 So yeah, I grew up west of Selby and I'm south of Selby now grew up on a small operation cattle hogs wheat corn I was the old wheat summerfowl deal with a little bit of corn for the feed went off to Brookings to college 80 to 85 and came back and started farming and running some cows and what just wasn't much money on it you know things weren't going well I wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer anyway but about mid 90s I started up a welding business and I welded for about 10 years and farmed on the side well I ran cows dad did the farming and then anyway penny did that for a while then base and electric came along about 2006 7 right in through there and I was kind of just barely hanging on and they wanted to buy our land the old place to put up a power plant and they ended up doing that so all of a sudden I went from being in debt all the time to to pay it off my debt and I was out of debt for about a month and a half and then I bought another place and I'm in more debt than I ever was so you kind of slow learners take the money and run right but anyway I got to do some different things I got to try things and about the same time I went to the South well about 2007 I went on a bus tour up to North Dakota that the South Dakota no-till Association sponsored and we went up to Gabe Brown's place and we looked around up there and we stopped at a place around Linton and I'm not sure who those folks were but it was a young couple and they were doing some things different on the crop land side and we we checked out Manokin well wasn't Manokin then it was Burley County's test plot it was just a little corner where they'd done some things with cover crops and where they planted monocultures they had crop failures because it was so dry the year before and where they planted multi mix mixes they'd flourished even on our dry year and one of the things I still remember from that tour up there is Gabe Brown standing out in this and we went up in in October late September tail end of September first part October and Gabe was standing in a warm season cover crop mix about this tall and he was telling us how he was using less fertilizer and less herbicide and I'm German enough that both of those things appealed to me you know a little less inputs and look at all that forage right so that kind of got got me thinking a little different and I went home and I it we'd finished up combine and beans and I bought some winter tray to kill and Harry Vetch and because Gabe said that was a slam dunk and I threw some turnips in with it and I went out and I planted my first cover crop in 2007 and it worked out okay got a lot of bills off it and stuff like that and and the turnips came the next year and that was you know how fun that is you know you got these turnips out there try to figure that out but anyway a couple years after that I went to the grazing school that's the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition put saw it and I thought I knew a fair amount about grazing and when I got to that grazing school I found out there was an awful lot I did not know about grazing okay and I learned quite a bit there they got me started down the road and they hooked me up with some people people like Stan Bowles people like Jim Falstick and they had the same kind of mix at that deal that you see here today they had some experts talking to tell about you know the new and the latest and greatest technology and you know the real the meat behind it and then they had a producer to talk about what they were doing okay so you got the the expert side and then he got the guy up there saying well I'm doing this and it's kind of working out and that's kind of the role I'm feeling here today but anyway the Grasslands Coalition got me thinking different about grazing more about rotation and the importance of rest I used to do rotation and then I'd screw it up at the end I had one pastor system I'd rotate through like the four pastors and then the last month of the season I just opened the gates and I let them go in all of it that can't hurt anything while you saw from Stan's presentation that it does hurt things so I came away from that that grazing school with a lot of respect for the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition and they came along about a year or two later they sent a flyer out and they were having a holistic resource management school two three days just like that grazing school and I tell you the truth I was pretty leery about going because when I thought about holistic I thought about floppy hats and bib overalls and all that stuff but I had a lot of respect for the Grasslands Coalition and I still do and so I went to that and that was quite an eye-opener they talked about looking at the whole picture and they talked about putting together a holistic goal and how does how does your whole family tie into this goal and where do you really want to be and then they talked about grazing management and they talked about moving cattle every day through pastor systems and the benefit of taking the time to do daily moves and that sort of thing and I came home and I started moving cattle every day for a while not thinking I could do this for a long time but I knew I could do it for a while you know maybe I could do it for a month or a couple of weeks anyway so the Grasslands Coalition really affected how how I looked at things and how I changed on things and the South Dakota Crop Improvement Association kind of helped light the fire they got me on the first tour okay so this is my wife Marilyn and you can probably tell by looking that she's a pretty big advocate of cover crops she's got oh she's pulled a couple of nice bucks out of the cover crops the last few years she's a deer hunter I can't really walk through the damn house I run into another deer head there by the doors there and they're nice ones she's in the right spot at the right time a lot but with the cover crops we do see a fair amount of wildlife moving into them I've had neighbors call to get the mix that I use because they have pheasant hunting and that my cover crop fields are where the pheasants usually end up toward the end of the year you guys have probably noticed that too this is a picture of Lowry just taken from the pasture see a little wonderful prairie sand read here but it just kind of shows you a little bit topography of where the pastures are incidentally I started grazing warm season cover crops and I'll come to that later but this this this Lowry system down here is has been my big pastor since forever that's my big pastor and we had the the first part of this year was as dry as it's ever been up our way or it's significantly dry you know that and I've been grazing this pastor in the fall late summer and fall for a long time since I went to that holistic management school that would have been about 2010 or so and I was trying to figure out how to switch up the season of use you know I wanted to get in in the spring instead of the fall all the time anyway so this last year this dry summer I didn't put any cows in it you know in the driest deal that we've had in a long time I was able to rest that pasture kind of scratch my head at the end of the summer wondering how that all worked out but it it's probably because I grazed a lot of cropland on the warm season mixes friend of mine he's sitting in the room over there oh yeah mr. Hoyle here he told me early this summer he says you have to stay light on your feet you know a lot of things going on in this drought this dry deal stay light on your feet and Jim fall stick and stand they they call that adaptive management be ready to change you know look at what you got be ready to change I made a lot of changes that's why I'm up here you don't need a you don't need a speaker up here telling you all about how good what you're doing is okay you need to be exposed to speakers that are doing some crazy stuff that moves you a little bit off-center okay so they bring in guys that are doing things a little different and and we try to move things a little bit that's what they did for me anyway too so I switched from late March to May calving be May 15th when I start this year I started doing daily moves for part of the year I started to use long rest periods on that pastor that pastors that we do the daily moves we might not come back to that for a year I try to move every five six days on corn stocks this year I see as the season went on I move in about every two weeks but I start off moving about every five or six days and it's not it's not that I think it's not as good I apparently I'm just losing ambition as the winter goes on but but I do that I rent neighbors corn stocks and and I want the I want the neighbors to keep renting my corn stocks this is a win-win deal for everybody livestock are like probiotics for the soil okay when the cattle are out on the crop land they're dropping bacteria microbes whenever they drop some saliva some urine some feces all that stuff stimulates the microbes in the soil they're not the same microbes but they're stimulating okay so if I put cattle out on your corn stocks it helps your soil okay and it helps me because it's cheap feed okay so I want them to be happy with me and I in the one thing that always comes up is compaction and a little worried about you compacting the soil so I tell them well I'm going to move them every five days and I do and you can drive by I'll give them maybe 30 acres every five days and you can tell when I'm on that second break they're not over on the first break when you're on the third break they're not they're not back and when they start going back you know it's time to step it up a little bit moving again so I don't think the cattle out there are really a compaction issue okay but I appreciate it that if it's your land you're worried about compaction so I'm doing something that you can see when you drive by to know that I'm addressing compaction okay I'm keeping the cattle moving across the land as a landowner I also will talk to you about a contingency plan let's say we get into a warm spell I don't want to plug in up your field you don't want to plug in up your field I'll just share with you that I'm aware of that and I'm going to move them over here back to my past or whatever if I have to okay so five-day moves on corn stalks smaller frame smaller frame cows less milk and I'll cover these through the talk I digress but I wean my calves at ten months of age now I do banding more than I do knife cutting no big advantage here except I'm old and I don't want to cut my fingers I don't give very many shots I change how I market I go through a direct an order buyer as much as I can now I quit using porons by six seven eight years ago I don't use ear tags as much I planted about two-thirds of the cropland back to deep red or perennials alfalfa grass the half of the remaining cropland acres are full season cover crops and I'm grazing more hay ground and I'm trying to buy more hay so what's what the later calving date Justin talk touched on a little bit earlier it's it's just way less labor I'm getting older I don't want to work as hard I want to run more cows and work class okay I don't pull hardly any calves out of the snowbank in May it just works easy scholars is a non-issue and like I think Stan said I want to mimic nature or it was Dallas I was mentioned earlier I want to mimic nature if I look around at the deer I don't see deer out there having fawns in the snow banks okay the deer are having having their fawns pretty much after the snow is not an issue anymore I also copy the deer a little bit of my cows with this ten month weaning they get a little thinner in the winter but they've got a couple months on grass to fatten back up because I'm not so concerned about high weaning weights and we'll touch on that in a little while I use moderate birth weight bulls now I hardly ever buy a bull it's over eighty two eighty three pound birth weight for heifers I'm in that 65 to 70 pound range and I just don't have much trouble which is good because I'm lazy quicker cycling the later in the year this is a Dick Divins deal but the later in the year that you have the longer the days are the quicker those cows will stop those cows will start cycling after they've had a calf so this is what I used to have that was middle April the last year I calved in April and I keep some pictures around you can see calf right there but I keep some pictures around I had to have one on my phone as a screensaver for the first couple years to remind myself yes this is why I don't want to turn the bulls out yes yeah because it just feels like June 20th I should turn the damn bulls out it's not so hard anymore but it was at first but anyway I didn't want to do that anymore and I didn't want to do it because I had been exposed to people had talked about an easier way okay this is what I do now okay you know this is a cow this is right back here you can ask Dan about this but I'm a little bit of a proponent and advocate for rye I didn't plant any this year I planted some the two years before this but rye is a tremendous tool you plant that rye you take your shovel out and you dig it up later and my god there's a rut mass under there it's like sod it's when these roots die off you're doing a lot of things to replenish your soil with your organic matter when when you got a lot of residue on top of the ground most of these cropland fields around here we're trying to get more residue on and on some of it I plant right into the rye without doing anything but anyway caving talk about the subject here Doug caving I do it on grass now instead of in the mud and snow it really works well I went to smaller cows and a cow eats about three percent of her body weight every day right so 10 1500 pound cows will eat the same as 15 1000 pound cows you've got 15,000 pounds of cows either way 10 times 15 times 3% 450 pounds a day 82 tons a year the smaller cows 15 smaller ones 10,000 pounds 3 3% on an 82 ton same amount of feed 10 big cows 15 little cows 10 let's assume that they each wean 50% of their body weight I don't think the big cows are as good at doing that as a small cause are but let's give everybody the benefit of the doubt make simple math if they wean 50% of their body weight 10 750 pound calves 7500 pounds of calves on the big cows 15 times 500 7500 pounds of calves on the little cows so the big cows bring in 12,375 dollars the little cows bring in 15,000 3375 pounds in favor the dollars in favor of the big the small calves and would you rather have a check from a semi load of big calves or a semi load of small ones the check for a semi load 22,500 dollars difference same amount of feed big cows and little cows something to think about okay improved rotation what the what I eventually found out and caught on to and they it's not that they weren't telling me this but what I finally heard was that the longer the improved rotations mean longer rest periods in in the pastures and that's where the big benefit comes in okay it's not some of it's not chewing so short sure but a lot of the benefit and the health we do to our pastors is doing something about extending the rest period okay so I started doing the one to five day moves and I increased my stock density the grass starts growing back three to five days after you bite it off when you pack them in a little tighter you've got increased harvest efficiency so you pick up a little that way they just eat more of what's there they step more down to which turns out that's a good thing you want to get the residue down on the ground where the soil microbes can get at it and chew on it if that old dead grass is just sitting up in the air it's just going to evaporate it's a different word for it but that's basically what it does get it down on the ground and those bugs can shoot up and turn it into nutrients this deal with moving cows every day turns into some extraordinary rest periods on the pasture what I what I started doing on that systems let's say this was a pastor that I'd be in for a hundred days sometime during the summer I just started doing football field strips with polywire greatest thing since sliced bread this polywire and above ground waterline comes right behind it but anyway this is the first football field in the first day I let him go to the 20 yard line and he they come back here to the end zone and drink the next day they go to the 40 come back to the end zone 60 80 doing five day runs okay then I come over to this one just flip takes three polywires right and just flip this one over here before you move them while the one in the pickup you put over here anyway another five day run and this this deal here we're going to come back here next year okay so this rested 360 days before I came and hit it again okay what I saw when I started doing that I didn't see dramatic increases in production okay but I sure saw things like big blue stem and Indian grass start to take off okay start to spread night they were probably there before but the way I grazed them off they grow a little bit in the cows it chew them off and you know so level playing a nutrition if I move them like that they're getting a level place let's like a salad bar right okay so the pasture the cornfield grazing the crop land and diverse mixes they're all like a salad bar so you go out I go I go to the salad bar and you watch me I'll do it today if they've got chocolate pudding on the salad bar that's what I'm going to eat if you guys aren't watching but I'm going to eat that chocolate pudding and I'm going to I'm going to work on that chocolate pudding until it's gone if you'll let me and when it's gone I'm going to move to the potato salad okay next best tasting thing and and I'll work on that and when I get done with that I'll go to the lettuce right but if you come back and you put out more pudding before I get done with a salad I'm going to go back to the pudding I don't want to eat the lettuce okay cows are the same thing out in the pasture you've got these chocolate pudding plants really taste good right you've got the potato salad plants you've got the the lettuce plants if I give that cow that whole pasture season long continuous graze those chocolate pudding plants get hit hard right away and pretty soon there's they say screw this and they just hunker down okay they don't die we we used to think they died but most of them they don't they just hunker down they say no I'm not going back you just gonna bite me off and some of those chocolate pudding plants actually take a like a two-year rest before they'll start showing up again okay anyway what am I getting at so if I use this system here it's more like making them eat something from the whole salad bar all the way down the line does that make sense okay yeah you give up a little you give up a little on pounds a game per head but you pick it up because you can put more head out there okay some of that's from the increased production and some of it's from that harvest efficiency if we're doing a take half leave half deal maybe we're really only using 25% of the grass out there okay with this high density grazing maybe you're using up around 40% of the grass okay so anyway some of it's just because they're eating more this is a system where where I did the daily moves that's all high-tensile single strand wire now and then this is a vacation pasture because I got to get the heck out of here once in a while but these I don't move every day all the time and what I'll what I've done down here the last couple days is move like every three to five days and it seems to be working pretty well the I don't know some of the casual observers that you wouldn't think would notice that the pastors are doing better notice mom was up at coffee last summer and one of the neighbor gals was talking said everybody's pastor looks pretty rough except for Doug's of course Doug hadn't had a cattle and right along the road but anyway some of that stuff a lot of people can notice that but anyway we put in a water tank there and a water tank down here equip help me do that Dennis the gang from Selby they've helped me through an awful lot of stuff we're floundered around Dennis and NRCS and equip also helped me figure out the fencing and and pay for it and just I can't say enough good things about Dennis and the crew and Selby there but anyway I've since started using some above ground water line too there's a hydrant down in this corner and I just drag that inch and a half poly pipe around the place is about two and a half miles up here and when I need the pipe I just took on with the pickup and I drag it down the ditch and you can drag a 2000 feet of pipe behind a pickup no problem if it's empty and the train isn't too bad you can drag it behind a four-wheel or pretty good too but that that above ground water line that is slick this is the old home place where I grew up in this I planted this used to all be cropland I planted most of this back to grass I've got a I don't know 80 acres here that was corn this year and this was warm season cover crop over here that I grazed and I'm just kind of flipping back and forth one year warm season cover crop mix and one year corn in the okay so we're grazing with this with this moving more often we're grazing more grasses taller not all the time like this but I don't know it's once in a while it's fun to have a picture of the grass taller than the cows this is a Canadian thistle here like Dan touched on there are certain times of the year my cows eat Canadian thistle really well I've got a Facebook page if you go to that Facebook page I've got a video of even some baby calves biting the blossoms off this Canadian thistle Facebook page is deep root ranch whatever you do with Facebook but anyway look around on Facebook for that if you want to see the video it's there there's also a video I think of some dung beetles doing some stuff oh yeah there it is right there how about that you know I'm not sure what this is but they ate the crap out of it I take these pictures and I don't remember it might be milkweed that's a diet Pepsi can there but anyway whatever whatever it was like Stan said it changed from being a weed to be in a forage material this might be milkweed here milkweed I don't think you're supposed to let cows eat them something about it being poisonous but my cows eat a lot of poisonous things and they seem to do okay livestock integration we talked a little I like to graze corn stocks it's cheap it's about half the cost of of hay how much is out there it's about half the cost for me of feeding hay okay so if I can rent your corn stocks or I don't know 70 cents a cow or 60 cents a cow maybe 80 cents a pair or something like that it's about half of what I think I'd have to spend if I bought hay so how much is out there you've got the same pounds of corn stover as you do corn grain okay so if you've got 5600 pounds the hundred bush of corn if you've got 5600 pounds of corn you've got about 5600 pounds of corn stover per acre okay cow eats about 1500 pounds a month if it's a you know big cow so given a cow an acre a month of corn stocks that's not taking hardly anything away from leaving residue out there okay oh yeah here's the cost deal okay so for every 100 cows I figure I save 30 and $3,500 a month that's pretty good wages you know it's a good idea if you haven't done it before you guys maybe all have and I'm sorry if I'm preaching to the choir here but if you want to you're grazing during the winter and you've got snow to deal with you want to train these cows on a big fencer okay you want them to have quite a bit of respect for that fence so they want snows out there and they're standing on this much snow that they still respect that fence because it won't zap them near as much will it if you don't if you don't want to spend the 1500 for a big fence by the way Ken Cove has a pretty damn good fencer for about 600 now I bought one last summer after cam walls things zapped out my other one and anyway that $600 fencer is working pretty good I don't remember how many jewels it does but anyway if you don't want to spend that much money on a fencer what you can do is is go buy your water source over here take any old fencer you've got and run two wires close to that tank where when they drink they're going to lodge around a bump into it and run one of the wires hot and one of the wires the ground and just have that the only fence that that fence is charging they'll get a pretty damn good shock off that and they'll start to learn okay I got to respect us I don't know but I use I use big fencers around the yard as long as I can and so by the time winter rolls around they're pretty respectful um I've had the string lay on the ground and and they still respect it okay I've had the string lay on the ground and they haven't respected it so but but they they'll um yeah oh I should say this whole deal of corn stock grazing I'm glad Justin Thompson's here today his dad's really the one that taught us that we could graze corn stocks a lot more efficiently than we did and he taught us just by letting us watch it back in 2006 it was bone dry up there and we were grazing whatever we could and about that time we started noticing what we did with corn stock grazing as a kid is we'd turn the cows out on the corn stocks and after about a week we'd start feeding them a little hay because we felt sorry for them well they did the whole chocolate pudding deal you know they said hey he's feeding us hay we're not going out we watched Darrell Darrell graze those those cows until February March and so we figured out we could do this different do it longer and and I have to thank your dad sometime we've never visited about that it could be yeah I'm sure there's learning curves with all of that but anyway um water if I've got a quarter of corn stocks that doesn't have water and I've got snow I don't worry about it my cows do just fine-licking snow I didn't think that would be true I learned that up in Burleigh County and they learned it from the guys in Canada I've gone a month at a time on some neighbors corn stocks with no water and the cows seem to do okay first year I did it I kind of like this you know and if you do it you turn them out there and like the next day you go check on them they're going to be beller and in honor you know not happy with you at all okay you learn to check from a distance for a couple three days and then they kind of get over it and anyway that first time I left them out on this quarter for about two weeks and it was at home where we used to let them back and forth for water and uh I let them I let them across and they knew where to go to get a drink it was a half mile down the line and I thought I'll mess with you just a little bit so they're they're kind of going that way and I turn a cabas and I let them up to the corn stocks that were and they went right to grazing corn stocks they didn't they weren't worried about running home and getting a drink so anyway that was kind of interesting when I'm fancying on corn stocks I use a lot of polywire and O'Brien original posts okay the O'Brien originals that's a big deal okay the O'Brien original I get them from Ken Cove they're about four dollars a post uh they make this this polywire fencing so much easier you can get them in in the frozen ground okay if you don't have a hammer you look for a corn rut or some kind of plant rut and you can work them in you don't have to go in that you know that far I'll hold it if it's froze but if you don't want to do that you can tap them in with a hammer and they'll hold together these posts you get it runnings that have a spike on the bottom that's as big as your finger there you can't get them in you can't get them out the post break uh those O'Brien originals that's the way to go uh less milk what's the deal with less milk don't we want bigger calves more milk well I'm not that worried about bigger calves anymore remember the the bigger check for the smaller calves so high milk producing cows don't just take more feed when they're milking high milk producing cows take more feed all year long they're just less efficient okay so I've started going away from high milk EPDs I want cows that provide enough milk for the calf to grow but that's it okay main thing I want is for that cow to breed back okay open cows are pretty expensive you all know that that's no brainer but anyway fertility is your biggest money maker what I what I need to be doing well it says expect fallout when you make changes like this when you start kind of roughing them out there there's going to be some fallout okay and the guys told me that was going to happen and you just need to expect it and the theory is you get rid of the ones that can't do it and your your quality of your herd will improve and you I look at that all the time like right now the calves are on the cows yet and I leave them there till about the first of march and this cow is pretty skinny and this cow is looking pretty good okay same feed same cows I need more of the fat cows more of the good condition cows that are still raising a calf okay at least for me I don't mean to tell you guys what you need to do this weaning at 10 months uh that I remember people that used to leave their calves on a little too long and when I was riding around with my friends in the neighborhood we ridiculed them because they weren't getting their calves weaned on time and now I'm now I'm the guy that they drive by and say why are these calves still out there but my cows work for me I don't work for my cows anymore okay I don't start to tractor up every day I don't haul feed out every day I will if it's a really bad winter but they're working for me now instead of the other way around doesn't seem like that sometimes but that cow becomes a source of a high protein supplement for the calf okay the cow is not milking very much anymore this time of year it's just a little bit of milk but it's enough to give that calf a little extra protein kick right calves look great okay um and like I said expect some cows to fall out of the herd okay this is uh grazing corn unharvested corn we'll talk about that a minute but that's typical picture you got the cows out there and you got the calves and I don't know they're weighing 550 I don't know something like that okay bale grazing I learned about bale grazing up at burley county those guys up at North Dakota shook up my thinking on a whole lot of things I didn't believe them at first they talked about putting out a all this hay and and just turning the cows out into it and and Gabe talked about he said oh I gave him seven to ten days worth at a time nothing I doubt it and I came back and I I thought I could try it with maybe four days worth at a time and see what happened so I started carrying it out take about four days worth of four minutes five minutes wow we're going to step this up a little so uh anyway uh ran into a guy canada up there and he said that he puts out a month's worth at a time I thought well if he can do a month's worth at a time I can do a week's worth so I started doing this and there's about 17 bales in a row there and going across here I was giving them two rows uh about every five days it's easy I like easy I don't have to start a tractor I put out the same amount of hay that I would put out if I roll them bales out so if I roll them out 10 bales a day I just give them 10 bales sitting like this I leave the twines on right or wrong um the better quality hay you have less residue some I turned on and they had net wrap I thought boy I'm clever I'll just put that I'll cut that off as I go I didn't realize net wrap wraps under around the edge so okay well it wasn't quite so clever but uh worked through it uh they kind of go back and forth eat the different bales this is what we did last winter Mary and I had some health troubles and she had surgery at the end of December first part of January so some neighbors came over and uh we we put out about uh two weeks worth of bales well we put out about a month's worth of bales actually and we just gave them two weeks worth at a time make it easy on the neighbors it worked just fine uh cows lead through them you can see the cows on the cows out there yet sorry about that that's uh snow build up underneath the the bale circle so I think what happens this is really tremendous you're going to see some neat pictures later on on regrowth what happens is uh that hay covers that snow and those cows lay on that old bale circle and that snow is trapped underneath and in the spring things start thawing and that ground around that circle thaws off right opens up and the last thing to melt is that bale circle so instead all that manure juice and residue running down the creek it runs out and it soaks in okay so uh it's a pretty good way of hanging on your nutrients that's an o'brien original post there by the way they make them in yellow white and blue uh that's a that's a bale circle some are better some are worse in two years you won't even notice it was there uh except it'll be better in two years there that's what it looks like shortly after grazing so you leave some behind but you leave some behind uh no matter what you do this is what happened when we got about an inch of rain when they were on it thought oh boy that's a disaster notice the two trees in the background there that's the regrowth on it yeah can't even tell where it was anymore that's a I do get some Canadian thistle in the bale circles so something you got to deal with uh cows here how do you know when your cows are eating enough left side of the cow notice how that's not dented in right there right side of the cow it's all hollowed out if I drove out and looked at the right side of my cow I'd say oh no she's not getting enough to eat uh she's doing okay my cows are liars that's why I bring that up you go to move every day and they lie like heck to you I come out to move them and they see me and they start beller and I you know and you know they're starving to death they can be standing in grass that deep and in their bellard like they're starving they're just a bunch of liars so I needed to learn some ways to not not believe them this is the summer okay this is the end of June and it was so dry up there uh you you know pretty obvious where we bail graze we had grass okay uh five feet over where we didn't bail graze it was brown and it was about that tall okay tremendous difference uh same story here you see right where the rolls of bails were so I've liked bail grazing uh I like it even more after last year um two minutes left okay full season cover crops so I I decided I started out cover crops after wheat um and I decided well I didn't decide I was listening to Jay Furran and people were asking him the same question we all asked the first time Jay starts talking about cover crops they say well we don't have enough moisture after wheat harvest to grow them up here and Jay said why don't you go with full season cover crops dedicate a whole year to the cover crop I wonder if I could do that so I did that I started coming back and doing oats and peas and then I screwed it up I cut the oats and peas for hay and bale and carried it off so I was still taking all the nutrients out the field but I told myself I'm going to cut that off and I'm going to plant a second one behind it because Gaven said you don't really start getting the the full benefit until you have two full season or two cover crops in one season but I never got the second one planted that's where rye came in I got to thinking I'll make myself do it so I started planting winter rye after wheat and that really worked well all the neat things with rye and then after the rye I planted a warm season cover crop mix okay um that warm season cover crops a good tool to fill the warm season slump okay um cool season grasses are good grasses okay they're not as good as some okay but we've got them we've got smooth brome we've got Kentucky bluegrass we've got these we've got to learn to work with them and take advantage of them right they're they're not bad they're just bad later on in the year when when they're all dried up okay uh I'll touch on it maybe I'll touch on that in a minute but anyway let's deal with the warm season cover crop I can chew off about four thousand pounds on there you can grow six thousand pounds without much fertilizer uh Al and Williams says that if you can grow a hundred thirty bush of corn you can grow eight thousand pounds of forage on Dan's field over here last year eleven thousand pounds yeah yeah so okay so you can grow a lot of forage out there uh and uh that's a pretty good money maker for me I graze it sometimes late uh sometimes earlier depends on the classic cattle um I do plant I try to plant maybe 40 or 50 acres with more pearl millet and hardly any sedangrass in so that when it freezes I don't have to worry about the plastic acid I go to that pearl millet mix for that two weeks or whatever because it takes you know it takes two weeks it never freezes once freezes and kind of kills it and then it comes back then it kind of freezes again right so you really need a couple of weeks worth though yeah that's uh that's kind of a handy deal there that's just a minards or runnings uh ice fishing sled calf sled strapped on with bungee cords uh you can fit your posts in they're pretty good you've seen that kind of stuff that's a nice way to wind up a half a mile of string a quarter mile at a time uh threaded rod through a spool uh that pipe there just stick the pipe on that threaded rod hold it like this and and you can wind it up to beat hell if you get to the real avid string grazers they say oh you got to walk along and grind wind it up because your your string won't last as long if you drag it to you I don't care okay I got a lot of stuff to do I'll buy more string right you can see the the diversity in that warm season mix uh sedan grass german hay millet pearl millet uh we got the turnips the radishes I like rapeseed more than turnips the radishes these days I'll throw some kind of kale hunter brassica something like that that kale's amazing stays green like forever uh noticed out in my wife's garden but anyway I try to mix it up like you would a native pastor uh I don't get anywhere near the 50 or 60 species but then you can see what's left behind okay I can graze off 4 000 pounds and still leave that kind of cover behind and I sent a test to that in this year so I only got an hour left I sent a test to that in this year just to see what am I leaving behind and it's actually pretty good stuff it's like 59 tdn and it had 25 on net energy for gain okay but I don't feel bad about that um I gotta feed the bugs too you know but I was feeling bad because these cows are going back and they were eating out there kind of picking up that that stuff off the ground in between water deals and I thought my god I'm starving them I wasn't they were short on protein it was low on protein but it was good I grazed unharvested corn I'll leave about 30 acres each year I'll I'll leave 30 rows I'll combine six I'll leave 30 I'll combine six you can see that I left I combine up the field that way up the field this way you can see the cows are give them about a half an acre a day this is where I combine crosswise across the field so I can run the string got a nice place that they recognize it really works well 10 pounds of corn and 10 pounds of corn stocks keeps them pretty happy costs you less than a buck a day I got to thinking if they can do it out in the field why not behind the trees so I took this gravity wagon and I modified the door and I got a bin with electric auger on I just time it and I'll put in my 10 pounds or 15 or whatever I want to do to fat them up a little bit and I'll go out and feed them like that fed them like that for a month last year did good uh then I give them about two bales a hay a day that's about 200 cows so I gave them about uh I think it was a 10 15 pounds of corn on about two bales a hay for the bunch uh they'll eat when when that's all the hay they've got to pick from they'll eat anything you take out there if you've got some cruddy hay but they're getting all the energy through this and then when I'm grazing in the field or grazing here I'll give them uh alfalfa on Mondays and Thursdays twice twice a week to get alfalfa uh yeah I won't run through that that's pretty good though uh but I'm not going to run through it but you can you can graze this cool season grass early graze the crap out of your cool season grass put your cows all together and then uh graze the warm season cover crops takes about an acre for two months for a cow or something like that uh corn and alfalfa uh and that was given 10 pounds alf every day 10 pounds every day and anyway my cost was 484 per cow okay so you can you can do this stuff I'm talking about and make it make it work pretty well uh yeah I don't know takes a takes a lot longer to cut baled stack and haul hay than you think figured out sometime covered crops we talked about that this is this is rye stubble here um I know I'm going over but this is I think this is important stuff I planted this this soybean these soybeans got planted into standing rye um I planted the rye after the wheat so it went to rye went out there and sprayed the rye when it was about that tall because up here crop insurance says you have to spray 10 days before you plant so that's what we did went in planted into that tall stuff it was hard to see the markers but uh but the kid did pretty good and uh we had all kinds of mulch on the ground there that might actually be one that I grazed first that field because there's not as much mulch but anyway there's mulch all kinds of rye mulch on the ground there uh we sprayed it I sprayed it uh before we planted and I sprayed it again when the beans are about this tall pretty much just with some roundup to take out the grasses broadly it's weren't much of an issue and I've got a lot of maristail problems up there so I was pretty impressed with that this is when we harvested that field still good cover on the ground um and this was the next year I planted uh beans we harvested the beans in the next year last year I went out there and I planted oats and peas last spring in that field and that's how much cover was still left on the ground that bean ground did not blow at all during the winter uh quit using insecticides you can ask me about that if you're curious that's some kind of strange insect I don't know what it is but I thought it looked cool so big green eyes that this I I drove by that for a lot of years it's in a pasture I rent for my cousin and I never stopped to look and see what that is I finally went look the other day or last summer that's a a grass cedar he's got an old axle down there and the differential spins this plate here this 50 gallon barrel has a little slide on the bottom and that's what they seeded grass with I guess so anyway use what you got any questions yeah yeah the less questions you ask the sooner you get to eat