Cow-calf producer Dave Sammons has come up with a unique and varied grazing strategy that has cut his workload and feed bills while boosting organic matter.
His system on his mixed farm near Gleichen includes stubble grazing into early winter, then moving the herd onto cover crops, and then onto corn.
“The grazing has helped to substantially reduce our feed costs,” Sammons said of his winter-feeding program.
It’s also led to a major bump in organic matter. A decade of corn grazing has improved the organic matter on those fields to more than five per cent (from 2.4 per cent previously), he said.
The system is constantly evolving, said Sammons, a director with the Foothills Forage and Grazing Association. That group’s summer programs, tours of other ranches, and conferences have all provided insights and ideas, he said.
“The Western Canada Soil and Grazing Conference in Edmonton is a fantastic conference. I’ve been to that one a couple of times. I love when they do producer sessions and you can learn from other producers about what works and what doesn’t — and the challenges.”
Grazing on multiple smaller pastures takes effort, but integrating cows and crops has been key on his operation, he said. The cows graze crop residues and field edges from harvest until nearly Christmas.
“In the third week of December, we will start feeding them, weather dependent,” said Sammons.
Then the swatch grazing starts. The cover crop was seeded last spring and consisted of barley, fall triticale and field peas as well as a cover crop cocktail mix that included chicory, clover and a brassica forage. The cows graze that until mid-January.
“We’ve only been doing cover crops for about three years,” said Sammons. “We started out the cows on that for about a month and then we transitioned over to corn grazing for the rest of the winter.”
His cattle move through standing corn until the middle of April, when calving starts. The grazing is supplemented with hay when the weather is extreme and the cows don’t leave the windbreaks.
“We feed them hay when they’re calving while the ground thaws out. I just don’t want to get compaction problems,” he said.
When in the corn, the cows are given hay every third day, to provide extra calcium, when they are moved to a new corn cell. Moving the cattle takes about half an hour thanks to what might be the oddest piece of farm equipment in the province — an old golf bag.
Sammons credits forage specialist Grant Lastiwka for the idea of using a golf bag to carry fibreglass posts, which are inserted into the frozen ground with a cordless drill and cement bit.
“It works well to drill into the frozen ground,” he said.
Having his cattle graze crop residue is a way of leveraging the fact that “cows are very inefficient users of feed.”
“So, they’re putting 80 per cent of what they consume on the soil in the form of urine or manure. We’ve been able to decrease the amount of fertilizer that we use on those grazing crops substantially. That makes it a cheaper source of feed.
“That’s been a big change. With successive years of grazing on the same piece, our fertilizer usage went down lots. It made it much more affordable. Margins in the cow-calf sector are tight, so that’s been a big improvement.”
In the summer, Sammons subdivides the pastures and moves the cows every three days on average.
“It depends on the pasture. Some of them have water sources, so it’s a little harder to do that. That’s been a little challenging these past few years. Because of the dryness, we didn’t get grass established in the spring. But it’s helped the pastures get through these dry years.”
Sammons said he’s constantly tinkering with his system.
“We added the swath grazing about three years ago, because I wanted a rotational break in the corn grazing.”
He’s also been doing more intensive summer grazing over the past three years. He made these changes because winter grazing is so costly.
“We wanted to develop some cheaper sources of feed. We’ve also been more interested in the soil health aspect, too. The winter grazing works well for that. So we’re not burning diesel taking feed to the cows. Instead, we’re taking cows to the feed.”
Further tweaks to summer grazing are in the works after Sammons tapped into government grants under the climate change program.
“In the summer, we got an On-Farm Climate Action Fund grant,” he said. “We have a solar water pumping unit and will bury pipeline across all our pastures at home that will facilitate the rotational grazing in the summer, to make that easier and more efficient.”
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