 Okay, a little bit of background about myself and our family and our farm. This is where we are located, probably not very visible there, but the star in the sort of north-central part of the state there is Caleo, Missouri. We are now north of Columbia, two hours east of St. Joseph, Missouri, and this is our little piece of paradise there just south of Highway 36. The area in yellow there is the total outline of the farm, and then the area in red is the ground that was used for this particular study for the grazing of annual crops using lambs. And our farm family consists of myself, my wife, Cherie. We have three children, and here's the crew, Gregory, who came with me today for a little trip to Iowa. This is Rebecca, and that's Abby there along with my wife Cherie and myself. I grew up on a dairy farm near Manneville, Missouri, northwest Missouri, relatively small dairy farm, but my parents are full-time on the farm. Predominantly grass-based, talk a little bit more about grazing and grazing philosophy here in a minute. My wife and I have raised sheep since 1996. We got our start with three St. Croix ewes. It was our first introduction to hair sheep. We purchased those from a friend, started using cattodon rams, learned a little more about the cattodons, ultimately got interested in and began raising purebred cattodon sheep, which is a hair sheep or a shedding sheep breed. We've been on our present farm since 1998. The farm was in my wife's family before that. Her grandparents and great-grandparents both lived in the area, and so we just had a chance to move back after about 12 years after they had left the farm and moved to where some of their other children were living. We continue to raise sheep there. We have had up to about 35 cow-calf pairs there. Sold most of the cows, I guess two years ago, two and a half years ago now, just a few kept three cows, to be specific, for ourselves and some friends we sell beef to, and then the kids have a couple Berkshire sows, and they show pigs for 4-H, as well as showing breeding stock sheep for 4-H and FFA. As I said, our sheep are cattodons, shedding breed, and we have had as many as 100 ewes. Right now we have 50 ewes. We'll lamb 50 ewes out this spring. We do lamb between January and March, just starting to lamb right now, and part of the reason for that, we've lambed anywhere from January to June. The reason we have settled predominantly on lambing in January to March is because of our ability to manage parasites on pasture. We feel that if we get the lambs on the ground in a barn or a lot situation, get them up, get a little growth on them, a little hardiness and immunity built in them, then we can either wean them onto pasture at that point, or if we want to sell lightweight feeder lambs we can do so. We can move the ewes out to some of our rougher, more distant pastures, if we choose to do that once the cool season grasses start to come on and strong in the spring. We end up selling most of our lambs, what you might call a feeder lamb weight, post weaning anywhere through the end of the year on into the next spring. We will keep and finish, I say finish, but just essentially grow out and sell some feeder lambs, or excuse me, some finished freezer lambs. Otherwise, most of our lambs either go to an auction or they go to another individual who is raising grass finished lamb and marketing and as such. The other reason for the earlier lambing, our kids do, right now being in 4-H and FFA they show breeding stock, and so to get lambs that are big enough to show and perform well at the county fair and state fair, we just about have to lamb that early. It's showing it's not a primary focus, it is a good marketing tool, a good way to get the sheep seen out there in the world and make people a little more aware of them. We do use a combination of feeding, and that takes me into my philosophy on forage utilization. Since I'm following a grass fed beef producer presentation, since many of you have a long history, lots of experience in forage utilization raising grass based or grass finished animals, I just want to be clear, and that is that I'm a pragmatist when it comes to forage utilization and not a purist. That is philosophically, fully in support of grass finishing and grass feeding. In a perfect world, sheep being a ruminant animal, if I had high quality forages or was cost effective to improve my forages, I would love to be entirely grass based. In our experience, economically, we have not been able to go to a fully pasture based, fully forage based system and produce animals that will get to a desirable weight, desirable condition and finish and market on a regular basis, again, while managing parasites and dealing with all of the other issues. So we do end up feeding some grain and the amount of grain we feed depends on the quality of forage that we have, both growing forage and harvested forage. And I don't market grass fed lamb or market my lamb as such, as I mentioned, the other individual that buys from me is marketing grass finished, so she has to own the lambs and finish them on grass for a certain period of time per her marketing claims that she is using. Now from a sustainability standpoint, personal preference standpoint, I do like utilizing as much forage as possible and talk more about that just based on the part of the country that we are in. We have primarily highly erodable ground, heavily eroded top soils with high clay content and a lot of ground that we used to have more CRP acreage, of course a lot of the CRP acreage has come out, is being cropped once again with the high crop prices we've had in the last few years. The motivating opportunity for the grant and for the study that I'm presenting about came when a neighbor was retiring, he had already sold us part of his pasture, he was wanting to get out of farming all completely, move closer to his children. And so before he did that he was looking just to rent out the crop ground that he still had and was still utilizing. And so there was essentially about 28 acres, 17 acres being the ground that he had cropped is most recently half of it in corn, half in soybeans and it presented an opportunity to cash rent that ground and then try to answer these two questions. What forages can support nutritional needs of rapidly growing lambs especially in the summer slump period we tend to face where our especially heavily fescue dominant pastures in the fight infected fescue when it is either in a slump or highly toxic to the animals as they attempt to graze it. So what can support the nutritional needs of these growing lambs and then can economic returns from grazing livestock in general and lambs in particular be sufficient to keep some of this marginal highly erodible land in forage crops rather than in annual row crops only. This is the ground we're talking about and you can see the gully erosion there that's quite obvious throughout the field there. These soils are heavily weathered and in our county in general by crop prices that we saw in the going back two years and in that three to five years preceding that had caused additional conversion and increased the 36% in corn acreage, slight increase in soybean acreage in the county and I just pulled out the 2000 and 2010 ag census numbers when we wrote our grant proposal originally back in 2012. In terms of unique challenges of raising lambs on forage I say unique because of course a lot of you know there are many challenges to raising any livestock on forage but I think raising sheep does carry some additional challenge in terms especially in terms of parasite management in terms of fencing and so you know the general challenge you can just sort of see from the condition of the pastures there the same same field those animals are in now the one is a fall picture picture the one on the right is a fall picture but in northern Missouri the saying is you're two weeks away from a drought at any point in time tend to have very tight soils water infiltration is very poor and so we can go from relatively lush pastures to to looking you know like you're in the Asian steps in a fairly short period of time. In terms of fencing I'm using portable fencing has challenges with sheep and a few fencing pictures later on but either in our area for portable fencing people for sheep either people either end up using netting which is relatively expensive electro netting it's fairly expensive fairly difficult and time-consuming to move or some combinations of polywire and permanent fencing and so that can create some additional challenges. Other challenges to raising lambs on annual forages that I have found my sheep at least don't like to go where they can't see and so using something like sorghum sedangrass that you know if you're trying to avoid any plastic acid concerns you want to let it get some height on it it can can hit a growth spurt and quickly get over the sheep's head and then they really don't like to go out in it because they don't know quite what's out there waiting for them and so the sheep tend to like to eat around the edge and they just sort of travel the perimeter of those fields so I was interested in looking at some other forages that might address that summer need. This is as Joan said this is also a humbling experience for me you just reminded me how dependent we are on weather and so in our proposal we had fairly ambitious plan to compare several forages due to weather conditions we'll talk about what we ended up being able to look at and gather data on was primarily just our spring production of oats. We did attempt to look a little bit at Tefgrass we never got the moisture to germinate the Tefseed once planted so I think everyone is quite familiar with oats we were very pleased with it and show the data that we found on the economics of utilizing oats. Tefgrass which you may or may not be familiar with is a C4 grass warm season grass the reason I was especially excited about it for sheep again my experience with Sorghum Sedan is that you know of course she put on the leaves but but you know the stem is relatively thick they do not utilize it to the same same extent that cattle will. Tefgrass has a very fine blade it's just a more much more delicate grass in terms of of its appearance palatability is quite high it's very drought tolerant so I was excited about this also very rather low growing and so sheep are going to be more likely to better utilize it it seemed to me and if you do if you have questions that come to mind as I go through feel free to go ahead and ask those if if you don't want to save that until the end to be happy to answer those as we go. The leaf on the ground was obtained in December of 2012 we were past the point where we could plant any winter annual crops to utilize and so once we found out that we that we had received the funding for the grant the plant was to go ahead the plan was to go ahead and plant oats as early in the spring is feasible and then after grazing or harvesting the oats go ahead and utilize some different warm season annuals to follow up. The oats were planted April 5th using a rented drill there from in RCS and to I know there were presentations earlier in the forum from others about the 2013 year of course where the very depending where you were but our situation we had extremely wet spring very heavy rainfall in April relatively wet May and then the spigot turned off and we went back into a really dry summer pattern similar to to what 2012 was in our area but early on we were cool and wet and so in April we planted those oats and they just kind of set there didn't do a whole lot that was there's April 5th and there's April 29th doesn't look a whole lot different than a few more ditches out there. April 29 again and finally we're getting close in May late May we were able to begin grazing but we were almost getting almost to point 60 days out from our planning which before able to graze which was longer than we had anticipated. We took our pre grazing study weights on May 22nd the date on the picture there is June 29th because it's this is a picture from the post grazing weights but just to show you the scale platform and our approach there and then we began grazing oats on May 25th you can see the the difference once they took off of course they grew very rapidly there was still a bit of ground out there some of that ground had been subject to erosion from those heavy rains but the cover was pretty good and the growth was very good at that point in time and our approach to grazing was to strip graze the oats and the animals were able to re-graze they're able to travel back over the ground they grazed for a certain point of time until we got to a bend where then we could put a fence behind and keep them from grazing back over that ground and so here we see the animals moving out on May 25th that's the same same field just a day later then you can see the extent to which they've they've already knocked down the whoa is there is there a pointer is that the in the middle there okay yeah so you can probably see the extent to which they've already they've heavily grazed there in that foreground area well we had available for the study we had 48 lactating use 85 lambs some we at this point we had already sold a few you lambs and then the lambs that the kids were going to show we did keep up and we're continuing to feed them and they're working with those lambs so that reduced the number of lambs available the lambs at the time the grazing study began were 77 days old average weight of 49 pounds so the lambs were old enough to wean certainly it could have been weaned our choice to go ahead and leave the use out there was simply that we had with once we hit that flesh of growth there was a tremendous amount of dry matter out there in the oats to be utilized and so chose to just go ahead and take all of the animals we had put them out there let the lambs continue nursing the use during this the grazing study in addition then there were 18 head of yearlings with no lambs at side yearling use that were put out there with them they were they stripped grazed on this nine acres for 35 days a total at the beginning there 13,408 pounds of animal live weight or using the conversion unit we had there 21.9 animal units just based on the number of head of use and lambs this is after one day of grazing there just to kind of show where where the animals are biting and how much of a bite they're taking there how far down they're taking that plant and how much trampling we're seeing there this is after three days on that first allotted area this point we're just removing the animals back out so we can move our fences but especially early on there the forage utilization is is very good I'll talk about our averages a little later but the animals are not leaving a whole lot behind at this point they're they're fairly hungry I mean they're certainly enjoying the oats highly palatable at that point in time okay then again just to give a little sense this is that same day May 29th there the area that they are moving on to just to show the growth level there there are using lambs grazing there and you can see the electron netting we were using at that point in time for fencing this is just gives you a sense of the way that we rotated the animals through that pasture and so the the numbers excuse me the number one and number 16 this particular paddock they utilize on day one and day 16 and day two they moved over here they were able to graze back here for a little bit until we got fence behind them there and then just shows the way that they move through here down to this end and then back through again and back eventually back out of the field over here depending where they were in the field relative to our hydrants and water source there they either had a portable tank with a float on it or we were hauling water to them I know Janet that caught just the end of Janet's presentation earlier but certainly this is an advantage of sheep they're very efficient at utilizing water relatively low water intake is compared to cattle especially when they're utilizing lush forages like those oats on the daily water intake early on when it was cool is very low again you know there was a fair amount of bare ground out there even amongst the oats and and so we saw fair amount of annual weeds weeds and quotations there because you know that's often the sheep's favorite thing lamb's quarter in particular these you know very high protein forbs that are available to them but certainly they had a variety of dock out there common ragweed giant ragweed that they cleaned up right along with the oats as they went along okay here we on on June 1st again you can see the the grazed ground behind them and what they're working on right now you see the growth continuing we also used a clipping method here just to try to just to monitor how much growth we were getting how much dry matter production we're getting from the oats and so we did three clippings three samples there May 24th June 3rd June 21st in each case we took either three or four forage clippings from throughout the field and average those to try to get an average representative sample of what was growing out there just use that quadrant clipped everything within it dried it down and tested that so May 24th there were a little over 1600 pounds per acre dry matter present June 3rd 2200 pounds June 21st 9000 pounds okay so what happened here well not quite sure frankly a different person took the clippings on June 21st and took the other two maybe they got overzealous and what they were putting in the quadrant and out of the quadrant so I'm willing to say that we may have overestimated production there on June 21st the other field we ended up not grazing just be you know because of the amount of growth we were getting where we were there we took a cutting of hay off of that the hay that we actually harvested off of that was about 6000 pounds three tons of dry matter per acre so that's probably a better estimate of what was produced in total out there is the 6000 pounds than the 9000 okay here we are June 6th you know a couple weeks into grazing now you can see that we're not seeing a whole lot of regrowth there eventually there will be some regrowth on what they graced first you know again depending on the number of animals you have you certainly could have re-grazed some of that regrowth of oats there this is is dry matter production from the oats per day so what we're looking at here is three different time intervals April 5th to May 24th May 24th June 3rd and June 3rd to 21st so in in that early season period there from from planting up to the time we began grazing again they weren't seeing a really ideal growth period the oats were producing about 35 pounds per day per acre dry matter late May early June it only goes up to about 53 pounds and then again we see this real surge here in June what they really take off okay June 13th we're another week into the study now you're starting certainly starting to see the stem thicken up there these oats are getting ready to flower palatability is going down but utilization is still pretty good there okay these are weight gain results so over a total actually a total of a 38-day period because we took the initial weights on the 22nd we didn't begin grazing until the 25th that's the three-day difference there but over the 38-day interval these use and lambs grazing together 85 lambs 48 use the lambs had a beginning average weight of 49 pounds they gain a little over 16 pounds during that time period which was 38 percent of their starting body weight and average daily gain of point four three pounds the use again they're still lactating so the lambs are getting a little bit of nutrition from the use as well the use did lose a little bit of weight they lost four pounds on average 2.8 percent of body weight point one one pounds per day that's you know that's a trade-off I'm happy to accept the use we're only lambing once a year the you has a long time to go out there and regain that body weight body condition over the summer and fall before she's rebred now this point four three pounds per day is that good or bad that's no no grain supplementation no concentrate feed supplementation of any kind the comparable lambs the the kids show lambs which you might say were the best the fastest growing lambs in the bunch that we're getting some concentrate supplementation I think they average their average gain was about point seven pounds a ketone lamb to me on you know pasture anything approaching a half pound per day is good on even on feed you know our lambs really gain more than point seven to point nine pounds per day so you know I was I was happy with getting that game there and then the yearlings that were out there didn't get excuse me and gain a whole lot certainly didn't lose weight their average daily gain point one three pounds but they weren't you know at a point they were needing to grow they're just there at a slow growth point there anyway okay and click past one picture there again just to see where we are June 17th now you know definitely starting to see flowering out there the plant is starting to mature now when the animals graze and they're walking down more of the crop that's out there definitely more residue left the stem is thicker leaves are a little less palatable and see the oats heading out there by June 19th so we were also we were estimating the amount of dry matter there just based on the height of the forage when we turned them into a new paddock and then looking at the residue that was left and trying to estimate the dry matter left when they came out and so based on those the measures that we took we estimated that the sheep consumed grows across the whole flock there about 21 22,000 pounds of dry matter or about 2400 pounds per acre so if there were you know something again you know just based on the the hay clip the hay cutting that we took if there was something like 5300 pounds out there the forage utilization rate by the sheep across the whole study was about 45% which you know again considering the amount the volume of forage there when they're turned in and the trampling they're going to do I think that's okay the the remaining organic matter is still there it's it's helping to enrich the soil as it breaks down okay this is June 24th getting close to the end of the period there again you can see kind of what is left out there in terms of you know the digestive health of the animal their ability to handle that forage and the high water content in it this is on June 3rd and so here you know you do have a pretty soft stool there that's left does not look the best now this is about a week later June 11th there and now is you know as a crop is maturing a little bit animals are adjusting to it certainly the the fecal matter that was out there is much more normal in terms of composition the way that the way it looks and again animal health was good during that time we did we utilize the Femacha method in terms of deworm parasitism and deworming so we analyze we take a look at the animals eyelid before we deworm try to only deworm animals that need it we did not do any deworming of user lambs during the study after later in the summer we did deworm lambs but during the study parasitism was not an issue that we faced okay now this again is this is July 1st here the animals are basically last day in the pasture there and then we did utilize some cows to clean up some of the regrowth there before we wanted to try to plant our summer annual crops overall on the nine acres that we grazed provided 25 animal unit months of grazing or basically 2.84 animal unit months per acre just based on the the number of animals we had in the area utilized there the other acre field that was available by the time we had finished grazing that first nine acres it was in full flower so we went ahead and cut it in fact it was it was in the those stage by that point went ahead and cut it for hay on June 23rd and that was the amount of hay that we harvested off of that field we also compared in the in a written report we compared the cost of mowing raking and baling as compared to grazing grazing was a more cost-effective way to utilize the forage at least based on our on the average forage values hay values in our area but still it was a way to preserve that forage for later use after we pulled the lambs off and after the hay was harvested we did light to medium tillage there a single-pass disking and field cultivator to try to prepare a seed bed for the teff grass it's if you're familiar if you are familiar with teff it's an extremely tiny seed it does need a prepared seed bed and quite smooth seed bed and then we seeded that on July 1st using a brilliant cedar maybe you know probably we in hindsight we were foolishly optimistic to expect to have a rain in July to terminate that teff seed but I guess that's what we were hoping for and unfortunately the you know the oats which had grown very effectively had also effectively sucked up most of the available top soil moisture and so the the teff went into a very dry seed bed planted very shallow because of the small seed size there was not more there was not enough moisture there in the top profile of the soil to germinate that seed and then we turned very dry and so we had no measurable precept in July or August after the teff was planted and even though it is drought tolerant it does need some moisture for germination and so we did not get a stand that's what the field looked like in early September there and mostly we had some pigweed which the sheep were happy to eat but there's very little teff grass out there there's a little bit of a close-up where we did get some growth of the teff but it was nothing that we were we were able to utilize in any significant manner for grazing okay some of it the challenges of this study in particular and of grazing sheep and in these kinds of situations of you know being solely grass-based with sheep so certainly the fencing is a challenge and again I did did not get to hear it sounded like you had some good maybe had developed some good solutions for fencing with sheep in these situations I wasn't terribly happy with either the Electronet or the Polywire so we in some cases we used Electronet that we had already and then we purchased Polywire and stepped in posts and tried three strands of Polywire our permanent electric fences are old break cable salvage break cable three wires on with combination of steel posts and fiberglass posts for electric fencing we have pretty good luck with it but the Polywire it either it comes up in low places or it sags enough that the lambs feel comfortable jumping through and then of course once they start jumping through it's very hard to stop them from doing so so to utilize this effectively with lambs you know I would say you need to have them well fence trained in a relatively tight area and then hope that carries over with an annual crop like this the Polywire was very challenging to get it down the oats you know we're 24 to 30 inches high by the time we're grazing some of them toward the end relatively stiff and so to just you know to try to trample that down get Polywire moved to a new spot or excuse me get the Electronet move to a new spot was challenging same thing with the Polywire the oats would push up that top Polywire and create places where the lambs could go through if I were if I want a sheep producer already I weren't committed to having sheep and simply wanted to graze annuals using crop ground you know I would say grazing stocker calves is going to be certainly a lot less headache and maybe more profitable because of the additional challenges of trying to fence sheep with portable fencing using annual cover crops I would have used better than the not using cover crops but relying on that annual planting still leaves the ground exposed to erosion at key times of the year and of course our heavy rainfall time is going to be in that early spring period and so you know I don't know that this is an ideal solution but if you have relatively flat ground and can utilize oats in that situation certainly our data showed that it can be done in a cost-effective way in terms of the economics of the study so across the time period that just the grazing study the 38 days there we evaluated gain the lambs alone gained 1382 pounds of weight live animal weight we valued that at a dollar 50 per pound which was market price in our area at the auction land prices are a little higher now than then so the the value of that gain on the nine acres was two thousand seventy three dollars or two hundred thirty dollars per acre just from the oats the expenses that we had we had $130 per acre cash rent $8 for the drill rental $8 for the tractor charge per acre $29 in fertilizer $19 in seed five minutes okay so $195 per acre and expenses just for the oats alone this is no labor expense included by the way so the net value of the oats per acre being grazed was $35 per acre now this is sort of a hypothetical again we did not really get any benefit from the tef grass and maybe it's foolish to think that you can come back with another annual after the oats and get that if you had access to irrigation and you could get that tef up I think the tef would have thrived in the summer even in the drought conditions just that initial germination was our problem but just for speculation here if you said you could continue to get those gains for another 35 days later in the fall from the tef grass in late summer and you get another $230 per acre your cash rents already taking care of this these were the seed and establishment costs for the tef so that would give you another $158 per acre from grazing lambs on that same ground later in the season so basically the two combined you would come up to $194 net per acre and then we just compared that to I took corn because we talked about conversion of land of erodible ground to corn production in our county I compared again excluding labor but pre-harvest machinery seed chemical fertilizer rent and harvest costs for corn in our area at $510 per acre and then gross revenue from corn at $3 a bushel $4 $5 and $6 a bushel and then the resulting net and it you know if you were able to get both the spring and summer fall annual grazing period using lambs netting $194 per acre again it starts to look more competitive versus crop production corn production in that case just a few other closing thoughts I guess the other forage alternatives we looked at and I've utilized elsewhere on the farm you know and given the spring conditions we had that very wet spring very cool spring it would have been nice to have a winter annual out there and so this is the neighboring field in the same day or three days later but almost the same time period there when our oats look like that here's what some cereal rye look like in the joining field that the sheep are on and so you know that benefit from a winter annual in a wet spring condition is very high I don't think I have much time but again sorghum sedan brown midrib sorghum and in pearl millet are other things we either have utilized or I'm interested in trying to utilize in that same pattern with lambs in the future in conclusion based on our results grazing annuals can be a profitable alternative to row crop production but it definitely raises challenges timing is everything especially relative to soil moisture and rainfall I mean getting those crops germinated labor is higher I didn't put labor in here but but I would say approximately two hours labor per acre over the grazing period is what we spent moving fence when you took out you know the time of weighing the lambs and that sort of thing that grazing of cover crops can offer erosion reduction on that highly erodible ground and and I think if you have especially small acreages consider that grazing of annuals to fill in niches or provide some livestock forage at key times of the year finally you know I would say sometimes simple is better on the tech it sounds really good it's quite expensive the seed is quite expensive and and I think that's the issue I find with a lot of the the novel cover crops the exciting ones they have a pretty high price tag and old tried and true things like oats and cereal rye and wheat and some of the clovers are you know maybe much much more cost-effective and still provide reliable grazing source so with that I'd take any questions that there might be yeah so he pointed out that there was no beginning value of lambs a purchase value of lambs going into the the cost yeah and the reason being is that the only return I value it I guess was the net return from the weight they gained it wasn't I wasn't valuing their total weight total body weight I was just valuing the weight they gained so that's kind of I mean you know depending what of course the difference in per purchase per pound purchase price and sale price at the end of the period it might be better to you know take their starting value and ending value and put it in there yeah so could the oats have been under seated with something else at establishment or broadcast like clovers yes I think that's a good point and the main reason for not doing so in that case was just that really again the teft grass was the exciting thing to us I think to say you know what what could teft do for us in grazing lambs and so in the oats I was just looking for something to fill the spring niche until we could get the summer annuals planted and so the the oats were sort of an afterthought in the beginning but they ended up being so you're also interested in in other crops so for example orchard grass seeding orchard grass with the clover initially to establish it right along with the oats and then if we had had better early growth on the oats would we have had different results been able to utilize them longer yeah so when we by the time we were coming off of what you know I had marked as field one field 16 there was probably six to eight inches of regrowth on the oats there so if we had had a little earlier growth and been able to get into them earlier I think we could have had you know enough second growth on the oats probably graze through another time may have still again left us with too little soil moisture to do anything else after them what you know I mean again frankly the grant aside that particular piece of ground I think is best suited to perennial forages and so you know we tried to get it seeded down that next year again we ran into weather problems and then this fall late in the fall I seeded Timothy and orchard grass on that and then I'm going to broadcast clover into it this winter maybe next week when I if the weather continues to prevail but anyway I think that particular ground is better suited to perennial forages