Air February 19, 2003

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. Real quickly now, Grain Sorghum meetings on the schedule for February 21st, day after tomorrow in Salina and February 27th, a week from tomorrow in Marysville - call me for details. We receive a lot of requests for the Custom Farm Rates bulletin every year. Those are now available at the extension office or on line. We can help you get a copy either way!

You’re going to hear a lot from me over the next couple of months on stocking rates. We’ve been needing to adjust stocking rates for a long time, and now with the multiple year drought impacting us, we need to adjust them even more. First of all, what should be a normal stocking rate? IF you have a good warm season tall grass mix, with modern cows weighing 1100 to 1200 with a spring calf, I think 8½ to 9 acres per pair is where I’d like to be. Now that’s 8½ to 9 acres of good grass, not just pasture. Cedar trees, brush and timber don’t count unless you’re grazing goats or giraffes. And treat one bull just like a cow calf pair. Granted, he won’t be eating that much part of the time that he’s out there - he’ll have other things on his mind - but he’ll need to eat sometime. Now, we need to adjust those rates some more given the 3 years of fairly dry conditions. 2000 and 2002 were real bad, and in many parts of the county, 2002 wasn’t much better. So we’ve essentially had 3 years of less than ideal pasture conditions. One of the adjustments we have to make depends on the rainfall from October 1st of last year through the start of the grazing season. Well, so far we’re in pretty good shape there, because we had good rain last week and heavy rains in October. So as of right now, we’re above normal for that time period since October 1st. If we can maintain that for the next 8 to 10 weeks it’ll be good news because then we’d only need to reduce normal stocking rate by 40% instead of more. So, assuming normal rainfall until grazing season starts, plan on stocking at about 12 acres per cow calf pair. Sure, this seems awfully light, but remember that those grass plants have been hammered the last couple of years and they need a year of light duty to start to catch back up. Keep listening, I’ll have more on this subject in coming weeks!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2003.

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