include seeding some annual crops such as sorghum, turnips and legumes
into the perennial grasses to add nutrition diversity and a steadier supply of
forage year round. Then some forage is stockpiled, which means it is left in
the pasture for fall and winter use. That hay reserve is rationed by rotating
the herd through the cells – called strip grazing – or by harvesting some of it
for winter bale grazing as necessary.
Staff at the East National Technology Support Center of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation
Service in North Carolina and several cattle owners produced a video that
describes this type of grazing system. Check it out here. Steve
Woodruff, regional agronomist at the center, says, “Some of us here thought
that… if more producers could use these techniques of year-round grazing and
stockpiling forages and strip-grazing that you will have less energy waste than
in having to make hay. Less nutrient loss problems, too, because in many cases
the forage being grazed in the winter time is superior to the stored hay. So
you have a lot of advantages.”
Woodruff’s team
focused on beef cattle, and he says the year-round system “works very well in
the mid-Atlantic region… because you have the types of grasses that can be
stockpiled and strip-grazed throughout the winter.” However, he says, “you can
extend your grazing season anywhere; it’s just a question of how far can you go
with it.”
He notes that
using such a system for dairy herds is different. “When you extend that grazing
season (for milk cows), you’ve got to make sure you’re keeping the quality
where you want it.” However, hay can be
stockpiled for fall and winter feeding of heifers and dry cows, he says.
Besides avoiding
hay-making expenses of seeding, cutting and baling, twine, equipment costs and
labor, the strip grazing systems reduce fertilizer needs because the animals
spend time in each cell, evenly distributing manure and urine deposits.
What’s more,
says Brett Chedzoy, a New York beef-cattle rancher and Cornell University
cooperative extension agent, grazing cattle most of the year greatly simplifies
manure management difficulties. “Many here are under the gun on water quality,”
he says. And while nutrient management systems for confinement livestock
operations are often hugely expensive, the need for them disappears when
livestock lives in pastures year round. He has expanded his grazing season to
eight months, hoping to reach nine in most years, and he bale grazes his herd
in pastures in the remaining months.
#30
For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com
