# Overstocking and feeding hay



## Creekbank Farm (Jun 27, 2021)

I am just starting out in growing a beef herd and currently have 3 cows, 2 steers and just had a heifer calf. I live on 8 acres and they get around 4 acres of pasture so we supplement with some hay year round already. I already had the equipment or have bought equipment with cash that has enabled me to sign a cash rent for 30 acres of hay ground. The owner doesn't want it fenced or cows grazed on it. My question is can I put "too many" cows on my 4 acres of pasture since I will have 30 acres worth of hay. I will obviously have extra hay and plan to sell some but would rather alternatively grow my herd. I am searching for grazing ground to rent or buy but with solar farms going in land prices have skyrocketed to over $14k/acre on average. I would lose the grazing quality of my acreage but would still be able to adequately feed hay 365 days/year. Is this a bad idea or any tips for how to handle this scenario? Thanks in advance for any help


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## Tx Jim (Jun 30, 2014)

I can't envision feeding a cow/calf operation 100% of their diet with hay & feed then making a profit. More especially when hay reaches the prices I expect it to if we don't receive some much needed precipitation. Granted you could make some cheaper hay from your 30 acres of lease land but ""what could you sell the hay for"" vs feeding it? Overstocking grazing(pasture) land is never a good practice. Perform a visual inspection of backyard horse owners pastures.


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## Creekbank Farm (Jun 27, 2021)

Tx Jim said:


> I can't envision feeding a cow/calf operation 100% of their diet with hay & feed then making a profit. More especially when hay reaches the prices I expect it to if we don't receive some much needed precipitation. Granted you could make some cheaper hay from your 30 acres of lease land but ""what could you sell the hay for"" vs feeding it? Overstocking grazing(pasture) land is never a good practice. Perform a visual inspection of backyard horse owners pastures.


That’s what I assumed I would hear. I think my best option is going to be looking for rentable pasture ground. My next question for that is how close to my main farm should I stay? Would 30 minutes away be too far for daily maintenance? Or what is standard practice for that?


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## Hayjosh (Mar 24, 2016)

Creekbank Farm said:


> That’s what I assumed I would hear. I think my best option is going to be looking for rentable pasture ground. My next question for that is how close to my main farm should I stay? Would 30 minutes away be too far for daily maintenance? Or what is standard practice for that?


For me, 30 minutes would be way too far. I'd want something 5 minutes away. If you have to get a tractor over there to drive posts, mow, etc, you want it close. If the cows get out, you want to be close.


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## sea2summit (Aug 4, 2021)

Creekbank Farm said:


> That’s what I assumed I would hear. I think my best option is going to be looking for rentable pasture ground. My next question for that is how close to my main farm should I stay? Would 30 minutes away be too far for daily maintenance? Or what is standard practice for that?


30 minutes in a truck or tractor? If truck that's closer to 2+ hrs in a tractor. How often will you need to move the tractor to feed/maintain at each location?
Do you have an hour a day to drive back and forth to feed and work the animals?
Do you have enough money to buy gas to drive an hour every day to feed and work animals? In my truck it now costs $21 a day to drive it to work when I can't ride my motorcycle.
I don't think there's a "standard" practice, everyone just does the best they can with what they got where they're at.

I cut my hay 12 miles away and to me that's as far as I want to go when I have to move every bale back home. I do some custom baling about 45 minutes away and that's farther than I want to move all my equipment but it's a friend who's trying to get his operation going so I do it for him.


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## Markpnw (Dec 27, 2019)

Where abouts are you located? Location is a big factor. If it’s a good pasture you should be able to run a cow calf pair every 3 acres and that should be sufficient for about 6-7 months. You also have to consider if there is a corral or if you have to bring one over. I tend not to run any hay or equipment to my pasture so a pasture an hour north would be absolutely fine with me. I’d check up on them every few days and better yet find a few neighbors who will call you if a cow gets loose or if someone is messing with the cows. Just give them a few steaks afterwards.


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## Creekbank Farm (Jun 27, 2021)

sea2summit said:


> 30 minutes in a truck or tractor? If truck that's closer to 2+ hrs in a tractor. How often will you need to move the tractor to feed/maintain at each location?
> Do you have an hour a day to drive back and forth to feed and work the animals?
> Do you have enough money to buy gas to drive an hour every day to feed and work animals? In my truck it now costs $21 a day to drive it to work when I can't ride my motorcycle.
> I don't think there's a "standard" practice, everyone just does the best they can with what they got where they're at.
> ...


All of our driving would be with a truck. We would hopefully not have to feed any hay on rented pasture ground for the summer and then bring back all of our stock to our winter lot for those months. The winter lot looks terrible and is muddy all the time but it works to keep our summer pastures in better shape. We will trailer our panels over to load cattle and our squeeze chute is portable as well if we wanted to do our AI stuff there rather than truck back and forth. I am hoping to stay within about 15 minutes of the farm but we will have to really search for that. We are surrounded by huge crop farms/ wind farms and now solar farms so land is a hot commodity. We have family ground that we will be able to cash rent for hay ground starting in 2023 to give us about 70 acres of hay total but even if we pasture that ground we will have to pay hay/crop ground price so I would like to keep that for hay and save myself the fencing work and find other pasture elsewhere.


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## Creekbank Farm (Jun 27, 2021)

Markpnw said:


> Where abouts are you located? Location is a big factor. If it’s a good pasture you should be able to run a cow calf pair every 3 acres and that should be sufficient for about 6-7 months. You also have to consider if there is a corral or if you have to bring one over. I tend not to run any hay or equipment to my pasture so a pasture an hour north would be absolutely fine with me. I’d check up on them every few days and better yet find a few neighbors who will call you if a cow gets loose or if someone is messing with the cows. Just give them a few steaks afterwards.


We are in East Central Indiana. Most people are pretty nice around and I would trust to call for downed or out cows. I think your model of 6-7 months on pasture and then bring back home for the winter will work best for me right now.


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## danwi (Mar 6, 2015)

I have 20 cows on a 5 acre pasture and concrete cow yard, half the pasture is a dirt lot for excersize and a place to lay. The other half is lower ground so we keep them off until it is dry so we have grass there. So basically we end up feeding hay year around. Figure 1 big bale a day at $50 x 365 days and you have $18,000 in the cows for the year, that means you have to sell 20 feeder calve for $900 a piece. Then you have manure hauling from the cow yard. So in the end the only profit will be when I finally sell the cows. I always figured the right way to do this would be if you had land that could not be crop farmed either creek bottom, woodland, or hillsides that you could pasture, then have the farm fenced so after harvest you could let them run over the whole farm, cornstalks and hay fields. There is a farm a mile up the road that has hillsides they don't farm and I always think that would be the place to graze some cattle.


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## Tx Jim (Jun 30, 2014)

$18,000 divided by 365 days = $49.31 per bale. I wish you luck finding the hay for that price & having 100% calf crop that sells for a premium($900 each). Wormer & vaccination's will put your more in the RED


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## danwi (Mar 6, 2015)

The rest of the story. The reason we have some beef cows is because I figure if you grow hay to sell you will get some that is hard to sell. This last year, 1st crop, I had 100 bales baled and the sun was shining, I had 1 row across the field and we got a 1 inch downpour, The hay was mostly good in the bales but there was some scattered mold and the bales were faded on the outside, so the cows got that. The horse farm up the road has given me hay when they have rained on stuff. Another neighbor gave me 2 dozen bales when they got baled tough and heated to the point they were black in a couple spots but the cows loved it. The point I was trying to make to the original post was growing and feeding hay to beef cows is not real cheap unless you can pasture them for cheap. I sometimes think when I talk with my dairy farm friends that instead of keeping cows I should just buy a few crossbred bull calves from them. I rounded some numbers you can buy hay around here for less then $50 a bale and if you are selling good hay you would be in the $60 range, If you are feeding the hay you grow then you will have to know what that costs you.


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## danwi (Mar 6, 2015)

I don't know if you thought about this with part about growing the herd, with your limited space until you find a better way. You will need pens or pasture so you can wean calves and finish steers. If you get a bull for breeding you have to keep the yearling heifer separate until you want them bred. One thing that helps that is artificial insemination or a rented bull.


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## Creekbank Farm (Jun 27, 2021)

danwi said:


> I don't know if you thought about this with part about growing the herd, with your limited space until you find a better way. You will need pens or pasture so you can wean calves and finish steers. If you get a bull for breeding you have to keep the yearling heifer separate until you want them bred. One thing that helps that is artificial insemination or a rented bull.


We will be doing AI and are building another barn this year for maternity pens. Our plan is to grass feed steers and grain finish for three months so they will be in a smaller pen for those three months until I can find better land to rent for that. We only finish 2-4 steers at a time anyways


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