#9 Save on hay when feeding it out

Hello, I am Jim Elizondo of Real Wealth Ranching and today we are going to consider how to save on hay when feeding it out.

You may think, isn’t it better to feed the soil with hay? Isn’t that a way to increase humus content of our soils?

While rotting hay may give some temporary surge of grass growth due to its organic humic acids being released, it is a very expensive way to increase soil humus as most soil humus is not produced by litter being degraded in the soil, but it comes mainly from the decomposition of the microorganism's bodies and these microorganisms are fed by the plants root exudates which in turn depend on the leaf to stem ratio in the plant. We know we can affect the leaf to stem ratio in the following regrowth by doing Total Grazing as my Total Grazing students have been doing with good success. Remember: green leaves produce energy through photosynthesis while stems consume energy through respiring.

It is important, therefore, to use your high-cost hay the most efficiently you can and get the most out of it.

With today’s high cost of hay, you cannot afford to let it go to waste. It is normal to only get a 70% use efficiency with hay when feeding in diverse ways and we want that number to be higher. Let's say a round bale of Bermuda hay cost is $50 and we waste 30% or $15 per round bale. Wouldn’t it be better to only lose $5 instead of $15 per round bale? Then you could keep that money in your pocket and in 300 bales that is $3,000 which you can keep! If you feed more than that you can make your own numbers.

Depending on feeding conditions and situations you can use the following:

-Hay ring

-Hay feeder

-Stand the round bale on its end

-Unroll the round bale in the pasture

-Chop the hay and feed it in the ground

All these different options have different percentages of waste and utilization, but the most important factor is to keep your animals a little hungry so that instead of selecting the best and trampling the rest they clean up their plate, so to speak.

Why is this so important? Because the difference on a 200 weaned calf herd in a corral can be 1-2 round bales per day of waste and that amounts to $75 per day which on 100 days is $7,500 dollars with no extra benefit.

It has been my experience that when you know to judge gut fill, you can assess if they have enough round bales or if they need more. Many times, they need half a bale more, so we need to be wise and adjust.

We want to keep our livestock full and content, but we also want to limit waste to keep that money in our pockets. We want our cattle to be full in the evening and a little hungry in the morning.

In my experience, I go early in the morning to inspect how much hay is left when on full feeding, and depending on how much is left over, I adjust the number of round bales to be put out, then in the evening I go again to check if they have good gut fill, the triangle between the last rib and the hip bone and their behavior. 

If not, they will lay down on the trampled leftover hay and not consume it anymore which leads to waste and unhappy animals next day.

When you find them in the early morning laying on top of much wasted hay that is a sure sign of hay being wasted. Now, when it is very wet and they lay on the hay it is preferable to them laying on the mud on clay soils, so that would be preferable.

When feeding hay on a central location or on a corral, like when feeding weaned calves, there is a hay feeder where the round bale is suspended by metal hooks and the calves can feed through the slots in the modified hay ring. This seems to work well at limiting waste where any hay that drops to the ground inside the hay ring can be picked up by the cattle. My Total Grazing students are having success in feeding less hay by using stockpiled forage and sometimes a minimum protein supplement if protein in the stockpile is deficient. And when they need to feed hay to a higher nutrient-demanding group like weaned calves, they try to use the hay efficiently as prices of hay are very high.

So, in conclusion, humus is not increased substantially by rolling out hay as its effect of humic acids when it decomposes is short lived and hay is very expensive for that purpose. If you are a Total Grazing student, you already know how humus is really formed and know this. This means that using hay as a fertility building strategy is not a good idea, I have seen places where they had been rolling hay for over 7 years and soda apple, an invasive thorny weed, takes over those spots in that environment.

By using hay efficiently, we can save dollars and still get good results in our cattle’s performance, we need to be observant and feed according to demand, no more and no less, then we can get a high utilization percentage with good results in our animals.

A word of caution, if hay is low in protein so that protein needs to be fed, make sure you do not feed too much protein as this will cause other problems by increasing the pH of the animal. Problems like foot rot and pink eye.

I hope this has helped you to make decisions that will improve your bottom line. Goodbye for now, make sure you subscribe to the podcast in Spotify, iTunes or YouTube, you can also join us on the weekly email at www.rwranching.com/join