How We Bale Graze Cattle
How we bake graze cattle. This is our experience as a winter feeding program for cattle. We are located in Alberta Canada where the ground freezes solid for 5 months during winter. This is our advantage as we don’t wreck soil as it melts/thaws.
The 2 main advantage for bale grazing is first: low equipment costs, equipment is only needed to set out the hay and therefor you don’t need to own a tractor. Second advantage is the left over hay, manure and urine is the ultimate fertilizer spread out evenly. Most nitrogen comes from the urine soaking is and water holding capacity from the organic matter left over. We hope to see a double in forage production next year.
The feed rate is controlled using electric fence, be sure to train livestock on electric fence first. Issues known in winter with electric fence is poor grounding due to frozen ground/ lack of water. The solution to this could be a bi-polar electric fence where you run two wires from the charger, one hot and one ground. This way the circuit is completed when an animal touches both wires.
To allocate feeding we setup 1 bale accessible for every 10 cows. For example we have 35 cows and feed three at a time allowing each cow access to a bale at once. This helps ensure all are fed well. We found the cattle clean up the feed better when it is cold then warm. We simply wait longer when needed to ensure more is cleaned up. We feel it is ok to have some waste as it is a fertilizer. I don’t need to be the most efficient, I prefer to be effective. Our goal is to improve the pasture and winter cattle economically, eliminating equipment costs was a huge advantage for us.
Stay tuned for how this pasture looks next year. Thanks for watching.
Пікірлер: 14
great video it is wonderful to see young farmers in action fantastic plan for your winter feeding happy grazing chuck ledbetter checotah oklahoma just a bit futher south than you are
Great technique love it and you are well articulated.
Wow it's beautiful place I love the snow..
Good job. Just subscribed.
I'm happy for you buddy. Nice to see you after so many years and I'm glad youre here in AB 👍👍👍👍
Great video! I am experimenting with some bale grazing on some pastures with a lot of trees this winter in Ontario. The cows sure are helping with land demo. They stomp down any small trees around a bale. It is working great for land clearing. Hoping this will help my pastures produce some better forage. I should post some vids its cool how fast they work. I subscribed look forward to more vids!
Do you ever plan to unroll the bails?
Thanks for the video and info! I wondered how your field/pasture performed after bale grazing, and whether you did anything to spread out the manure where it was heavy?
It would be nice to see this in the spring and summer to see the effect it has
@brockkyradoerksen2687
Жыл бұрын
Yes, we will do that and show you how it looks a couple times this season.
I'm from NEW BRUNSWICK CANADA where are you located? Love the video can you so another in spring?? Where did you get your Obrien step ins? How many joules do you use on your fence?
@Northroadranch
Жыл бұрын
We are from Alberta. West of Edmonton. Yes it all just melted I’ll take a video of what it looks like. Order them straight from power flex in the states. You pay tax and duties but it works out to about $10 a post but I think great quality. My energizer is 18 joules I think 3rd biggest. I have about 20 miles of high tensile wire though.
What fence charger do you use? My dang cows walk through the wire like its not even there.
@Northroadranch
2 ай бұрын
We use the Gallagher Fence Energizer MB1800i. What has worked for us so far is for a herd of cattle that has never been around electric fence, we have to train them to it first. We put them in a tight 4-wire high tensile wire pen for the first day to get them all used to the fence before we let them out to the pasture. The rest of our perimeter fences are 3-wire.