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| Winter 2009 | It’s been a very wet fall and a cold winter. It was so wet that we did not get our cereal rye and rye grass drilled until late December. We didn’t get all the clover drilled for the same reason. We did not top dress the winter planting and are hoping that our chicken litter will be enough to get the winter pasture started. If the weather pattern gets over this “global warming” we will top dress with urea in early February.
Our feeding program has changed some from last year. We are not using feed limiters for our breeding cattle because of cost. We are hand feeding five pounds a day with free access to hay. Our hay tests 10-12% protein. There is higher labor cost but our feed bill was killing us.
With this program it has been easier to pen our heats for our AI program. We synchronized our cattle with lutalyse and had a very unusual response with our first injection. We bred 75 head in one day. We repeat the lutalyse injection in 11 days. We started with 200 head of fall calvers and virgin heifers, and all except for 3 have been Artificially Inseminated. We started our breeding with 5 days breeding on heat detection and then lutalyse. We placed the heat detection patches, which was helpful. Our fall calves looked really good.
Our virgin heifers are developed on Purina feed limiters but put on hay only for 60 days prior to breeding to ensure that we didn’t have a group of fat heifers to breed. They cycled very well and appear to have bred up nicely. We had a good fall PB female, commercial female, and bull sale the last weekend of October. There is a lot of interest in Simmental bulls because of the extra 50-100 pounds weaning weight.
We will have our spring bull sale with 75 Simmental and Sim Angus bulls February 20. We will also offer 50 F1 Brah-Herf cross females, 19 bred to Angus bulls and 31 stout open heifers.
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7P Ranch |
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