Mike, I am all for grazing as much as possible, and hay, rather than corn silage for beef cows.

However in climates like here in Wisconsin, we can only graze for 6 months out of the year. Usually May 1 to around November 1.  The other 6 months of the year we need to feed some sort of stored feed. You can have the best rotational grazing system ever devised for 6 months out of the year but you've got to have something stored to feed for much of the rest of the year.

And for 3 or 4 months out of that 6 month stored feed period (I'll avoid calling it winter!) "stockpile" just doesn't work very well. Asking a P3 cow to find her dinner under at times couple feet of snow and ice leads to some real skinny cows! Grazing standing unharvested corn works very well for steers and open yearling heifers, however it is way too rich for bred cows.

I was feeding hay only over the winter. This worked well when I had fewer cows and purchased hay was cheap.  I can't see where purchasing all winter hay is economically viable for beef cows. Dairy maybe but not beef.  It seems to me that I need to make my own hay at recent hay prices.

If you have to make your own hay rather than purchase, the issue then becomes do you have enough land to make enough good hay (high enough protein etc) to keep cows in condition over what can be an extremely cold winter like last.  I don't have enough ground to make enough hay to over winter my target herd size on hay only.

I almost "accidentally" got into a neighbor custom bagging corn silage for me last year. Never done that before. But it was a life saver over the long cold winter last year.  Corn silage, as I recall someone mentioned above, produces more good feed per acre than about anything else you can grow and easily store for winter use.  I had all sorts of concerns about feeding it to bred, spring calving cows but being careful none of those concerns became a real issue. 

What the approx 4 acres of bagged corn silage, fed free choice by occasionally (every 4 days or so) loading a silage wagon, did was cut my total over winter hay consumption about in half.  It also seemed to allow me to feed lower quality grass hay at times and keep the cows in good condition. It did not appreciably increase my labor over putting out twice as much hay.

So for those of us who are hay land-limited in the north, I think there is a place for cow silage with beef cows. And yes this is a change from my earlier thinking because conditions (hay prices mostly) have changed.  Filling a 100 ft bag cost me about $200 for the bag and about $500 for the custom work, a total of about $700, maybe $800.  At $150 - 200/ton, that is about the same cost as only 5 to 7 5'x6' big round bales of hay.

I'm not very good think in terms of tons of silage but that corn silage went a whole lot farther than 5-7 bales of hay.  As has been said here before, corn silage looks like the way to produce more feed per acre and at what seems to me to be a very competitive cost.

Maybe my math is off some where but I am planning on filling another bag in September then drilling a cover crop including annual and cereal rye into the stubble as soon as the custom chopper pulls out. This should also give me some additional forage to graze earlier next spring than the pastures are normally ready and maybe a bit yet this fall depending on the weather.   

Am I off somewhere?

Jim

edit: I'll add a couple "reminder" pictures from last winter....

(IMG_1278_opened fresh grazing corn at sunset 011914.JPG)

(IMG_1280_opened fresh grazing corn at sunset 011914.jpg)

(IMG_1806_Cows shoulder to shoulder around the silage wagon 031214.jpg)

IMG_1278_opened fresh grazing corn at sunset 011914.JPG (90KB - 46 downloads)

IMG_1280_opened fresh grazing corn at sunset 011914.jpg (80KB - 45 downloads)

IMG_1806_Cows shoulder to shoulder around the silage wagon 031214.jpg (104KB - 49 downloads)