Timing management practices? By Donald Hubbell, Resident Director in Charge, Livestock and Forestry Research Station, UofA
Timing is everything. We structure our daily lives around the clock.
Livestock production should be considered a “timed” event, much
like calf roping or steer wrestling. Try to beat the clock, or weather, to get the biggest payoff. Conditions change and can be different in the same calendar month each year, but overall they usually turn out to be about the same. Planning for these changes and sticking to a time line pays off more times than not. One of the timed events, like planting winter annuals the first week in September, regardless of
conditions, has always paid off. In summer 2010, there was essentially no moisture for planting winter annuals at the end of August. However, we planted anyway on Sept. 2 and 3. The results? We had cattle turned out on time – Nov. 2 – and grazed the same number of steers, at 500 pounds an acre, we always grazed in the fall. We grazed that set of steers till Feb. 18 and had one of our best-ever average daily gain years for the fall group. We fertilized on Feb. 15 and put a new set of steers in at 1,250 pounds per acre on Feb. 23. We have been doing this consistently since the fall of 1996. There have been wet years, dry years, cold years, warm years, even armyworm years. Except for planting dates, which never change more than one or two days either way, the grazing time that animals are grazing and gaining never changes more than 10 days either way. This has become something that we count on to be there for our overall operation. I do not expect this to change much except for the genetics and quality of the sale barn cattle we
use for these projects. Establishing stockpiles of fescue and bermudagrass for deferred grazing has saved us untold bales of hay. While we did not get the “big” stockpiles we usually get, we were able to keep most cattle on stockpiled forage until late December. Hay production was limited for us, just like many other operations in the area and across the state. Having covered storage and
carryover from previous years will carry us through the winter without having to purchase hay or de-stock. Had we not fertilized these stockpiled areas around Sept. 1, we would have been feeding hay to the majority of our herds by Nov. 1. These are just two examples of how timing keeps our operation consistent and on schedule with the production cycle that we have established. Does your “timing” need a change?