Intensive cell grazing cattle

[Kiwi Pete]

Given the number of dairy farms in the UK using all the land they can get for milk prodiction, so not keeping their calfs. I expect traditional cow/calf setups can't complete with buying dairy calfs unless land too hard for dairy calfs.

Same here, that's why we targeted dairy grazing snd largely ran dairy beef crosses. With the stocking rate doubling and variable costs reducing to nearly nothing, very few people can match the profit per hectare for the time input.

With our "deluxe" technosystems - no fences to make, no water troughs to eat time, 2 hours per ha per year is achievable

Milking farmers is easy work, despite claims we spend the bare minimum, really a fallacy. People in general pay for convenience, and farmers are people ! Hence the false economy of temporary electric fencing

 

[ringi]

That depends if the farmer have off farm work so care about profit per hour of farm work, or is trying to maximise profit regardless of number of hours work on the farm.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Yes, indeed.

Is it better to net $800/ha with 20 hours a day being worked or $990/ac with 15-20 minutes a day?

It depends mainly on whether you love spending time with your family or whether you would rather be "busy on the farm" and have them come to you ?

Payback time for the spend on infrastructure was approx 2½ months

 

[ringi]

It depends mainly on whether you love spending time with your family or whether you would rather be "busy on the farm" and have them come to you

Avoiding needing to commute to off farm work will increase time with family. But adding organic pasture eggs behind the cattle in cell grazing could create more on farm profit. (And give free p&k)

(Likewise farm tourists.)

Getting a large enough farm in UK for pure cell grazing is likely stil much harder then New Zealand.

 

[ringi]

Payback time for the spend on infrastructure was approx 2½ months

How much per head of cattle did the fencing cost?

(https://www.nofence.no/en-gb/ seem to be about £60 per collar and need good mobile coverage.)

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Avoiding needing to commute to off farm work will increase time with family. But adding organic pasture eggs behind the cattle in cell grazing could create more on farm profit. (And give free p&k)

(Likewise farm tourists.)

Getting a large enough farm in UK for pure cell grazing is likely stil much harder then New Zealand.

Oh, I didn't need to work, still don't. I needed to get off the farm to avoid making something cheap, expensive.. and to avoid making something simple and flexible, cumbersome and complicated.

Is 104 acres hard to find over there, I guess it must be - you sure seem to come up with a lot of reasons why nothing works in the UK, it's a mindset thing and nothing else

 

[ImLost]

How much per head of cattle did the fencing cost?

(https://www.nofence.no/en-gb/ seem to be about £60 per collar and need good mobile coverage.)

Has anyone on this forum actually tried these on any serious scale?

 

[Kiwi Pete]

How much per head of cattle did the fencing cost?

(https://www.nofence.no/en-gb/ seem to be about £60 per collar and need good mobile coverage.)

Fencing was about ⅓ of the total cost, from memory.

And it makes a difference which stocking rate you work it out on to get an accurate figure, our peak SR was 8.1/ha (see comments I made above regarding embarrassing covers) but more regularly around 5/ha or slightly under.
It's far easier to work out on a per hectare basis and then work out per head from there, I think we spent $430/ha so let's say $150/ha of it was fence and bike and related hardware.
5 animals per hectare = $30/hd = £15/hd roughly
8hd/ha would bring it down to more like £9/hd but of course that's not how it works, this is a per area cost because animals come and go.

Sure beats the crap out of 2 head per hectare and feeding your winter silage out in the summer because you made silage - what's the cost of one tractor again?

 

[Bury the Trash]

it's a mindset thing and nothing else

interesting i really must try that change mind mind set to believe :

"it has stopped raining "

"It hasn t rained most days for the last few months "

"they never it into a muddy mess when moved before they even get chance to eat it "

" I am the Worlds best lover "


"theres faires at the bottom of the garden "


lol.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

I mock what I cannot comprehend

 

[ImLost]

@Kiwi Pete any out of the box suggestions for when we are grazing ground that can only be grazed within certain months because of schemes we have in the UK (not me that signed up to them!) and ground that floods/is too wet to carry cattle in the winter?

We mostly house at the moment, but the other obvious one is outwintering on arable ground (not sure how keen arable farmers would be round here) any other suggestions of systems you have tried or seen in action?

 

[ringi]

interesting i really must try that change mind mind set to believe :

"it has stopped raining "

"It hasn t rained most days for the last few months "

"they never it into a muddy mess when moved before they even get chance to eat it "

Having no livestock over winter and the long recover times must help with these issues.

 

[ringi]

@Kiwi Pete any out of the box suggestions for when we are grazing ground that can only be grazed within certain months because of schemes we have in the UK (not me that signed up to them!) and ground that floods/is too wet to carry cattle in the winter?

We mostly house at the moment, but the other obvious one is outwintering on arable ground (not sure how keen arable farmers would be round here) any other suggestions of systems you have tried or seen in action?

Buy the stirks in spring that someone else have fed indoors over winter, sell them late October to a finishing unit.

 

[Bury the Trash]

Having no livestock over winter and the long recover times must help with these issues.

someone has to keep livestock over winter or else there wouldn't be any for over summer.

anyone who cant comprehend why there is a requirement for enough conserved feed and and dry areas for stock to at least lie in constant wet conditions for 6 months or so which we get here every year and even may imply that they are not needed are to the impressionable, is to put it mildly not a good influence.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

@Kiwi Pete any out of the box suggestions for when we are grazing ground that can only be grazed within certain months because of schemes we have in the UK (not me that signed up to them!) and ground that floods/is too wet to carry cattle in the winter?

We mostly house at the moment, but the other obvious one is outwintering on arable ground (not sure how keen arable farmers would be round here) any other suggestions of systems you have tried or seen in action?

Hi there, yes out of the box is by far the best way around the usual problems, having an actual grazing plan is the step most people overlook - because - "We've got this" ?

First port of call is illogical - increase grazing intensity. There's all this BS about wasting grass, and as we know lax rotational grazing may work at times to boost animal performance, but the cost is that either stocking rates suffer and/or grazing frequency must increase.

That's the real issue whether wet dry or in between, grazing every few weeks you may as well let them have at it every few days, for all the good short recoveries will do. Compounding damage is nearly always the result of grazing animals in unfit conditions, so in our case we plan where the animals will mainly be over winter and setaside/stockpiling is key to better outcomes.

Jaime Elizondo (the Total Grazing guy you see on FB) is one of the few out there promoting actual regen grazing (nonselective grazing with high utilisation and longish recovery periods) but really it's a multi pronged approach:

Planning, beginning with financial planning as per holistic management framework

The right animals, for us weaners over winter which would be 170kg now and 250kg by the shortest day... heavy animals are useless in more ways than one, very inefficient as so much food is maintenance, sheep are harder to contain and can be sooks in wet weather, they evolved to browse in semi arid areas, not graze in waterlogged conditions

The right pasture - what we would call "maori hay" protects the soil and even if not well utilised, stops mud from being made and at best, gets pushed in as an absorbent "weave" which rapidly builds topsoil

The right animal movement dynamics - content controlled and slightly modified animal behaviour caused by raising the stock density over summer and leaving it there.

Constant safe-to-fail trial work can not be over-emphasised enough, what works is not what you or I or the troll team "think", what we think makes so little difference.
"I think the sky would look great if it was green during the week and purple on the weekends", makes no difference to what's so about the sky. So break the thinking habit and get scientific about it.. what happens if we setaside for 9 months and graze at high density? Ok how about 16 months? 15 months? And so on. Trials need to be proper trials, not using the ram paddock or suchlike, not going off what we see when a parcel gets away and we shut it and cut it - that's going back to thinking and that's where we go wrong

Biggest one is still working on maintaining a low variable cost model, 'consolidating during good times makes getting out so much more affordable' (Warren Buffett) holds pretty true with grazing but is at odds with common farming practice where stocking rate is largely determined by what we can carry over winter.
In the conditions described on TFF, many farms should be destocked right now "but can't afford it" so you have to use your noodle - what do you want to be?

In our case with beef, it was always a topup over and above a contract dairy-grazing thing, but having no variable costs to cover it meant buying cheap cattle at the wrong time of year (when everyone's buying) and selling them at the wrong time also (when people just want them gone) and making a margin.

Last full financial year only about 10% of the profit was from beef, just solar-powered topping machines to boost utilisation over and above what wee dairy heifer calves can handle on their own - products of their environment really they are about as robust as store lambs off a lowland farm are.

Really it means having at least ⅓ of your area setaside/stockpiled at any given time and more is definitely an advantage if you have metres of rain while things aren't growing over winter, possibly ⅔ of the area you guys call home ?

That isn't just going to happen by itself on a conventional "spread em out, cut it down, tip that bit over" style farming operation so for us it was all-in or pack it in .

Taking it back to the original point of the thread about intensive beef grazing, best advice is to get what you get from TFF and then throw all that away, just pay the money and do a Total Grazing course with Jim.

I haven't done that, I haven't done a holistic managment course either, but I know the people who "invented the stuff" reasonably well and arrived there by logic, just as they did. Trial and observe

 

[ringi]

someone has to keep livestock over winter or else there wouldn't be any for over summer.

anyone who cant comprehend why there is a requirement for enough conserved feed and and dry areas for stock to at least lie in constant wet conditions for 6 months or so which we get here every year and even may imply that they are not needed are to the impressionable, is to put it mildly not a good influence.

With dairy calfs being done for beaf, let that somebody be in the middle of an arable farm.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Having no livestock over winter and the long recover times must help with these issues.

Definitely.

The question has to be asked, if it wasn't for the quality of my boundary fences, what animals would be here - under these conditions ?

Animals would be somewhere where there is tall enough vegetation they can hardly be seen, not parked in a swamp or a shed waiting for food.

Sure there's that sunk-cost-fallacy keeping the status quo in place, but it's not bad luck that things don't work very well.

Sheep would be in the Mediterranean this time of year, if they could be.

How does that compare to the cost of one tractor

 

[Bury the Trash]

With dairy calfs being done for beaf, let that somebody be in the middle of an arable farm.

majority of arable farmers by their nature don't want livestock as to why you better ask @Clive
I doubt they would want there top few inches of best soil puckered out for a few years .therefore concrete roofs tanks and silage clamps would be needed hmm.

 

[sheepdogtrail]

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[unlacedgecko]

Hi there, yes out of the box is by far the best way around the usual problems, having an actual grazing plan is the step most people overlook - because - "We've got this" ?

First port of call is illogical - increase grazing intensity. There's all this BS about wasting grass, and as we know lax rotational grazing may work at times to boost animal performance, but the cost is that either stocking rates suffer and/or grazing frequency must increase.

That's the real issue whether wet dry or in between, grazing every few weeks you may as well let them have at it every few days, for all the good short recoveries will do. Compounding damage is nearly always the result of grazing animals in unfit conditions, so in our case we plan where the animals will mainly be over winter and setaside/stockpiling is key to better outcomes.

Jaime Elizondo (the Total Grazing guy you see on FB) is one of the few out there promoting actual regen grazing (nonselective grazing with high utilisation and longish recovery periods) but really it's a multi pronged approach:

Planning, beginning with financial planning as per holistic management framework

The right animals, for us weaners over winter which would be 170kg now and 250kg by the shortest day... heavy animals are useless in more ways than one, very inefficient as so much food is maintenance, sheep are harder to contain and can be sooks in wet weather, they evolved to browse in semi arid areas, not graze in waterlogged conditions

The right pasture - what we would call "maori hay" protects the soil and even if not well utilised, stops mud from being made and at best, gets pushed in as an absorbent "weave" which rapidly builds topsoil

The right animal movement dynamics - content controlled and slightly modified animal behaviour caused by raising the stock density over summer and leaving it there.

Constant safe-to-fail trial work can not be over-emphasised enough, what works is not what you or I or the troll team "think", what we think makes so little difference.
"I think the sky would look great if it was green during the week and purple on the weekends", makes no difference to what's so about the sky. So break the thinking habit and get scientific about it.. what happens if we setaside for 9 months and graze at high density? Ok how about 16 months? 15 months? And so on. Trials need to be proper trials, not using the ram paddock or suchlike, not going off what we see when a parcel gets away and we shut it and cut it - that's going back to thinking and that's where we go wrong

Biggest one is still working on maintaining a low variable cost model, 'consolidating during good times makes getting out so much more affordable' (Warren Buffett) holds pretty true with grazing but is at odds with common farming practice where stocking rate is largely determined by what we can carry over winter.
In the conditions described on TFF, many farms should be destocked right now "but can't afford it" so you have to use your noodle - what do you want to be?

In our case with beef, it was always a topup over and above a contract dairy-grazing thing, but having no variable costs to cover it meant buying cheap cattle at the wrong time of year (when everyone's buying) and selling them at the wrong time also (when people just want them gone) and making a margin.

Last full financial year only about 10% of the profit was from beef, just solar-powered topping machines to boost utilisation over and above what wee dairy heifer calves can handle on their own - products of their environment really they are about as robust as store lambs off a lowland farm are.

Really it means having at least ⅓ of your area setaside/stockpiled at any given time and more is definitely an advantage if you have metres of rain while things aren't growing over winter, possibly ⅔ of the area you guys call home ?

That isn't just going to happen by itself on a conventional "spread em out, cut it down, tip that bit over" style farming operation so for us it was all-in or pack it in .

Taking it back to the original point of the thread about intensive beef grazing, best advice is to get what you get from TFF and then throw all that away, just pay the money and do a Total Grazing course with Jim.

I haven't done that, I haven't done a holistic managment course either, but I know the people who "invented the stuff" reasonably well and arrived there by logic, just as they did. Trial and observe

He learned it from Johan Zietsman. "Man, Cattle, Veld" is something I listen to quite often