Stretch your hay
Tips, techniques and nutrition for a short hay supply
By Dr. Jim White

With hay in the feeder by August, this winter will be challenging for cattle producers. Hay management will be critical.

You balance your checkbook. Or at least you look at your bank statement from time to time. It’s how you know where you stand financially. It’s time to do that with hay. You might have an excessive supply and liquidating the extra on the market could be profitable this year. But more likely, you have a tight supply or are short. So consider these tips as you manage your way through winter.

Assess needs and supplies
After culling cows who won’t be winter boarders, how much hay do you need to get through the winter? Cows in thin condition will eat 2 percent of their body weight as dry matter on a daily basis. Fat cows will eat about 1.75 percent. If you restrict-feed cows, you can get away with feeding them roughly a third forage and two-thirds grain at 1.4 to 1.5 percent of their bodyweight. They will be hungry. Just like limit-fed gestating sows, they should be monitored to ensure body condition is where it needs to be. And, just like limit-fed gestating sows, you will listen to them squall.

Suppose cows are a bit fleshy, and they average 1,300 lbs. If you peg them at getting 1.5 percent of their body weight as hay dry matter and an average of 2 pounds per day of cubes, that is about 22.5 pounds of as-is hay per cow per day. Assuming that you will feed hay for 120 days, you would need about ton and a third to a ton and a half per cow to get to spring. Bulls eat much more than cows, so count mature bulls as 1.5 cows.

Weigh a few bales
Begin by looking at how much forage is on hand. From each cutting or each hay purchase, you should know how many tons are out there. Unprotected bales stored outside will experience substantial damage from rain and weather—often in the range of 15 to 25 percent dry mater per year. Bales will have much less loss if stored under cover. If you have silage, measure the cubic feet of silage available. Corn silage will average 50 pounds to the cubic foot. Haylage will average 35 pounds per cubic foot. The best method to determine pounds to the cubic foot in a bunker silo is to get a plastic bucket, a heavy duty plastic garbage sack, some water in a bucket, a posthole digger and a scale: 1) hop on top of the pile; 2) dig out a hole, placing the silage dug out in the empty bucket; 3) put the sack in the hole, pour water into the sack until the water is flush to the top of the silage. You either weigh the water in the sack, or know how much you started with and determine the difference. Water weighs 62.4 lbs. to the cubic foot. If you weigh the water (tared bag) and it is 11.25 lbs., the hole is 11.25/62.4 or 0.18 cubic feet. If the silage out of the hole weighs 8.5 lbs., you have 47.25 lbs./cubic foot of silage, as is.

Get a moisture test
With it, you can determine how much actual dry matter those cows will get out of every bale. If you’re on the edge of having enough hay or in the market to buy expensive hay, you want to be as accurate as possible in assessing your needs.

Now work up your feed budget knowing how far your hay will go, how much you need to stretch it, and possibly how much more you’ll need to buy.

Winter’s wrath?
Adjust feeding based on weather stress. We don’t know whether this will be a mild winter like last year or a hard one. What we do know is that for roughly each degree below 40 degrees, cows will need an extra 1 percent of energy to maintain themselves. So, if it’s 10 degrees outside, they need an added 30 percent of groceries. Failure to adjust for the climactic conditions leads to lost body weight, higher supplemental feed requirements for thin cows, weak calves and poor breed backs next spring. Under feeding cows does not significantly reduce calving weights, but it does substantially increase dystocia and reduces calf survivability.

In a year when there are sufficient forage supplies of adequate quality (i.e. 11 to 12 percent protein and 52 to 55 percent TDN), my preference would be to use MFA 20 percent Breeder Cubes at 2 pounds per day. These can be fed every other day at 4 pounds per head for convenience. By feeding cubes you supplement protein, energy, vitamins and minerals all in one shot without having to worry about the sulfur levels that can be experienced with some corn byproducts. High sulfur levels in the ration can cause a disease known as polio in cattle. This is more problematic when drought feeding because you are typically short of forage (low forage intake has been associated with polio), and you often end up feeding a heavy rate of high-sulfur byproducts because of cost and availability.

Ask some questions
Do cows have to be wintered on hay? The answer may be dictated by available feed. The table below is from 3 years of restricted-feeding a higher energy diet to good-sized Angus/Simmental cows at the University of Kentucky. The cows were bred to Simmental bulls. Researchers compared wintering cows on hay to wintering cows on a very low level of hay. Cows were wintered separately. During the grazing season they were co-mingled and maintained on the same pastures. Cows that were fed a restricted diet lost slightly less body weight than cows on hay; both groups maintained condition well. The only way to tell the difference between a group of cows dropping 50 pounds and another dropping 70 pounds is with scales. Seeing the 20-pound difference is a challenge. While calf birth weight was higher for the restricted group, no increase in dystocia was observed during the trial. The big differences were in weaning weight and conception rates, both were higher for the restricted-diet cows.

If forages are slim, consider MFA 14 percent Drought Cubes where 5 to 7 pounds of cubes can replace the energy and protein of 10 to 11 pounds of hay. If hay is in extremely short supply, you can feed roughly twice the above amount of cubes with 3 to 5 pounds of hay. When doing this, it is absolutely crucial to ensure animals will not be shorted because of inadequate feeding space. A cow’s ability to get feed is related to her ability to push and shove.

Don’t quit feeding too soon in the spring. With dwindling hay supplies, it will be tempting to back off the feeding program and hope that the cows are getting their nutritional needs from sprigs of grass. Research shows that cows that lost weight just prior to calving had weaker calves and lower conception rates later in the spring, especially those that lost weight before and after calving. There have been numerous studies showing thinner cows have lower pregnancy rates. The graph above shows some typical results. It suffices to say that cows at a body condition score of 4 or below need help. Cows should be closer to body condition score 6 for best results.

Some people will be tempted to neglect minerals as feed costs rise, too. Remember that cows undergoing the stress of a hard winter will use minerals faster than cows with little stress. To obtain optimum immune function and reproductive performance from their herds, producers must provide proper levels of macro and trace minerals.

Pastures need help, too
In a spring following drought, grass roots suffer from water shortage; this is the case in spite of pastures starting to green up. To help pastures recover, grazing should be delayed by a couple weeks to let roots recover and the plants build up leaf area. Drought weakens plant root systems, and heavy grazing of drought-stressed cool-season grasses like fescue, bromegrass and orchardgrass makes the situation worse.

Cool-season grasses grazed heavily early in the year will lower the total forage yield, which translates directly to lower carrying capacity. Usually the best time to begin grazing cool-season pastures is when the plants are 3 to 4 inches tall. If you start when they are not yet 3 to 4 inches tall, the subsequent yields will be lowered. If the pastures are too wet, wait until the grass is 6 inches tall. But wait much longer than that and Midwest cool-season grasses will “get away from you.”

Given that normal springs are wet, graze the best-drained areas first. Start grazing in a different pasture every year to maintain stand persistence and control weeds.

If you have pastures of switchgrass or bluestem, the pastures should be grazed early to remove early season grasses and weeds. Getting rid of the weeds helps retain moisture and reduces competition for the warm-season species. Grazing early growth on native, warm-season pastures will not harm the warm-season grass as long as cattle finish grazing before new grass shoots get more than a couple inches tall. In northern Missouri this is the first week of May. The further south you go, the earlier this happens.

Dr. Paul Tracy, MFA director of agronomy services, makes the following important points about when to start grazing:

• There is no right or wrong time. Turn-in time will depend upon stand condition.

• Many producers will be frost-seeding legumes into stressed pastures this winter. It is critically important that stressed pastures receive adequate fertility before grazing. Growers should apply their N, P and K in late winter and let that take hold before aggressive grazing.

• In areas where stands have become thin, grazing too early will definitely stimulate weed problems. Some weeds graze well, others do not.

• If the pasture is extremely stressed, it would be a good time to renovate. In this situation we recommend a kill-smother-kill program. No grazing should be done on those fields. 

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