Colt Knight: 00:06
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, extension professor and state livestock specialist with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And today, I’m gonna try something a little different, and I am gonna let my friend and colleague, Dr. Jeff Lehmkuhler, the beef specialist from the University of Kentucky, kinda take the reins and guide us through grazing math and grazing management strategies for ruminants.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 00:33
Today, I’m joined by my colleague, Dr. Colt Knight, and his basset hound, Layla. Colt, how are you doing today? I am rolling along merrily as ever. Excellent.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 00:44
So, when we got talking about what we were going to talk about today, I got to thinking, you know, things are drastically different this year than previous years when I’ve been in Maine. One year when we were up here, it was so wet you could hardly get out into the fields. This year, it seems like you guys have had a pretty good spring.
Colt Knight: 01:06
Yep. It’s a little rainy when we’re supposed to be putting up hay, but we’ve not been inundated, so the fields are dry. We can drive on the fields. We’re just waiting for the sun to shine.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 01:19
It’s a drastic difference. Well, yeah, about a couple of weeks ago, we were out west, traveling through western Nebraska and the southern part of South Dakota, where there are some wildfires and extreme drought conditions. You all are looking green up here, and it looks like forage yields are going to be decent. As we talk through some of our, you know, challenges with weather and forage growth, we’re, you know, in Kentucky, coming out of a really dry spring, and some areas of the state are still experiencing drought. I think we can step back a little bit and think about some pasture management tips to consider when we kind of have these issues with low precipitation, not knowing what forage production is going to be.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 02:11
So I thought maybe today we could talk about some of the tools we have in the toolbox to get out there and estimate standing forage, give us an inventory, and maybe help us modify a planned rotation if we’re doing rotational grazing. Does that sound like a good topic to throw around? I think that’s a great topic. Fantastic. So, Colt, when we think about grazing management, one of the first things we should probably consider is, you know, what are these rascals going to eat on a daily basis?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 02:42
So what would be some ranges, number-wise, that you think we would throw around for intakes on grazing ruminants?
Colt Knight: 02:51
So when we think about grazing ruminants, they’re going to eat 1% to 3% of their body weight in dry matter. And, you know, our wet forages are pretty high in moisture content, so they’re going to have a much lower dry matter content. Whenever we weigh forages or feed, we always do it on a dry matter basis just to equalize everything. We have to get a tremendous amount of water in the diet before it limits their intake. Normally, it’s dry matter that limits their intake.
Colt Knight: 03:23
And when I say 1% to 3%, that varies greatly over their lifespan and stages of production. When we think about our cows, on average, they’re gonna eat somewhere around 2.5% of their body weight in dry matter. That’s a really good number. We talked about this at our workshop last night. Cattle are biological systems.
Colt Knight: 03:54
They didn’t read the book, so they don’t know that they’re supposed to eat exactly 2.5% of their body weight. Some cattle are more efficient, and they can eat less than that and maintain the same level of production. Some cattle are gluttonous. They’re gonna eat a little bit more than that, so they’re probably closer to 3%. I’ve even measured some at 3.5%.
Colt Knight: 04:15
And that’s eating too much. We need to get rid of those, but…
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 04:19
Yeah, and so, you know, when you think about those numbers that you threw out, 2.5%, if we had, say, a thousand-pound bred heifer, at 2.5%, that’s 25 pounds of dry matter a day. Yeah. And if forage is running 20% dry matter, 80% water, then we’re looking at 125 pounds of fresh forage intake a day. That’s a lot of water.
Colt Knight: 04:48
So…
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 04:50
As you go through it, it’s interesting. You know, a lot of times folks will think that water is a major limiter for production and performance, but ruminants have a unique ability to manage how much water they retain, and the liquid passage rate out of that rumen can be much higher when it’s fresh and wet.
Colt Knight: 05:10
I don’t know the exact number for beef cattle, but it’s like 40% of the rumen if we fill it with water, and in dairy cattle, that’s when we start limiting dry matter intake just from gut fill, because there’s no more space. And on a full-grown dairy cow, that’s a 55-gallon rumen, and 40% of that has to be full of water before we start limiting dry matter intake. So in beef cattle, it’s almost unheard of that water would limit dry matter intake.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 05:44
Yeah, and you know, the liquid passage rate might be 10% to 12% per hour. It is pretty fast how much of the water can pass through a ruminant system. Yep. But as we go through, then we talk about that target, or not target, but kind of expected intake, and you mentioned 1% to 3%. A lot of things can maybe control, or not control, but limit intake or influence intake, and forage quality certainly is one of those.
Colt Knight: 06:14
There are a lot of things that control intake in cattle. One is just the animal’s biology. Some animals are gonna eat a little bit less; some are gonna eat a little bit more. But when we talk about forage quality in beef cattle, when we drop below 6% to 8% crude protein in our forages, the animal will self-limit its intake just based on the poor quality of the feed. And I like to use the example, you know, if someone offers you a fresh pizza, hot out of the oven, you might eat the whole thing.
Colt Knight: 06:51
If somebody offers you some stale, cardboard-like, nasty, dry food, you’re not going to eat very much of that. If you’re real hungry, you’re going to eat some, but it’s really going to limit that. One of the other things that really limits intake, I wouldn’t say limits intake, but increases intake, is species diversity in our pastures or forages. It’s like if you go to the Chinese buffet, you pile that plate high, as tall as you can get it, and you eat so much because there’s so much good, different stuff that you like. Whereas, if it was just a single item on that buffet, you probably wouldn’t eat that much.
Colt Knight: 07:33
But they really like diversity, and they’ll eat more if there’s more diversity in that diet. So we’ve got forage quality, and it’s not just a crude protein metric. There are a lot of different quality metrics we can put in there. But we like to say 6% to 8%, somewhere around there. Then there’s diversity, the animal’s biology, and the animal’s stage of production.
Colt Knight: 08:04
You know, if she’s early on in the pregnancy, her requirements aren’t that much different from maintenance. But as she gets further along in her pregnancy, she starts eating more, and the size of her digestive tract actually increases so that she can process more feed and have more milk. And then when she starts milking, her dry matter intake goes way up. But right before she has a baby, she gets real uncomfortable and might go lie down, and she might not eat hardly anything for a week or two. So it drastically changes.
Colt Knight: 08:40
But while she’s lactating, her dry matter intake goes up a lot, and it has to stay up. Otherwise, she starts losing condition because the calf is drinking milk and all of her energy is going into that milk. She goes into a negative energy balance. She’s gonna lose some weight. So we need to keep her weight up so she doesn’t lose too much weight.
Colt Knight: 09:00
So she’s ready to rebreed again, and we’re on an annual calving cycle. But there’s a lot that goes into forage intake.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 09:07
There really is. And we didn’t talk about the weather, you know, heat.
Colt Knight: 09:15
I should mention those if we’re talking about it. The number one thing that I tell my students and people who come to my nutrition or forage classes is that dry matter intake is positively correlated with water intake. So if we limit water intake in any shape or form, the animal voluntarily decreases its dry matter intake. They need the water to process the feed. So if their water is limited, they will limit their feed intake.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 09:48
Yeah, that rumen is 80% to 85% water, so it’s important that we have enough water in that rumen. And we talked about how fast water will pass out of the rumen. You gotta have, I mean, that water is the highway system for the bacteria to attach to the feed and begin that fermentation process. Absolutely. So, you know…
Colt Knight: 10:13
I mean, there’s that aspect of it, but they also need to generate a tremendous amount of saliva for lubrication, just to process that feed, whether it’s during their initial swallowing of the feed or the chewing of the cud later on.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 10:30
Yeah, and then that saliva buffers the rumen some because of the bicarbonate that comes in with the saliva. And so, you know, when we think about intake, there’s the metabolic side. Like you said, when cows lactate, energy demand goes up. There’s that metabolic drive for energy to support lactation. There are physical limitations. There are stretch sensors on that rumen, and like you said, when that rumen gets full and stretched, that can then be a kind of negative feedback system to reduce intake or limit intake. There’s the physical side too, like you mentioned, with late-gestation cows. That fetus is taking up a lot of room inside, and it’s in an area that will limit rumen expansion. So there can be a 10% to 20% reduction in intake just because of that uterus being, you know, a 60- to 80-pound calf and amniotic fluid.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 11:32
And you mentioned, I’d like to follow up on that 6% to 8% protein. Rarely do we see protein being a challenge with our cool-season grasses because most of our forages are going to test sufficiently for protein not to be a problem, versus where you did your grad work…
Colt Knight: 11:53
Yeah, I spent most of my career out west, and it’s really funny when you think of, like, cattle east or west of the Mississippi. East of the Mississippi, we supplement energy. West of the Mississippi, we supplement protein. And we didn’t talk about this, but, you know, ruminant animals digest their feed through the proxy of the microorganisms that live in their rumen: fungi, protozoa, and bacteria. There are trillions and trillions of these little bugs that live in their rumen, and we’re feeding those bugs, and the animal lives off the by-products of the bugs. That’s the easiest way to put it, I think.
Colt Knight: 12:35
It’s super complicated, but that’s kind of the easiest way to put it. We can trick that animal into eating low-quality forage that it normally would not eat if we supplement it with protein. Fred Provenza did a lot of great work with that, where he would feed sheep and cattle straw versus alfalfa. But if he dosed that animal getting straw with a really high-quality protein supplement straight into the rumen, the animal didn’t taste it at all, and it would eat more straw. So there’s a relationship between those bacteria and the animal, an unspoken, I don’t know what you would call it, but they know.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 13:26
Yeah, and it’s also part of the fermentation process. The bacteria there need small peptides and ammonia to incorporate into their cells to be able to build their own protein. And when you’ve got that really low native grass, you know, 4% or 5% protein, there’s just not enough ammonia and small peptides generated for the bacteria to continue to replicate.
Colt Knight: 13:50
But there’s tons of fiber, so the bacteria can convert that to energy for the animal. But we have to supplement that protein. So out west, it’s really common to have protein lick tubs. It’s really common for them to feed what we would call cake, which looks like big 30% protein pellets. They’re usually some kind of, you know, cheap fodder mixed in with protein.
Colt Knight: 14:19
And then if you have a high percentage of protein, like a 30-something-percent protein supplement, you can actually supplement every three days. If you’ve got a lower-protein supplement, you have to supplement every day. So most people out west, where the pastures are on 50,000- to 70,000-acre ranches, are gonna elect to do it every three days with those higher-quality protein supplements. Or just go drop out those molasses lick tubs with urea or nonprotein nitrogen in them. And then the animals can just go lick that and get what they want.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 14:57
Yeah, so now we shift back to thinking about these factors that affect intake. When we’re moving into pasture management systems, we kind of have a target now of what intake can be, you know, somewhere around 2% to 3% of body weight. A lot of times, I’ll tell producers to figure around 3% of body weight, estimating on the high side. Exactly. So, how do we take that information and incorporate it into pasture management? You know, we need to know next how much forage is actually out there.
Colt Knight: 15:35
Yeah. And I find that most producers I work with, this is where they really fall short. They wanna guesstimate or eyeball forage and how much the animals are consuming. And then they want to know why their pasture is full of ragweed or bedstraw, or why there are bare spots, or why they have to continuously add fertilizer. Why are they reseeding their pasture every couple of years?
Colt Knight: 16:05
And it all has to do with pasture health, which is climate plus soil health plus plant health, right? And if we suffer in any of those, we can lose the good plant species biomass. And when we lose the good plant species, the bad species move in. Or in the worst-case scenario, like out west, the wind and rain wash all your topsoil away.
Colt Knight: 16:33
It’s not as big a deal in Kentucky and Maine, but we do have to worry about losing topsoil. Erosion is an issue.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 16:41
And we…
Colt Knight: 16:41
want to prevent that. You know, if you erode your topsoil in Arizona, it’s not coming back for the next 10,000 years.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 16:48
We’re trying to maintain the desirable forages for intake and production efficiency. As soon as you have a quote-unquote crash in the system and you get a bare spot, then we get an undesirable species, usually what we call a weed. Not all weeds are bad, but we get the ones that are either poisonous or that cattle and sheep don’t prefer, and they’re just taking up nutrients and moisture. So, you know, overgrazing is consistently one of our biggest challenges, I feel. And, on average,
Colt Knight: 17:25
if we remove more than 50% of the biomass above ground, we start drastically damaging the root structure underground. And it’s crazy. Like, if you remove 60% of the biomass above ground, you actually damage 70% of the roots underground. And if you remove 80% or 90% of the biomass above ground, you’re left with almost no root structure at all. That’s where those bare spots come from.
Colt Knight: 17:54
That’s when the weeds move in.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 17:58
There was some really good range-management work back in, I’m gonna fudge the numbers, I think it was the ’50s or ’60s, where they would go down and dig up those plant profiles and look at the length of the root system.
Colt Knight: 18:14
I show those pictures in every single grazing class that I do because they really highlight it. You would think it would just be a little gradual root damage. After 50%, it is drastic root damage. Drastic.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 18:32
And that’s why those plants can rebound so quickly, if they’re managed properly, once they get some precipitation. Yeah, because…
Colt Knight: 18:38
they’ve got that whole root structure under there. It stores all those carbohydrates, starches, and sugars. So, with a bit of photosynthesis, they sprout right back up again.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 18:47
And so now, you know, there’s a lot of interest in regenerative agriculture and livestock grazing management.
Colt Knight: 18:54
And honestly, that is the basis of regenerative ag. You know, a long time ago we called it sustainable, then we called it adaptive, then we called it, well, I’m not going to say holistic because there was a lot of snake oil with a lot of that holistic stuff, and now we call it regenerative, and it’s all the exact same thing. I think people are better educated now, but it lessens the power of the word over time when people say it
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 19:29
but don’t practice it. And so what we’re trying to do is take the science. You know, you and I had a good discussion at one of our meetings, I can’t remember which, and we were talking about managed grazing and the art versus the science. And there’s a lot of science that we can apply. What we’re trying to do is give producers the tools to do the science, do the math, right? And we’ve got pasture out there. How do we estimate how much forage is there?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 20:00
And how do we know that we’re not going to end up overgrazing? So one of the tools that we shared last night was the grazing stick. The NRCS here has, I think, the Northeast version of the NRCS Grazing Stick that we looked at. And so that grazing stick does what? Measures height, right?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 20:24
Yep. And then we can look at density, and then we get an idea of how many pounds of dry matter per acre-inch there are. And so if the height is six inches, maybe there’s 300 pounds of dry matter per acre-inch. So that’s 1,800 pounds of dry matter forage in your pasture inventory.
Colt Knight: 20:47
Yep. And if you know you’ve got 1,800 pounds per acre, we know that a thousand-pound cow is going to eat 30 pounds, you know, if we use your higher estimate. We say, I’ve got 10 acres. That’s 18,000 pounds of forage. Now, that sounds like a lot of forage.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 21:06
Sounds like a ton. That’s nine tons.
Colt Knight: 21:09
Remember when we were just talking about that? But if we take more than half of the biomass above ground, we damage the root structure. So that’s where that old axiom, take half, leave half, comes from. Just pure and simple.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 21:24
So we’re down to half of that.
Colt Knight: 21:25
9,000 pounds of forage. Still a lot, right? Well, the cattle are gonna trample, defecate, and urinate on half of that. So we cut that number in half again. So now we’re down to 4,500 pounds of forage.
Colt Knight: 21:45
And for a lot of people, this is where they don’t like the math. We went from 18,000 pounds of forage to 4,500 pounds of forage. And that’s kind of the gold standard for pasture health. If we do that, we’re not gonna damage the pasture. But like we said earlier, this is a biological system.
Colt Knight: 22:14
There are no hard-and-fast rules. So there’s actually some flexibility in grazing efficiency. We call that 25% grazing efficiency. So if we know that we’ve got really strong, rebounding pastures and we do some really good rotational grazing, you know, that grazing efficiency can be fudged to 35%.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 22:35
Or even higher. Like, we target 60% in a well-managed grazing system, 60% or 65% at the highest end, but 50% to 60% is a pretty good grazing efficiency.
Colt Knight: 22:47
And you have to really be disciplined to do something like that, and you’re kind of relying on the weather guys too, because if you happen to have a drought after you take 60% off, then that pasture might be sitting for the next year or two before you can get back on there.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 23:04
But…
Colt Knight: 23:05
if you live in an area with consistent rainfall and high organic matter in the soil, you can do things like that if you allow it to rest long enough to recover.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 23:13
And that’s one of the things. We started out with 18,000. Let’s just, you know, say now we have 10 acres and 18,000 pounds. Let’s just do your quick and easy number of take half, leave half. Then we’re going to have 9,000 pounds, and, you know, I’ve got 30 pounds of dry matter a day, and we can calculate how many days of grazing that current inventory has. But then plants are also growing every day, and some of the leaves senesce and die. The research is pretty clear that animals prefer live tissue over dead tissue, and that’s part of that trampling loss that you talked about, the efficiency loss. But that’s where the tools can come in and help us kind of plan our stocking densities.
Colt Knight: 24:10
And so this is where, I guess, the discussion gets squarely into the art versus the science. Exactly. I say it’s not art because I can measure it all. I can use the scientific literature, and I can tell you exactly how much forage you have. I can tell you how much forage the cattle are gonna eat.
Colt Knight: 24:30
And if we monitor our pastures, we monitor our cattle, and we do that for a little while, we can build our own calibration curves. We can take all that wiggle room out of the law of averages because we know exactly what our herd does and what our pastures do. Now, when you want to argue the art side of that, you can say that someone just instinctively knows how to do that. And if you spend the time monitoring, you can calibrate your eyeball, you can calibrate your instincts, and then you don’t have to monitor nearly as much. But I gotta say that the folks who say it’s an art and say they don’t have to monitor, they don’t have to do the math, usually, in a couple of years, I see those systems fail because they weren’t as in tune as they thought they were.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 25:37
And I think part of the art is also the biological system deviations that we manage and call the art. For example, you have that one animal that eats 2.5% of its body weight, and the next animal eats 2.7% of its body weight. As a herd, that’s where the math kind of is. All right, it’s not a hard-and-fast number, and we just say that deviation around the average is the art part. That’s what I think is the art part.
Colt Knight: 26:11
But I’m saying, if we monitor our forage before we put the cattle in, and we monitor our forage after we take the cattle out, and divide the forage loss by how many cattle we have, I know exactly the average amount that our cattle were eating. We’ve removed that wiggle room from the book value, so to speak. Right. So by doing the math, by doing the science, it’s not educated guesses anymore. Yeah, we’re just doing it. And if you do that enough, you learn your cows, you learn your forage, and you don’t have to monitor nearly as often. But you can get lazy. You know, say you monitored really heavily for three years.
Colt Knight: 27:02
You’re like, oh, well, I know the numbers. Well, is the weather the same every year?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 27:07
Exactly.
Colt Knight: 27:08
Do you get replacement heifers? We can start losing a lot of efficiency if we’re not periodically monitoring and recalibrating our eyeball or recalibrating our systems.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 27:21
And we need to, you know, one of the tools we have is the grazing stick. We also showed the falling plate meter, which accounts for density. And so if you’ve got a thinner stand versus a really thick stand, with the grazing stick you don’t get that change in density as easily as you will with a plate meter. You could do clippings with a square and hand shears or a hedge trimmer. And actually, that’s the gold standard, to go out there and do physical clippings, weigh it, then dry it and weigh it again. But it takes a lot of time to do that.
Colt Knight: 27:59
If you wanted to get really fancy, you could measure it with a yardstick and then clip it. Yep. And actually build your own calibration curve and build your own grazing stick, so to speak, calibrated to your farm. Exactly.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 28:13
And then that has to be adjusted because, in the springtime, you may have a different species dominating the pasture than in the summertime. And so you have to build a different equation as you progress through the season and adjust those calibration curves. But over time, you can build a pretty good, reliable calibration for your specific farm. But if…
Colt Knight: 28:37
you do that monitoring and you do the math, you’re not going to run out. You’re not going to get caught with your pants down.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 28:43
Exactly. And you can plan, right? Like…
Colt Knight: 28:46
And if you plan for a drought year, when a drought year happens, there’s no skin off your back. If you happen to have a wet year, maybe you can add a few stockers.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 28:55
Yeah, or hold those calves after weaning for a little while.
Colt Knight: 28:58
Make a few replacement heifers. Yep. Or maybe, you know, you don’t have to sell those cull cows. You think, maybe I can get another year out of these. Maybe the beef prices aren’t real high this year.
Colt Knight: 29:11
We can hold them over this year because we’ve got lots of forage. But if it’s a drought year, that’s a good year to get rid of those.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 29:16
Exactly. Maybe cull some of those cows back that, you know, are semiproductive. Markets are good right now, and if you’re running into dry years, you know, consider those aged cows. Your genetic progress in the beef herd is in those younger females. And so maybe pull off some of those older cows that are a little bigger. You know, you’ve got a 1,400-pound mature cow versus a 900-pound heifer that we’re developing, and we can pull those bigger animals out.
Colt Knight: 29:45
And we’ve talked about this in the past: do you optimize beef production or do you maximize beef production? Because you can maximize beef production, but it might also maximize your cost. So you don’t actually get the same dollar return by maximizing beef production. So I always like to say optimize. It’s like, where is the spot where cost of production and returns intersect?
Colt Knight: 30:15
And that’s the optimization, right? So we do all this good work with genetics, and we have to pick the animals that fit our systems. So if you’ve got a jerk animal that’s breaking your fences, even though she’s a great producer, she needs to go. If they don’t fit your production system and they’re not producing what you need them to produce, we get rid of them.
Colt Knight: 30:44
And, you know, we’re talking about forage intakes and things, and you’re like, what does that have to do with that? Well, it has a lot to do with that because we’ve got a limited resource in our forages. Why keep animals around that aren’t optimizing the use of that forage? That’s just my opinion.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 31:03
Yeah, it’s hard when you’re sitting there, though, and you’re looking at a $5,000 replacement value on a bred heifer right now, and that cow comes up and she’s pregnant.
Colt Knight: 31:14
Yep, I know that feeling. I’m a pig farmer, and I’ve got a super-expensive, high-powered genetic sow right now, and she’s just awful. It’s hard to keep weight on her. It’s hard to keep her in a pen because she’s real nasty. She gets everything wet.
Colt Knight: 31:34
She pees everywhere. You know, just a hard-keeping pig. But on the other end of the spectrum, she is my best-producing pig. She makes more piglets. Those are awesome piglets.
Colt Knight: 31:51
And I am keeping her long enough to recoup my investment, and then she’s going down the road.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 31:57
Yeah. And so, you know, I think that’s the challenge when we get into, you know, there’s the, ‘Oh, well, that’s easy. Just get rid of her.’ But there’s also, ‘I’ve got a significant amount of money invested.’
Colt Knight: 32:10
That’s that optimization, right? Exactly.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 32:12
And I’ve got to recoup that. If not, I’d have a heck of a high level of depreciation in her value, from what you paid for her to what you’re going to get out of her salvage sow value. Yep. And so hopefully you keep some of her genetics back, and they’re a little bit better.
Colt Knight: 32:29
I’ve got two gilts out of her, and they just farrowed at the same time she did this year. And I will say that her daughters’ piglets are outperforming her piglets. I mean, her piglets are still way above average, but her daughters’ are outperforming them. And that’s the same in beef production too. If we’re doing a good job, every year the genetics get better. So the replacements should perform better than their mothers.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 32:55
And that’s that genetic progress in those newer generations, where we’re hopefully doing a good job and we don’t make a mistake. And those are the young females that we want to keep back.
Colt Knight: 33:07
Yep. And again, just like we’re monitoring forage, we should be monitoring our beef cattle herd. You keep records?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 33:14
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 33:14
And it doesn’t do any good to keep records if you don’t look at them and make management decisions based on those records. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. That’s right.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 33:25
And so I hope everybody enjoyed this little discussion. But for tools, you know, you’ve got grazing sticks, you’ve got falling plate meters, you’ve got rising plate meters, you’ve got your visual, right, your trained eye, getting out there. But the key is, as you said, Colt, get out there and look at the fields, and don’t look at the pasture that the animals are in right now or the next one they’re going into. Look at the fields you’ll be in a couple of weeks from now and see how that forage is growing.
Colt Knight: 33:55
Get out in them fields. You can’t tell anything about grass production by looking at it from the side because it just looks like it’s all there. You can’t see the bare spots; you can’t see how thick it is. You need to go walk those fields.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 34:08
Yep. And then know what’s out there.
Colt Knight: 34:11
That was a problem when I was in rangeland situations because, you know, there are 20,000-acre pastures, and you gotta go look at 20 of them that day. People would just drive their trucks by. And when you look at it from the side, it all looks like knee-high grass. But when you get the aerial view or when you go walk through it, you realize those grasses are spaced every three feet apart or there are huge bare spots. You don’t see any of that passing by from the side.
Colt Knight: 34:39
So I always tell people to look at your cows and look at your grass. Get out amongst them, not just from a distance.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 34:48
Good words to live by and to manage those forages and make decisions. It’s easier to start supplementing a little bit of hay, even though cattle are going to prefer the fresh grass. But, you know, two, three, or four pounds of dry matter intake from hay, that can be 10% to 15% savings, if you will, on your forage, and just stretch that forage…
Colt Knight: 35:13
a little. Yeah, because that hay is 90% dry matter, and what about some of those legumes or forbs or forages? They might be just…
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 35:21
10%.
Colt Knight: 35:23
So that four pounds of hay replaces how many pounds of forage?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 35:29
Right. At a minimum, it’s going to be one-to-one. Yep. So on a dry matter basis, it’s going to be, you know, it’s…
Colt Knight: 35:38
the same, one-to-one.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 35:39
But on an actual fresh-weight basis, it isn’t. And so, you know, I hope that last night at our field day, folks took away some potential tools that they can implement on their farms and help them improve their grazing efficiencies and optimize that forage system. And we had some good discussion and good questions. You know, sometimes we don’t always have the answers, and you’ve got to really kind of sit back and look at how you might be able to change management a little bit to improve the system. And I think that’s the other thing that folks need to take away, is you can’t be rigid in your management.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 36:24
Like, you can’t say that I’m gonna move every 14 days or I’m gonna…
Colt Knight: 36:29
That’s where the term adaptive grazing management comes in. We used to call it stock and monitor, and then it became adaptive grazing management. You know, you go out there and you measure, and if they’re eating more than you thought they were or you didn’t have as much as you thought you did, you’ve got a plan, but we look at it and we monitor it, and if we need to adjust the plan, we can adjust the plan. It’s not a…
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 36:55
big deal. It’s no different than a budget. A budget is not a ledger. That’s right. A budget is an expectation, and so you make adjustments as you move.
Colt Knight: 37:06
We can have our family budget, but then the hot water tank blows up. We adapt. Yep. Same thing with our grazing.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 37:13
And so, with that grazing system, you know, you’re doing a forage budget almost. But, you know, it may be that you need to be in there an extra day.
Colt Knight: 37:21
And I think that’s where people confuse art and science. Is it really art if we can measure it and predict it?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 37:33
It really isn’t, is it? I don’t think so.
Colt Knight: 37:36
No. I don’t think so. But you can’t convince people of that. No, but what we…
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 37:43
can do is show the tools, right? And then we can give them the power and the knowledge to go out there and implement those tools as they need them to help them become better managers.
Colt Knight: 37:55
If I had to give one takeaway, it’s the biology of the plants, the environmental interactions of the plants and the soil, and everything. These are all really complex systems, and, you know, our favorite extension answer is, ‘It depends.’ It depends on the rain, this and that. But overall, if you think of just the basics of pasture management, it’s soil health, not overgrazing, and water. And nothing that we do will ever change the basics. Keep it simple, stupid.
Colt Knight: 38:44
Right? The KISS doctrine. Even with livestock management, how many times have you seen people go down some weird rabbit hole, and it almost always comes back to a basic, simple solution? When I work with producers, they’re always wanting to blame some exotic disease or something here or there. It’s usually just basic nutrition or housing or something that causes 90-something percent of those issues.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 39:15
Excellent. Good. That’s a good point. And…
Colt Knight: 39:19
like, we don’t overgraze; we don’t damage pasture health.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 39:23
Yep. If we don’t overgraze, we maintain desirable forages. If we maintain desirable forages, we…
Colt Knight: 39:29
have fewer weeds. It is just that simple. And when you see some of the famous YouTubers or social media folks talking about all these systems where they can magically make things happen that don’t seem to fit the basics, they’re doing that on a short-term basis. In the long run, I bet if you go back to those farms, they’re covered in weeds or the cows are skinny.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 39:59
So I think, you know, the challenge that we run into is year-to-year variability in precipitation. You know, you never know when you’re going to have a really wet year. You never know when you’re going to have, what, a winter that’s almost two weeks longer than the previous four years, like this year. Almost a month longer. So, you know, you can’t always know when those things are gonna occur, and so you just, you know, like you said, have got to be ready to make changes based on what your predictions say versus what the reality is, and be out there managing.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 40:39
That’s the key thing, making changes with management.
Colt Knight: 40:42
My master’s advisor had a great graphic that he showed in class one time, and he said average rainfall in West Texas, in that area of West Texas, was 20 inches. And he said, that’s the average. If you draw a straight line through that, that’s the average. That means that 50% is below average and 50% is above average. And if you’re managing for the 50% above average, that means half the time you’re gonna fail.
Colt Knight: 41:22
So you manage for the below average, and then you never have to worry about it.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 41:32
Yeah. That’s good. That’s a good way to think about it.
Colt Knight: 41:35
If we think about that in terms of mud, rain, and cold weather, if we plan for the worst, you never get caught with your pants down. We’ve got the historical climate data. We’ve got rain data. You can look and see.
Colt Knight: 42:00
That doesn’t predict what it’s gonna be next year, but if you’re basing your calculations on the lower end, it’s not a lottery, which means that maybe your stocking rate isn’t as high as you think it should be.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 42:18
And I think that’s where we run into the challenges, right? It’s hard for somebody, just like your sow. It’s hard for somebody who’s running 30 cows and has historically been able to run 30 cows to get into a drought year and then realize that they can really only carry 15. Yep. And then, you know, if next year’s a good year, it would be hard to go out and buy 15 back at the prices that they are.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 42:49
And so, you know, you do have to think about that. And so sometimes it’s, you know, you mentioned the stockers versus maybe developing some heifers and just selling bred heifers. You can be a little bit flexible in your numbers that way with some of the young stock, or even buying in different species. You could bring in some small ruminants if you wanted to. If…
Colt Knight: 43:17
your economic plan is depending on the weather, that’s not an economic plan; that’s a lottery ticket.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 43:25
Good point. That’s because you can’t predict it. Nope.
Colt Knight: 43:31
It could rain way, way too much and ruin your pastures, or not enough, and you don’t have any forage. So those things all happen. Absolutely.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 43:46
Well, Doctor, this has been a good discussion, and I hope folks will tune in to this, take away a few notes, and think about implementing some of the tools that we talked about. If folks in Maine are listening to this and they want to get more information on some of the grazing management tools that we talked about, where might they find some additional resources?
Colt Knight: 44:07
They can send questions, comments, and concerns to extension.farmcast@maine.edu.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 44:15
Excellent. And those of you in our region who are listening to this, we typically have two grazing schools, one in the spring and one in the fall. You can also go to the Extension Forages website and get fact sheets on how to use plate meters. And you can also go to the beef page and find resources there as well. Oh, thanks for joining us today.
Colt Knight: 44:38
Happy to be here. That’s a wrap.