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vordude

Posted 10/16/2020 15:51 (#8549009)
Subject: Down Corn Solutions

Northeast Colorado

I see a good number of posts this fall about handling downed corn.

I can't say I know how to solve your problem, but I can share what worked for us last year.

Last year we had a severe wind storm blow through after an early hard freeze. I had opened up a circle and taken a couple of passes on the edge of the field, and the wind blew that night. It got ugly fast. I've shared a screenshot of our yield map from last year. The green stripes through the middle were picked before the storm. There were spots in the field that had 40-80 bpa of corn on the ground.

I put together 3 loads of weigh cows from the sale barn. (Which were cheap during preg check season). I had 3 requirements.

1- Less than 1100 lbs.
2- Less than $600/hd
3- Not obviously crazy

We fed hay before they got all assembled and turned out, and that was probably the most expensive part.

My brother and I branded, poured, drenched with Lactipro, gave them all a Synovex H, and turned them out--only supplemented with salt.

We were pretty religious about rotating through each field regularly to not have a shock to the system with a new rotation introducing a ton of corn, coming off of nothing.

We hauled a gooseneck or two of poor doers back to the sale barn pretty early on. I think we had 3 die, mostly the oldest skinny ones that didn't make it through the first snowstorm.

We calved 10 or so and sold pairs this spring.

We tried to hold out as long as we could this spring with the crazy cow market, and our desire to plant corn this spring.
We sold 2 loads direct to the cow plant in Gibbon, many of them made white fat. and took the rest to the sale barn.

Our estimates across everything except the deads, they gained 2lbs/day, and we came out profitable. It would have been better if the market acted normal this spring.

Breaking even would have been a win to simply clean up the downed corn. We dealt with some volunteer corn this fall but less than we should have. We had a neighbor tear up a stand this spring because it looked like it had been drilled solid when all the volunteer came up alongside what he planted.

Takeaways--
-Be quick to sell anything you don't want to die on you.
-Lactipro worked as it should, and working with the company was okay.
-Probably could have done better running steers, but I feel the risk would have been higher.