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West Central Illinois | This is my first set of mama cows i've ever owned myself this year, have a group on our family's ground that i bought this spring. Mostly hereford angus cross with a group of gelbvieh angus cross. More moderate cows, plan was to do a breedup program to the best southpoll bulls i could get my hands on, got a good Ralph Voss bull out there in the pasture entertaining them at the moment. I rotational graze, soil on parts of this farm aren't the greatest but always seems like we have better forage than places that don't rotate, we move them every 1 to 2 days depending where they're at. I give 1 lb. of distillers per head once a week just to keep them broke to following a bucket even though they follow me thinking i'm gonna move them on a new paddock. Mostly 3's as an avg. for body condition, some 4's and a few 5's on the gelbvieh crosses. So anyway, trying to move the genetics in the breedup program to cattle that thrive on grass.
So now i'm working with an older neighbor across the road at a cowshare program where i turn out a bunch of cows of my own and he keeps some of his better middle aged cows on it that i tend to and that's how i pay rent on taking care of his stock on the place, inputs are split by the %. These are mostly angus/simm/hereford crosses pretty solid framed cows 1400 lb-ish., bigger than what i'm used to with mine. This group of cows will be the same breedup program with the south polls which is what i'm working towards.
So here's my question: most of the year he supplements the cows with 3 lb or so of gluten/corn 50/50 mix EVERY DAY. To me this just seems like it's gonna sap out any profit there'd be in it. The landowner wants to keep supplementing the cows some but is willing to scale back. I'll be putting similar cows to what i've been running across the road, 1100-1200 lb cows so i really don't want to supplement that heavily but i'm willing to meet in the middle.
Will this end up in a trainwreck on his group of cows not breeding back, getting thin, etc. if we change to less grain for them? Do we quit cold turkey? Wean them off? His cows are in excellent shape probably 4 to 5 condition score they're "fat and happy". Anybody faced this same dilemma? I plan to really get on it with the rotational grazing on his place maybe not daily moves but trying to get his pastures rested a good 40-50 days before we regraze and splitting it up into 4-5 day paddocks so i'd like to think we'll see some improvement in forage quality vs. continuous grazing | |
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Supplementing Stock Cows
