From the Barns: Every month is busy

As March hit, we finally got some relief on the weather and had some nice days that first week. February stayed ugly until the end and muddy, muddy, muddy. I stand by my statement that it has been the worst winter we have faced in several years, and it was a really tough 75-day stretch for us. The forecast for the upcoming week looks really nice, as they are forecasting 70-degree temps and not much, if any, rain.

We did go ahead and wean the fall-born calves on Feb. 27. We haven’t turned them out yet, but have kept them in the receiving barn and bedded with straw. They were already bunk broke, having eaten alongside their mothers for the past 90 days, so no surprise they are cleaning their feed up each day and I am increasing their intake daily. They may be at the point where I need to stop the increase and keep them at this level, for I don’t want to get them too fleshy at this age. I do hope we can get them turned out at least in a trap the next day or two and at that point will offer them free-choice hay along with their ration.

I said last month I might not sell any more fats until last half of March, but I went ahead and shipped a grid load to Tama this past week. I was getting nervous because of pen conditions. Have had some trouble with slick and muddy conditions and cattle that have trouble getting up and down. We saved a few and lost a few. I think the “mud fatigue” has also been an issue, so we wanted to reduce some risk and go ahead and sell some. It only takes one downer or bloater to slash the profit, so why take that chance?

Anyhow, it turned out that the cattle performed and graded better than I had projected. They were heavier than I thought and weighed well over 1,500 pounds and they were plenty well finished as this load had 76% prime. So, obviously, a good decision. That being the case, I am shipping another load up there next week and are going to try and sell two cash loads that would ship before the end of March.

Since we are going to have nice weather this week, we have a lot of heavy feeders still out on traps that need to be sorted by size and penned accordingly, so that is on this week’s agenda. I think we will end up with three to four groups out of about 250 head and they immediately need to be transitioned to the finishing diet, at least the ones that are heavier. I also have a couple of pens in the feedlot of cattle that need to be implanted and hopefully get to that, as well, soon.

Also on the to-do-list is ultrasound preg-checking the 90 heifers that were bred this winter. They will be far enough along to do later in the week. We will take the ones that we are keeping down to the Russell farm and the ones that we will be offering for sale we will be keeping closer to home. Of course, there will be some open heifers in the group and they will go straight to the feedlot to start that phase of their journey.

With the help of Hamson Ag out of Dahlgren, they came down and used their drones to fly on legumes that we wanted to interseed on some of our pastures. Got that done a couple of weeks ago. We ended up doing 165 acres and we put on red clover, white clover and Korean lespedeza. Hoping that proves to be a benefit to our summer pastures.

This week I also intend to have fertilization done on the cereal rye and ryegrass we sowed last fall. Had hoped to do it a little sooner, but the fields were just too soft to attempt that. At least need to get nitrogen on these fields and give the grass a boost to come on, as we need to be grazing that right off. That should give us 60 to 90 days of forage, so every day is important. We had some soil testing done of some of these fields, so we may need to add some P&K, as well.

Cow preg-checking in a week or two and then out to summer pasture, as well. The spring calving heifers are dropping babies like crazy. I think we have calved 40 to 50 just in the past week. Those were the ones that conceived AI. We could have a brief lull, then the bull-bred ones should begin. I think there will be close to 40 of them. A few cows have had a calf, but the majority of them will start in the next week or two, as well. Looks like it will be a busy month, but I guess aren’t they all?