From the Barns: Stirring up dust

Since my last writing, the weather and conditions changed in a heartbeat. I predicted it would, for that is summertime weather in southern Illinois. In the past month, we have only received a quarter inch of rain. Went from green to brown and dry as a bone with dust flying everywhere. We knew this would come and we are fortunate that the rain and grass lasted as long as it did.

Summer forage has all but disappeared. Any breeding female with a calf at side or ones who have or are close to calving are being fed with the total mixed ration, providing almost all the dry matter intake they need daily via that method. That is noticeably ramping up feed tonnage, but it is necessary based on the conditions.

To help cut down on some of the feed making, we decided to go ahead and wean our spring-born calves, so yesterday we pulled off all 150 head and put them in the receiving barn after weighing and vaccinating them. They are bawling a lot, but eating well already, as they have been eating alongside their mothers, so that should make for a smooth weaning transition. We will continue to feed their mothers, but should be able to cut back some and pull back on some of the energy and replace with more hay to cheapen up the ration.

Because we weren’t able to plant the sudangrass because of the spring wetness, we have been grazing the 160 breeding heifers on those acres — mostly crabgrass and wild stuff that volunteered. We pulled the heifers off this past week and I must say they look great considering what they’ve had to eat. They were pretty much out of anything to eat out there and we have made the decision to plant wheat for grazing, so we need to be prepping for that. We have decided to disc it once or twice. We have been strictly no-tilling, but we think it is time to break it up and this ground is so hard and packed right now I don’t think we could get a drill to penetrate the ground. Hopefully, we get that sowed in the next week or two.

Speaking of the breeding heifers, we will be preg checking them the week of Sept. 15. The cows we just weaned the calves off of, I imagine we will be checking them out fairly soon, as well. We have bred heifers calving now, as well. Had several calves early, but technically it is just now their due dates, so calves should be hitting the ground right off in abundance and also a good number of cows starting to have their calves also.

We keep moving a load of fat cattle every other week and will be shipping our next load out three days from now. Despite all the hot weather we had in July and August, the cattle have come on well and look great. Returns on the cattle we have sold continue to show they are performing and grading very well.

The temperatures we have been blessed with the past week or two have the cattle enjoying life and stirring up a lot of dust as they romp around the pens. We are going to get a warm-up this coming weekend with temps getting back into the low 90s — not looking forward to that.