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SE Iowa | Just a thought provoking question for anyone who likes to think outside the box. Maybe Im missing something but I’ll throw this scenario out. You own a 160 acre square in iowa, 150 of it is tillable. It has decent perimeter fence, not great but with a couple thousand bucks and some sweat effort you could hold in critters with it. Maybe a creek running through part of it or some water access. Here’s my thought. Let’s say you want decide what to do with it and do some figures. To simulate at corn/bean rotation, Let’s say you grow 75 acres of corn and 75 acres of beans on this farm. An average year will be roughly 200 bushel corn and 60 bushel beans.
75x200=15,000 bushel @ 4.50= $67,500
75x60=4,500 bushel @ 10= $45,000 for a total of 112,500.
Now let’s plug in cows. 2 acres per pair. That’s 80 cow calf pairs on a 160. 72 calves to sell (death, opens, etc.)
72x500=36,000 lbs of beef @ 3.75= 135,000
Now for extra fun let’s try sheep. Usually most guys figure 6-7 sheep per cow so if you can run 80 cows you can run 500 ewes. Ewes rough low estimate 1.4-1.5 lambs per ewe so that’s 700 lambs to sell (death, opens, replacements) 700x70=49,000 lbs of lamb @3.50= 171,500.
So what am I missing here? We run a small cowherd and small flock of sheep, but I’ve never put numbers like this together before. Sheep seem like a clear winner to me but nobody wants to deal with them. Sorry for the long post but curious what everyone’s thoughts are with this why we don’t see more of this sort of “out of the box” ideas being put into practice.
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Are we doing it wrong?
