Air December 8, 2004

Thank you Jerry, and good morning everyone.

Well, if you didn't make the cow-calf meeting last Thursday night, you missed a good one. Packed house and a great lineup of speakers! Lots of good discussion, but if I was to try to sum it up it would be management. Manage your pastures so you match carrying capacity with animal's needs. Manage your cow maintenance costs because that's about the only place you can really make a difference in controlling expenses and improvinig profitability. Manage your feed and nutrition so you know what your feed's value is and match that to the needs of the livestock. And finally manage all your potential feed resources. Make use of crop residues, wheat pasture, tame pasture and anything else available to minimize feed and maintenance costs.

Keeping on that theme, let's talk a little bit about those pastures. This is a great time of year to evaluate your pastures. Now, you can not drive by them on the nearest road at 50 mph and do a good job of evaluation. You need to get out in them with a 4-wheeler or on horseback or even walking. Whatever it takes, work the complete perimeter of your pastures and then do a couple of diagonal transects. You're looking for how much forage is left. If there's nothing left, that tells you something, especially after this year, and if you can't even see that there were cattle in the pasture, that tells you something else! There should be evidence of spot grazing fairly evenly about the pasture. If one part of the pasture is being greatly under utilized then look at cross fencing or water source development or moving salt and mineral feeders, anything to get cattle spending more time in the un-utilized area. That's assuming that the grass forage is of equal value to the areas that were being utilized. If it isn't then we have another management issue to discuss. Look for evidence of cool season grass invasion. That's easy to do right now because the desirable natives are brown and dormant, the cool season grasses, like cheat, brome, fescue or bluegrass are still going to be green. If you have a lot of green in your pastures, more so than just around gates, water sources and feeders, then we need to work on that. And also look for weed and brush invasion. We need to take all these things into account as we prepare our 2005 pasture management plans!

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2004.

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