Spring is in the air. But if you’re a livestock farmer, there’s something else in the air too: the bawling and bellowing of late-gestation or early-lactation cows and ewes. These moms are near the peak of their nutritional needs. If your grass isn’t ready, they’ll demand your best hay — and plenty of it.
Can you dish it up? Or are you rummaging through the hay mow like John Cleese bashing through the kitchen in Fawlty Towers, screaming “Where is that good hay? Don’t tell me I fed it already?”
Given the vagaries of farming, it’s hard not to act like a member of the Monty Python troupe at least some of the time. But here’s where a simple hay inventory and a map of stored feed will reduce stress, improve animal performance, boost your bottom line and improve your anger management.
“Forage inventory management is dollars in your pocket,” says Les Halliday, beef development officer with Prince Edward Island’s Dept. of Agriculture and Land. Along with vaccinating, nutrition and good pasture management, managing your winter feed supply “is one of those little things that add up,” he says. Those little things “could mean 40 or 50 pounds extra weaning weight on your calves at the end of the year.”
Your farm is also a warehouse.
Receiving, storing and dishing out feed is a core part of any livestock operation. As Ontario shepherd, Vince Stutzki, said at a meeting I attended a few years ago, livestock farmers must manage “the stuff that comes in, and the stuff that’s leaving.”
“I don’t like getting to the end of March and finding I’ve only got 10 or 15 days of feed left,” added Stutzki, who was keeping an 850-ewe flock on about 200 acres. “I need to know well in advance of when I’m going to run out of a certain type of feed and make arrangements to deal with that.”
The key is to track your forage inventory as it’s produced, stored and then fed, and to record it on paper, or in a computer or phone, and not just in your head. Stutzki tracks his supplies with a spreadsheet and clipboard, using a tape measure to gauge the flock’s daily silage consumption as it’s drawn from silage bags.
“The big thing is to get in the habit of writing things down,” Halliday says. “When you write things down it seems to stick up in the grey matter longer. If you just try to keep it in your head, you think you’ll remember, but as time goes by your memory will fade.”
Halliday sees this memory loss when he goes out to sample forage. Faced with rows and rows of identical white, wrapped bales, once-confident farmers lose their certainty. “A lot of producers start off saying I know where everything is,” Halliday says. But out among the snow-covered expanse of bales, it’s like “’There’s the clover row — no wait, it’s timothy,’”
Step One: Know what you need
As Halliday says, it all starts with ensuring you have enough feed: “Do you have a sufficient amount of hay to get through the next winter? Ruminants need fibre. If you don’t have enough, they can’t survive on air alone.”
The key is to set a target for your hay production, based either on what you typically need to get through a winter or by doing the math for your herd or flock’s consumption. On-line feed calculators can help fine-tune your estimate by including bale weights, forage losses during feeding and storage, forage quality, herd or flock size and animal needs. I like the University of Wisconsin’s “Estimating Winter Hay Needs for Beef Cattle, or for more detail, Saskatchewan’s Beef Cow Rations and Winter Feeding Guidelines.
Let’s say you have 10 beef cows, and you’re allocating 38 pounds of hay per head per day. (Even accounting for wastage and storage losses and the moisture in the hay, this is a fairly generous amount, but I like to err on the high side.) To make the math easier, let’s assume you’re also feeding 400-pound bales produced by an ancient 4x4 round baler. If your typical winter feeding season stretches from November to the end of May, you’ll need at least around 170 bales.
But to sleep sound, especially in an area where forage supplies are tight, you’ll want additional bales to cope with an early winter, late spring or summer drought (or all three.) Halliday recommends padding your hay stocks by at least adding 20 percent. In my case, I like a six-week surplus. Either way, that’s roughly 35-50 extra bales.
Step Two: Keep records by field.
Number or name each field, and build a spreadsheet or inventory that identifies each one.
Columnist Ray Ford records hay production — how much and from what fields — on simple calendar
Include space to record mowing dates, hay bales produced, storage locations for those bales and notes on hay quality and field management.
In spring, scout each field for problems such as areas of severe winterkill. “If you have a 40-acre field, and the ten acres at the bottom have nothing but grass, note that,” Halliday says. The goal is to head off forage shortfalls by keeping on top of fertility issues (and resolving them by renovating the field, frost-seeding legumes or fertilizing). With enough early warning, you can also deal with a forage squeeze by renting more hay ground or buying additional forage.
At harvest time, use a notebook or your smartphone to log key data. I like to jot daily observations (along with grazing records and notes about lambing and calving dates and breeding times) on the kitchen calendar. Here’s an example from last July: “Baling No. 2 Field. 35 round bales. Rained on.”
When I have down time, I transfer the calendar’s entries onto a spreadsheet, and sketch a map or make notes describing my round bale storage.
By combining years of data, I get a handle on productivity. As Halliday says: “if you usually get seven (round) bales per acre and it’s going down to six bales, and then five, maybe you’ve got a soil problem out there and it’s time to get the soil probe out and find out what’s lacking.”
Step Three: Store bales by type and quality, so you know where to find them.
Everything looks different months after hay is made and stored, and even more so when snow flies. All the more reason for tags or maps to help with identification.
Whatever system you use, consider sorting bales by field, mowing date and quality as they’re brought in. In my case, round bales from the best, earliest-cut fields are laid out on the west side of my storage area. As the harvest continues, the storage area is filled until I arrive at the eastern side of the yard. The best hay is tarped, the poorest hay is left un-tarped. As I look from west to east, I can scan most of my round bale inventory and know the good stuff is on the west, under tarps, and the mediocre stuff towards the east, un-tarped. Rained-on hay is segregated in its own row, to feed to dry ewes.
Meanwhile, small square bales go in the barn. Most are first-cut, but about 150 of the very best second-cut squares are tagged with a loop of orange flagging tape, knotted on the twine. It takes a second for the person loading the elevator to slap on the tape, but if that stops this primo clover from being accidentally dumped out to the pony, the rams, or — shudder — dry ewes, it’s worth it.
Halliday is a proponent of identifying rows and lots of forage while you can still remember what’s in them. Go for cheap and easy labels — a note tucked into a sandwich bag and stuffed into the bale twine of the round bale at the end of the row, for example. For wrapped silage bales, a permanent marker “is worth its weight in gold,” he says. As the forage is wrapped, you can whip out the Sharpie and scribble “oats and peas” or “alfalfa/orchard grass” on the plastic.
As a bonus, segregating hay by type and quality makes it easier to test these “lots” of forage, generating reliable assessments of forage nutritional value. As for finding the hay afterwards, “keep it simple,” Halliday advises. “Just draw a map and show where things are. Stick it on the fridge so other people get used to seeing it. Include local landmarks — the fence here, or the barn there—so if the map gets turned upside down, it doesn’t reverse your system.”
In the midst of a frantic and exhausting haying season it’s tough to spare the neurons (and energy) to keep notes. But in an era where quality forage supplies seem tight and weather increasingly unpredictable, good forage inventory management means better animal performance, more efficient feeding and a farm that’s more Royal York Hotel, less Fawlty Towers.
— Ray Ford