Episode 50: Bale Grazing with Dr. Jeff Lehmkuhler
In this special 50th episode of Maine Farmcast, host Dr. Colt Knight is joined by Dr. Jeff Lehmkuhler from the University of Kentucky to discuss bale grazing as a winter feeding strategy for beef cattle. They explore how this method improves manure distribution, reduces soil compaction, and enhances forage utilization. Dr. Lehmkuhler shares insights from a multi-state research project studying bale grazing’s impact on soil health and fertility.
The episode covers best practices for bale placement, choosing the right hay rings, and adjusting strategies based on soil conditions. They also discuss cost-effective ways to reduce mud-related challenges and alternative winter feeding options like unrolling hay. Whether you’re a small-scale farmer or managing a large herd, this episode provides valuable tips to optimize winter feeding while improving soil and herd health. Tune in for practical advice on making the most of winter grazing!
Dr. Jeffrey W. Lehmkuhler was raised in southern Indiana. He attended Purdue University and obtained his M.S. in silvopastoral systems and Ph.D. in beef cattle nutrition from the University of Missouri. Jeff continued his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001 and was hired by the University of Kentucky in 2008 where he now holds the title of Extension Professor. His internationally recognized programming has spanned five countries and covered a diverse range of ruminant production from dairy steers to yaks. Jeff’s external funding exceeds $6M dollars and he authored more than 125 newsletter and popular press articles, 66 abstracts and journal articles, and 46 proceedings and extension publications. A key to his success has been forging relations with colleagues to work as a team. Jeff received the Agri-Communicator award in 2004, Southern Region ASAS Extension award in 2016 and M.D. Whiteker Excellence in Extension award in 2021. Jeff and his wife, Gwen, have three children.
Episode Resources
- Learn more about Dr. Lehmkuhler
Automated Transcript
Colt Knight: 00:18
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state life stock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And once again, we have my good friend, doctor Jeff Lehmkuhler from the University of Kentucky on the podcast. He is in Maine. We are working on a calving dystocia model, And we’re going to give some talks on bale grazing, and beef quality assurance.
Colt Knight: 00:49
Dr. Lehmkuhler.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 00:51
Colt, first time in Maine in the winter. And honestly, you kind of scared me a little bit saying I asked if I liked a lot of snow, but actually we’ve been decent just about an inch and a half since I’ve been here. But it looks like you’ve had probably eight or 10 inches on the ground before I got here.
Colt Knight: 01:07
They were calling about six inches the day that he landed and another six inches when over the weekend and it was going to be like minus six or something. It only got down to minus four, only minus four, which is normal habitable environment for us Mainers.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 01:27
It reminds me of our winters in Wisconsin when I was up there. And there was a reason why I kind of moved further south. But hey, we’ll take this nice break and sun’s been out, the weather’s actually been pretty good. So I’m not going to complain. Maybe I brought a little, a couple degree of warmth from the south up here for you.
Colt Knight: 01:46
Well, let’s get right into the topic at hand bale grazing. For those that aren’t familiar with the phrase bale grazing, what are we talking about when we say bale grazing?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 01:58
That’s a good question, Dr. Knight. Know, one of the things that’s a challenge for a lot of our beef cattle operations is the winter feeding period. And as we move into kind of the heart of winter, there’s, you know, some challenges in thinking about how you’re going to manage feeding stored forages, you can kind of got a couple options, you can put in a feeding pad and develop a kind of high traffic use area where you put your feet out, you can scrape that collect the manure off of it. Another way is the old traditional sacrifice lots, right?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 02:34
And we feed in that area. And in our area, the challenge we have is is mud, we don’t get cold enough to have solid frozen ground through the winter times, you know, we may get a couple of days to maybe a week of frozen ground, but we’re free saw free saw and those sacrifice lots get pretty nasty. And the other challenges is in that scenario, we’re concentrating all the winter manure nutrients in a single location. That can be alright if we’re using it as part of a renovation strategy. I’ve got a field over there that is kind of poor fertility got a lot of weeds and that and I’m going to have to renovate it we can use winter feeding strategies to try and improve fertility come in the springtime, minimal tillage and resell that the maybe a desired forage we want fescue, orchard grass, whatever.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 03:26
The rutting though becomes a problem, rutting and soil compaction becomes a problem. So bale grazing is an alternative strategic plan for winter feeding kind of comes out of the Northern Plains in Canada. It would fit I think well here in Maine as you know, the winters that you all have. And the idea is, is you set hay out way in advance, you know, typically up here, you might be looking at the November 1 putting your hay out when the weather’s still good and dry. And we think about strip grazing those bales.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 03:59
So imagine a row of bales separated by electric fence, and you control the access that the animals have to those bales with an electric fence. Once they clean up that row bales, and you advance that electric fence to the next row bales, and you continue across the field that way. And surprisingly, you get a pretty decent utilization of the hay and then also the manure deposition moves with the bales because we know what called 60% of manure is going to be deposited around feeding stations. So it’s a it’s a one way to kind of think about trying to get more even manure nutrient distribution across the field during the winter.
Colt Knight: 04:44
And here in Maine, you know, spring through early summer, sometimes way into summer, we’re gonna have some severe mud issues. And and in Kentucky, you know, you might have those mud issues all winter long, not and then late fall, early winter, we’re gonna get right back into that mud again. Luckily, though, most years we get some reprieve from the mud through the winter because the ground is gonna freeze, but the bale grazing would still work really well on that frozen ground. In fact, it might work better on that frozen ground because we don’t have to leave the bales outside all winter long. We could actually just take them out on the frozen ground.
Colt Knight: 05:28
We don’t have to worry about the rutting. Now when we do have those mud seasons, though, that’s where some of the systems you’re gonna talk about today will really kick in and be handy for folks. I have seen bale grazing done in a multitude of different ways, and I’m gonna get your opinion on on some of the different ways to do things and see what your experience has been because you get to institute a lot of bale grazing across Kentucky because you’ve got a lot more beef cattle producers and you’re using the process a lot more down there than we are up here.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 06:00
So Dr. Knight, you bring up a good point and you know, the diversity and kind of regional differences, right? So we have a multi state conservation initiative grant and it involves states as far as north as New York, and then all the way down into Virginia and North Carolina, and Kentucky and West Virginia. So it’s a lot of different fields that represent different soil types. And soil type can influence it.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 06:29
Heavy clays hold a lot more water can be mucked up a little bit more than a nice silty loam or the sandy kind of soils in Eastern North Carolina as an example. So there is a little bit of that factor. And we’re learning quite a bit on what works well on those different types of soil. The other thing is in areas like Maine, up state New York, where you get that nice frozen hard ground, you can change the bale density, how many tons or how many bales per acre you can feed. Whereas in the areas where we don’t really get frozen, you know, that high traffic use can damage the soil give you compaction.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 07:14
So you need to think about this in more kind of holistic thought process for this winter feeding strategy, particularly during those times of mud.
Colt Knight: 07:23
Yeah, that’s one of the issues that we have here. We’ll have plenty of forage available, but we cannot put the cattle spring, sometimes into early summer or sometimes fall, early winter. You just can’t put the animals outside because they’ll destroy your field and then you won’t have anything for the next growing season, which kind of lends itself to the pad you were talking about. So if maybe does NRCS cost share with some of those projects? Terry It’s
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 07:52
a good question. So we are fortunate that we do have some NRCS, which is Natural Resource Conservation Service funds to help offset some of the expenses on high traffic feeding pads. And that is one option. One of the challenges that we have found with those is, again, not being in a dairy state. A lot of our operations don’t have a manure spreader.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 08:22
So the manure nutrients are accumulated, but then they you’ve got to go rent to manure spreader or find one to borrow, which can be a challenge. So that is one obstacle we have with those feeding pads. The second obstacle is management of them. You know, they do need to be cleaned and scraped because manure and rain will build kind of this sloppy mess on that and we want to try to scrape that off and keep that.
Colt Knight: 08:48
So if you’re going to have one of these high use areas, you’re going to need a tractor with a bucket, a skid steer or a loader or something so that you can remove the manure off the concrete and even the surrounding areas if need be. And one of the things that we can do with that manure is actually create a nice compost pile. It doesn’t help you spread it out once it’s composted. But that might actually be another product that you can use to diversify your farm. We see compost sometimes selling upwards of $75 a yard.
Colt Knight: 09:19
So that’s another way to offset the cost of beef cattle production is with that nice composted manure.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 09:25
And then other thing you can do to go along with that cold is we could NRCS will cost share as well on a covered manure stack pad. So when you scrape off that concrete with that manure, you can put it in then to a covered stack pad that will allow you to capture that. And so that’s another advantage that you have that you can maybe go out then in April or May, if you don’t compost, you can at least spread those manure nutrients on fields that need it when it dries out some. The other thing is, is they don’t all have to be concrete. We also have cost share opportunities for the geotextile material with gravel on top of that.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 10:06
And what we’re trying to do there is protect the soil from erosion and compaction. So that’s another opportunity. The challenge in my mind with those though, we’re not really capturing as many of the manure nutrients in that scenario as we would with concrete.
Colt Knight: 10:25
Other than just directly depositing them on the soil. We’re not expending any extra diesel fuel or gasoline to move it from one pile to the next to the field, to the so on and so forth, which is really handy here in Maine. One of our largest chicken producers just quit production recently, and a lot of our farmers were using chicken litter as field fertilizer. We are not centrally located in The United States. So a lot of our chemical fertilizers are very expensive and a little bit more difficult to acquire up here than they may be if you’re along the Ohio River or the Mississippi.
Colt Knight: 11:06
And so having that fertilizer go directly back onto the soil is not only a regenerative practice, but it’s a cost saving six
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 11:15
And that’s a really good point. You know, one of the reasons we jumped into this and we applied for the grant was coming out of that high fertilizer price timeframe. And we saw a lot of our producers pull back on fertility. And we know that with reduced fertility, you’re going to start losing some grasses persistency weakens yield weakens. So we thought about this and said, if we know at that time, for example, there was almost 70 to $80 in fertility value in a ton of hay, why can’t we try bale grazing to capture that fertility value across these fields a little bit better?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 11:56
Now, one downside is, you know, there’s nothing comes for free. So with bale grazing, we’ve got to set the hay out and you’ve got to have temporary electric fencing. We like to use bale rings in our area because again, we’re we’re dealing with not as much frozen ground. And it helps control the hay waste. They’ll stomp it down in the
Colt Knight: 12:20
mud in our area if we don’t use those. And this is probably a good time to interject there are certain styles of hay rings that allow for more waste than others. And it’s amazing how much hay you can use if you’re using the wrong style of hay ring.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 12:39
Yeah, and with bale grazing as well, what we found is there’s a lot of concern about you know, well, they’re going to get down in the mud and I can’t lift them up. We use the the poly rings, which have about a three to four inch black poly base. So it it’s sets up, it has a larger foot, if you will.
Colt Knight: 13:05
Surface areas. Surface areas.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 13:08
You go. They don’t sink as bad. They don’t tend to freeze down to the ground as easily as the smaller ones. The other the other thing though, with those, you have to watch them because some of them may not have the extra ring around the bottom like you’re talking about where hay will pull out of the bottom and get under their feet. And so you want to make sure you get the ones that have either, if you’re going use metal, go ahead and pay for the metal sheeting around that bottom to hold the hay in at the bottom at the base.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 13:38
Otherwise, sure you’ve got some additional metal down there to hold the hay inside. Once the hay gets pulled out to where the animals are standing, it’s going to be trumped in the mud in our area. And it’s just a loss. So you can look at the literature and it will tell you somewhere between five to 20 savings and hay dependent on the style. We’re not using the cone or hay saver type feeders in in this scenario, mainly because we’re not typically going out there with any equipment.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 14:09
Most of our producers are flipping these rings by hand, rolling them to the next row and then setting them down. And the whole idea on this is I don’t have to keep the tractor plugged in in the wintertime and saves on electricity. And I don’t add that compaction going across the field with equipment. So there’s other things we could use like a UTV, lighter tractor, you know, lighter than a tractor. You could move the hay rings with something like that.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 14:39
So there’s different options out there. But we like those poly rings because they’re pretty lightweight. They’re easy to pick up out of the out of the snow slash mud muck, if you will.
Colt Knight: 14:47
Those those metal ones here in the main winters when it’s 10, minus 10, they get frozen to the ground. They’re hard to Yeah. You can hardly move them, especially if there’s a a little bit of mud around there. Because even if it’s cold enough for the ground to get frozen, just the heat from the hay composting and the manure and the cattle and stuff is enough to just kind of fuse it to the ground.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 15:13
And that’s, yeah, so that’s, you know, there’s some things about management too, right? So let’s think about net wrap on bales. You know, if you set hay out in November, we want you to leave that net wrap on. But now those bales have been setting out, they’re getting weathered and they get frozen and you’re gonna say, Well, how am I gonna get this frozen netwrap off? So there are some obstacles to think about that.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 15:40
And so maybe you need to think about, well, should I switch to if I’m storing hay inside, can I just use twine? Know, sisal twine or biodegradable twine. But if I’m storing hay outside and not a lot of protection, then maybe you want to stick with the netwrap. And we’ve seen people come in and they’ll, say that with our winners with little bit of frozen, that kind of frozen outside edges that we get, they can take a like a metal baseball bat or the spear on the tractor and knock that netwrap loose enough that they can just cut it then and it comes off. But there are some challenges.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 16:19
Know those things. This is about a this is three, we’re three years into a five year study. And each state has what we call these core farms, that there’s some intensive soil data coming in forage data, bio, we’re looking at botanical composition because one of the concerns is weeds and weed pressure around those bale rings and the damage there. But we’re also looking at on a few farms, soil health characteristics to see if there’s some improvements there. But now in years, four and five, as we move forward, we’re going to be able to move on to what we call these demonstration farms.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 17:02
And there we can look at other opportunities. As an example, how does bale grazing do in relation to unrolling hay? Because unrolling hay is another good way to distribute that kind of feeding station out and get those manure nutrients out across the field.
Colt Knight: 17:20
Really gets me into my what my next question was going to be is in your current iteration of bale grazing that you’re working with, you’re setting them out in a straight line, basically. And then you’re just strip grazing, like you would stockpiling your fescue fields or what have you. In the past, I have seen people just when the ground was frozen, just take a bale and just distribute it equally throughout the field so that the cattle are moving throughout the field. And that’s a good option when the ground is frozen, but not in the muddy season, right?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 17:52
Yeah, because you get a lot when you don’t, when you don’t control access, they’re gonna go and kind of find a bale and pick on a bale and graze it pretty heavily, right? So you could have a lot more animal traffic across the entire field with bale grazing by having them in the rows and we always start the closest row to the waters where we start so they’ve got access to water and feed, right? And as they progress further away from the water, they don’t tend to want to come back and quote unquote, backgraze on the hay because it’s all gone. So you do kind of minimize the traffic area they will, as all cattle do cold, I’m sure you’ve seen it, they’ll trail, they’ll make trails back to a water point. But I think that’s minimal compared to if I put 20 bales out in the field, and I just gave them access to all 20 bales.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 18:52
They’re going to go
Colt Knight: 18:52
They’re gonna pick which ones they like, they’re gonna form social groups. They may. And you know, there’s a little bit of data in rangeland situations that different soil types are gonna impart different preferences to the animals, and so they may or may not pick one side. If your landscape is hilly or whatnot, depending on if it’s like a breeze,
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 19:16
got a shelter
Colt Knight: 19:17
break, or just different wind patterns, they may, they’re going to pick one side of the hill or the other and may or may not use certain landscapes within the pasture. And so you could use a bale to entice them to go to areas that are normally not utilized, if you’ve got a big enough pasture. Or like you’re saying, if you’ve got a nice area where you can just line graze these things in in little strips, you’re really reducing the hoof impact on the ground, the compaction, and the need to drive because you’re setting those out in good weather before it gets muddy. Exactly. And we’re not driving out there.
Colt Knight: 19:54
And you’re just walking out on foot or on your side by side to put the electric fence up and down.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 19:59
Exactly. And so as we move forward, we’re gonna get into some other we’ve got two farms now that are doing winter bale grazing on crop ground. One does it on his tobacco ground and another one does it on he just started on his corn ground. And so the concern has always been with the compaction that you have there. The one farm has been doing it for several years and on his tobacco areas and, you know, with tobacco, there’s a rotation right for disease.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 20:30
So he claims that he’s seeing an increase in productivity with bale grazing on that ground. And maybe it has to do with increased fertility, maybe it has to do with increased organic matter. But I think that for us, the other thing that you always want to keep in the back of your mind is the need to be flexible.
Colt Knight: 20:52
And
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 20:53
you know, we’re doing in our work, looking at two tons to the acre versus four tons to the acre. And then the the two ton to the acre area gets split in half the second winter and gets another two ton to the acre on that second winter. So now we can compare the four ton over two years versus four ton in one year. And so it’s going to be interesting because I think what we can do is well, maybe you’ve got an area that you don’t want to continually bale graze every year, right? So you can go in with maybe higher density, put some fertility down, and then let that field recover.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 21:33
You know, with us, we’ll get a wet spot, you know, before I came up here, we had about two and a half to three inches of rain overnight. And that came right after we had about eight to 10 inches of snow and it thawed out and melted away. It gets pretty nasty. Gets really nasty. So you’ll get some damage around those bales.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 21:57
And with about, you know, with some time that recovers and it will fill back in. And so if you’re concerned about some of those things, you know, give that field rest, take advantage of that fertility, and then come back in in two, three years and bale graze it again to add more fertility.
Colt Knight: 22:15
And a couple of aspects that we may have hinted on or talked about just a little bit. One, bale rings are incredibly important to prevent wastage, especially in the muddy situation you’re talking about because that round bale all of a sudden becomes a high spot that’s not muddy, and the cows will just lay on top of it and defecate, urinate, and just really waste a lot if we don’t have that bale ring. When we choose a bale ring, we want one that we can easily move in the harsh conditions. We prefer ones that have solid around the bottom to prevent that hay from slipping out and getting stomped on. So that’s always a good practice.
Colt Knight: 22:56
And then one of the things that we just lightly covered, does this work with haylage bales and white plastic? Can we go out and cut that plastic off and and bale graze with halage? Should you cut the strings off? If you’ve got grass strings, should you be cutting those off before you allow the cattle to graze on those?
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 23:17
Good, good questions. So you got two questions. Baleage we’ve we’ve not had anybody work with in this scenario with baleage, mainly because again, we don’t have a lot of producers that have high moisture equipment. I think if you did this, it’s gonna have to be with individually wrapped bales. Can’t, it’s not going to work with the tube or inline wrappers.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 23:43
Because as soon as you cut those bales and expose them to oxygen, hurt.
Colt Knight: 23:49
I think our beef producers would mostly have access to the individually wrapped ones, not so much the two bales.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 23:55
So in theory, then that will work fine. You just want to make sure that those bales are consumed in a short enough period of time that your risk of Listeria growth is minimized. So you know, in weather like this, you know, week is more than sufficient. But when it starts getting warm and bacteria growth increases, you know, hopefully that bales completely gone in four or five days.
Colt Knight: 24:17
And our herd sizes are probably going to be smaller on average than the ones that you’re working with. Yeah, so you know, 20 or less probably is going to be normal here.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 24:26
Yeah. So as long as you can control that, you know, when you think about the pounds of actual dry matter in a high moisture bale versus a normal dry bale, depending on the size of the bale, they’re about the same really. They weigh twice as much because of the water, but the actual pounds of dry matter is about the same. So they’ll they typically will disappear about the same. Now on twine, if it’s if it is not, if it’s not the biodegradable sisal type twine then and it’s the plastics, yeah, you need to pull the plastic twine off because there’s too big of a risk of that getting consumed and actually causing an obstruction in the animal.
Colt Knight: 25:08
I have necropsy cows, and that reticulum had a five gallon bucket of twine Yeah, inside of there. Yeah. So it doesn’t degrade inside the rumen. No, it’s plastic. Stays there.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 25:22
Yeah, for it stays there until the point that either passes straight out, or it causes an obstruction and the animal unfortunately is necropsy situation you described. So get Yeah, you want to get those plastic blue and orange strings and others off of off of those things.
Colt Knight: 25:40
James Same thing with that plastic netting. I’ve seen cows eat. Because once they get started, they have to keep going right for it to not block their mouth anymore. They can fill their entire room and up with with those those netting.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 25:54
Yeah, so you know, and again, the nice thing is for us, you put those bales out in in the springtime and I’ll be honest, you know, we still are dealing with probably smaller bale sizes and what maybe you might have up here with the dairy industry. So a four by five bale is still really common for us. You know, five by fives are also pretty common, but you can with some leverage in a bar, you can roll those bales up. So what a lot of times we’ll do is we’ll we’ll put them out in the field down so that you know, the curve allows the moisture to run off the sides of the bales. And then if you want, you can tip them up with some with a bar and some leverage and then cut those strings off and then put your ring feeder over them.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 26:40
And that minimizes the waste when they’re sitting out there. But then it allows you to get them up, flip them up and take and cut those strings off. We’ve also seen some guys take a on the it’s a pretty neat little apparatus. It’s on the winch on the front of their UTV or whatever. And they can run a spike down that bale and kind of pull it with the winch and tip it up.
Colt Knight: 27:07
And then one of the things I saw a lot when I was working with beef cattle out West was actually unrolling the bales. And in those situations, it worked really well. But there was also a lot more cattle in those herds. When they unrolled a bale, it just got ate. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 27:22
It wasn’t sitting out there. So I think unrolling the bale is a good practice if you’ve got enough cattle that can eat that bale quickly. Smith
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 27:30
Yeah, so for us, I like unrolling. There’s question about that. Like the unrolling. I think as you mentioned, things, you got to have enough animals out there to eat it. So the the laying down and urinating and defecating and getting it in the mud doesn’t become an issue.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 27:50
We can minimize that a little bit by again, temporary electric fence running one single strand of hot wire down the middle of that row. Can dead in out nowhere. Mean out in the middle of the field, that’s not a problem. The challenge is the amount of time it takes to set that charger up and do that. But in Arkansas, when I was down there working with the group down there, they would unroll two bales side by side.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 28:19
And so what they could do then is take that temporary fence, run it down the edge or through the middle of the first bale, and then the next day, just move that electric fence back to the second bale and minimize how much waste they got. So that’s another way to kind of do that. For us, unrolling becomes a challenge because of our mud. So now we’re taking heavy tractor out there with an unroller. And it’s kind of defeating the purpose of what we were trying to avoid.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 28:46
But there are these unrollers now that are made to go behind the UTVs or your ATV and, and so that minimizes the compaction that you have to deal with. And so that gives you another tool in the toolbox to go out there and spread that hay around spread those manure nutrients around the field with that unrolling and I think that’s a that’s a good tool to have good management practice to have.
Colt Knight: 29:12
John Now, well, I enjoyed sitting here with you talking about bale grazing. This is a I think this is a good practice, especially on your more regenerative type farms, anywhere where soil compaction is an issue, if you’ve got mud issues, this is a solution to a lot of those problems. And it can be accomplished without a lot of heavy equipment. So if you’re a smaller scale farmer, it works pretty well.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 29:39
I think it has the potential to be a win win, because I think it will allow you to save some potential money on fertility inputs. Yep. And build some fertility. So I think that’s a win. And I think it also has a win because we know from literature that in those sacrifice lots and that we’re concentrating pathogen load.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 30:01
And so when we’ve got newborn calves hitting that springtime, the mud and the pathogen loads can be pretty high around those kind of sacrifice lots. So it can be a win win from
Colt Knight: 30:15
a calf health standpoint too. Just the sheer expense of creating a concrete pad with all the feeding infrastructure, fencing and whatnot can be quite substantial, even with cost sharing.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 30:27
Doctor. Exactly right. And so I look forward to being able to share some of our findings after the five year studies over and then showing hopefully a little bit more understanding of what it does from the fertility standpoint on the soil nutrients aspect and soil health, but also on that potential changes in botanical composition in some of these fields. Smith
Colt Knight: 30:48
Well, we thank you for your your knowledge on this subject. And I’m curious, you’ve been here in the summer, you’ve been here in the spring, and you’ve been here in the fall. Now you’re here in winter. What would you like to see your experience here in Maine in the wintertime, knowing we can’t we’re not going to get out on the river.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 31:11
I tried to get you to go ice fishing.
Colt Knight: 31:14
I told you that you can drink an adult beverage from the house. You don’t have to do it in an ice shack.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 31:19
So I, you know, I think we’ve had we’ve had really good fortune that we’ve had the opportunity to see some nice countryside with the snow on it.
Colt Knight: 31:28
We’ve been to Stephen’s house. We’ve been
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 31:30
to Stephen King’s house. Moosehead Lake region. Yep. So we’ve done some smallmouth bass fishing and that we had some lobster rolls. So I think we’ve just about covered it all. You know, I think we’ve just about covered it all.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 31:52
Maybe hit the national Park one time.
Colt Knight: 31:57
Yeah. We need to get you up to Acadia.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 32:00
Yeah. But other than that, it’s been good. And I enjoy coming up here. I enjoy visiting with your folks up here. And so hopefully we’ll, we’ll continue to do this and work together.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 32:11
And as you said, we’ve got a little work to do on our on our dystocia simulator and get those things knocked out. But we’re always coming up with something new to try it seems like.
Colt Knight: 32:22
We Jeff and I spent a day and a half. We measured a newborn calf. And then we transferred those measurements, we actually drew it out on big white paper, checked dimensions, just it looked like a calf silhouette that we drew on this piece of paper. And then, you know, we added a little extra for gussets and the width of the animal and this and that. And then we we sewed it out of some really nice stretchy fabric.
Colt Knight: 32:49
And when we got done, our 70 pound calf that we measured, the model ended up looking like one hundred and ten pound. It’s a big old seven tall calf or something. It’s a big one. So we’re gonna have to shrink that down a little bit.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 33:06
Cold, I think, you know, our three d printed pelvis that we have is gonna have to increase in size for that calf or we’re definitely gonna be showing folks how to pull calves.
Colt Knight: 33:16
Well, I told Jeff, we’re going to keep the big calf, we’re going to we’re going to make some smaller ones to make the simulation easier when we go do some trainings with this model. But I think I’m going throw that big one in there and be like, and this is what happens when you got one that’s too big to fit through the pelvis. Maybe we could even
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 33:32
And that leads itself into the discussion on EPDs for
Colt Knight: 33:36
calving ease. Calving ease is a big deal.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 33:41
It’s one of the top traits that I know our producers look for when they’re buying bulls.
Colt Knight: 33:46
Breeding cows when they’re the right size and age all plays into that selecting the right bull or the right semen.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 33:53
Yeah, yeah. And especially on those first calf efforts. So see even how we could spin right on in the something completely different. But it is something that’s it’s good. And I’ll be honest, when we measured everything on that, on that calf, we were spot on on our measurements, but by golly, something happened.
Colt Knight: 34:12
Yeah. You look at the literature and you measure the hip height, the the length of the legs, the neck, the torso, everything, it was spot on. But when you pick up that calving model, it looked like the size of a Newfoundland. It was huge.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 34:32
Yeah, it’s big, it looks like the size of a Holstein calf at weaning. Was big.
Colt Knight: 34:41
Well, Jeff, it was great having you on the podcast. I’d like to remind the listeners that they could email us at extension.farmcast@main.edu if they have questions, comments, concerns, suggestions for things of Jeff to do while he’s here in Maine, and, we look forward to hearing from you in the future.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 35:07
Kope, thanks for having me up here again, and, thanks for keeping the weather tolerable for me. Sounds good. We’ll talk to you soon.
Colt Knight: 35:19
Man. So that went thirty five minutes. That’s good. Oh, that’s good.
Jeff Lehmkuhler: 35:22
I thought we were like, Pete?
Colt Knight: 35:26
No. I’ll rein this in before we get that long. Oh, good. You’ve got a timer on there that you can kinda see. Yeah.
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