SEON | mennoboy - 10/4/2012 01:23
Over the years, we have taken on different pieces of land that have been owned/rented/farmed by cattle farmers for hay land. Not always, but often, those pieces of land have not been fertilized properly when taking into account the P and K removed by feeding/selling the hay. I talked to a cattle rancher today that had a piece of hay land for more than 10 years and had never fertilized it ever. he said it always yielded well so he didn't bother fertilizing. Do many cattle farmers not understand the "feeding" side of grass/crop production. I find it interesting that they will feed their animals and not their hay land.
Don't sell them short. Maybe they know more than they are given credit for. My father, now 73 yrs hasn't applied anything except manure to this 400 acres of hay ground since he took over from my great grandfather in the '50's. My Great grandfather and his contemporaries were the same way. Then I come along and take all these soil samples. show him the very low P and K amounts and I explain to him how hay takes alot of nutrients. "Horse manure" he says. His position is that those figures are created by people who have an interest in selling fertlizer etc. He says you will never get your money back. Rainfall is all the fertilizer you need. Perhaps now would be a good time to mention that the OM is >7 and calcium is very very high.
Anyway, I shake my head and do the math on what 3 years worth of alfalfa will remove and order up $15,000 worth of MAP on one old 67 acre hay farm. Following year I order up $26,000 worth of MAP on another 88 acre piece that has been no tilled in a corn-soy-wheat rotation for for 20 years....this farm was 3% OM. I plant a wheat crop following the fertilizer and then back into alfalfa. I always leave a few acres without any fertilizer and you can't tell the difference in the hay stand......so far any way.
Maybe we blindly trust those high removal rates or maybe we underestimate what alfalfa can do all by itself if all you do is rotate out and re-seed it. I don't think we fully understand alfalfa.
Maybe someone can help me understand the mentality of a row cropper that rapes the land by not having alfalfa or clover in the rotation. Must be greed because clearly legume is good for the land.
Just another viewpoint for you.
Edited by rank 10/4/2012 14:00
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help me understand cattle farmers mentality
