by Marlene Fritz
With beef prices soft and hay prices steep, Idaho livestock producers are in the grips of a profit squeeze, and University of Idaho Extension is helping them find and evaluate alternatives to their single biggest cost—the fuel-intensive process of harvesting, baling, and feeding hay.
“We can’t keep going the way we’ve been going,” says Rauhn Panting, UI Extension’s Oneida County educator. “We’re getting the same price for cattle that we got five years ago, when diesel was $1.15 per gallon.”
“The industry as a whole is going to have to look at how it does things,” agrees UI Extension economist C. Wilson Gray. “We may be looking at longer periods on pasture because that’s way more cost-effective than anything else.”
When livestock are on pasture, they do their own harvesting. Oneida County cattleman Nathan Briggs has been grazing his cattle through December on annual crops of sorghum-sudangrass and corn. While the former can be toppled by heavy snows, the latter has held up reliably, says Briggs, who first got the idea from a UI Extension beef school.
Cheaper winter feed alternatives
In Cassia County, UI Extension educator Richard Garrard is examining the combination of a winter feed supplement—chopped corn, salt, and soybean, canola, or linseed meal—with crested wheatgrass pasture. Noting that “it’s unreal the way hay prices have gone up,” Garrard expects savings for the three-month winter-feeding period to reach several hundred dollars per cow.
In Jefferson County, UI Extension educator Brian McLain says producers are “showing a lot of interest” in a promising trial of drought-tolerant perennial grasses and perennial, nonweedy forage kochia that he planted in 2005. He added a new trial this year in Dubois that will be handier for livestock operators to observe.
At the Nancy M. Cummings Research, Extension, and Education
Center, superintendent John Hall is focusing on the corners that center-pivot irrigation systems don’t reach: Would they be economical sites for growing teff, sorghum-sudangrass, pearl millet, German foxtail millet, or grazing corn for either swathing or extending the grazing season? He plans to find out.
Test crops for sheep
This year, UI Extension Lincoln County educator Christi Falen planted a complex demonstration of annual forages—teff for summer feed, pearl millet for winter feed, interseeded oats and turnips for summer-fall feed, and triticale and Austrian winter peas for early spring feed. Grower-cooperator Laura Sluder of Blue Sage Farm describes herself as “the kind of person who is willing to try anything” and Falen as “the kind of person who’s got lots of things to try.”
Last fall, Sluder grazed 150 dry, pregnant ewes on turnips and “stockpiled” grass—that is, grass left standing from the growing season. She saved an estimated $1,000. This year, she ramped up the experiment to include twice-grazed turnips. Her ultimate goal: “To be able to graze year-round and not feed any hay.”
Contact Wilson Gray at wgray@uidaho.edu.
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