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| Winter 2011 | We went into winter with the 90 rolls of hay we put up and almost 500 rolls of poor quality one and two year old hay. We usually put up 3,000 rolls. All of our pastures looked like a pool table—no grass cover. Normally in the olden days when it rained we had to do our last cutting of hay late so that when we drilled our cereal rye it would not have much competition from the coastal Bermuda grass. This year we felt we had to go ahead and plant our winter cover crop even with a forecast of continued dry weather. We planted and it RAINED enough to get it up. We then top dressed it with 100 units of nitrogen in the form of urea and it rained again. For the first time in my life time we were grazing our cover crop of cereal rye (Maton®) and rye grass (TAM 90®) by January 1st. You can graze this cover crop earlier if you plant into a prepared seed bed and be ready to fight army worms. I went into detail about this because it is a first and we needed it more than ever before.
Our fall calving has gone well. We settled 72% AI this fall by synchronizing with Cystorelin® and Lutalyse® and breeding on heats. Our timed breeding of those that did not come in heat was an underwhelming success—so bad that this year we bred only on heats this fall. After AI-ing these cows and allowing them to pass over and re-bred those that came back in heat one time, we proceeded to place them with clean-up bulls. We bred the same way this year but didn’t do any timed breeding.
Females that we’re going to offer in our fall sale that will be bred AI will be bred in such a way that we will know for sure whether they are safe to the AI date or not. We are considering blood testing after 30 days past breeding for elevated progesterone levels to more accurately determine the AI date. This test is proven 97% accurate and is safer by not aborting 40 day pregnancies by palpation.
We have fed gin trash (the cotton plant after hulls, seeds, and cotton are removed) in lieu of hay. The plant is ground up and contains about 8% protein. Normally the cost of gin trash is reasonable but now it has been priced too high. We bought and fed soy bean hay with 14% protein. It was used for our cow-calf pairs before they were placed on winter cover crop. We fed about an 8-10% protein hay to our dry cows.
We are preparing for our spring bull sale. We will not sell commercial females this spring; we don’t have enough to offer so we will sell them in our fall sale. In the fall, we will also be selling bred pure bred Simmental and SimAngus females and bulls. We have a video on our website of the bulls offered in the spring sale. We will post a video for the fall sale as well.
| | Spring 2011 | Spring Letter 2011
With the drought, cost of feed and fertilizer, we are struggling like everyone else. We started our breeding program December 10, 2010 by synchronizing all cows with calves over 45 days old and heifers 14-15 months, and weighing over 700 pounds, with GNRH and PG and BNRH and PG (Select Timed A.I.). We A.I.’ed with PB Black Simmental bulls, heavy doses of Sure Bet, Lucky Man, Ranch Hand and others with high API and TI, also pure bred angus with Mitty In Focus and Destination 978.
We planted our winter pasture with the cereal rye (Maton) and rye grass TAM 90. The cereal rye came up but we are still wondering about our rye grass. We top dressed the pastures the first week of February with urea- 60 units which cost about $3/acre more than last year. This will be grazed with young growing cattle and cow/calf pairs. If we get rain and warm weather this would be a smart move. If not, well, I’ve been there before.
We will be offering our best set of bulls yet for our spring sale, February 19, 2011 at the ranch- most A.I. sired Red and Black PB bulls and also SimAngus. All bulls are polled and age range from 3 months to 26 months.
I feel with the cattle numbers down and prices up, that the Simmental breed is well positioned to offer growth and carcass traits to the majority of the nation’s cow herd. That will return welcome and much-needed benefits. These benefits will be magnified by hybrid vigor, a fact not readily discussed by other breeds.
Hopefully, we all can profit by the strong cattle market.
Joe Prud’homme
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