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Using hay efficiently is important every year, but especially in drought years when hay is in short supply, we want to use get the most out of every bale. Listen as the OG3 discuss how to improve your hay use efficiency no matter how you feed it.
Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.
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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG3 is here. We are still covering drought topics. If you're surprised by that, then you haven't been outside lately.
Emily: [laughs] Joe. Wow.
Joe: Sorry, that was a little aggressive.
Emily: I liked it. The drought is aggressive as well. We're just trying to match its attitude.
Joe: Right.
Bradley: It was getting better here in the western part of the state, but then it rained for a while, and then it stopped raining again. It looked like we were coming out, but not at all.
Joe: It's not getting better. Like we talked about before in previous episodes, our fate was sealed a while ago is in terms of hay harvest, forage, all that. Today, we're going to talk about looking a little bit ahead and seeing a lot of people are feeding hay already. Because we didn't get as much as we wanted this year, we really need to worry about using everything as efficiently as possible as we get through fall, winter, where we're feeding probably a longer period where we have to feed hay, and we have less of it. That's the topic today. We're going to talk about how to try to avoid buying really expensive hay if you don't have to, use everything you have as efficiently as possible.
Emily: Find a magic lamp, and then just have the genie get you more hay.
Joe: Exactly.
Emily: You better use your second one for rain otherwise, you don't deserve it.
Joe: Right. In this episode it's probably going to be a little more beef focused, but we can talk about dairy. I think that's probably where we should start. We should start with the dairies because the drought has been definitely emphasized on the beef side because of pasture and hay, and then going into winter, but it's affecting our dairy farmers as well, a lot with hay prices, and hay quantity, and quality. Brad, give us a rundown of what's going to happen to rations, and things this fall and winter as we get short on hay.
Bradley: That's a good question. I think sometimes people might put more corn silage in the ration, which may be good or not good. We're looking at drought has affected the corn silage as well. I think about it from our standpoint, and we've been talking here the last week or so about what do we do, we've had less hay. The quality is actually pretty good. We're running about 130, 140 RFQ on our haylage, which is pretty decent I think, but the yields aren't there. Some of our cuttings were half the yield of what they were maybe first cutting. We just have a little bit less.
As I probably said before, we harvested oatlage, but we're trying to think about how we can reduce hay because we don't want to buy $250, $300 a ton of hay. We're probably going to chop more corn silage than what we ever have to help compensate that. We're going to be going into our corn grain. We're going to have less corn grain, but we're going to chop more silage. That might be a way, and I think that's what other dairy farms are figuring out because nobody's going to pay a lot of money for hay.
I wouldn't suggest that you pay a lot of money for hay either. If you can chop more corn silage, I would chop as much corn silage as you can. There's lots of things that go with that if you have enough space, or bag space, or bunker space, or silo space, but consider chopping as much as you can.
Joe: That sounds about what I'm hearing as well, especially on the dairy side where no one wants to buy hay. It's too expensive. Chopping corn silage is where it's at if you can do it. Again, yields there might not be as good as they previously been. You might have to chop more just to get the same amount that you do normally. A little depressing there, but there are options there.
On the beef side, I think we're probably going to see more corn silage fed to beef cows this winter than we normally do because of that same reason. That there is probably some corn that's struggling that can be chopped instead. I think that's where a lot of people are going to move. Let's get away from that strategy because that is a valid strategy. It's something that people are going to do.
Emily: I was going to say something.
Joe: Oh, Emily's got something.
Emily: You never give me a chance. I got all distracted by yelling at you, now I can't remember what I was going to say. Oh, yes. For dairies, this poses a really unique challenge and things that are going to affect the farm all the way around. Just in that now we're dealing with less feed available, and really poor quality feed, or lower quality feed at that as well. Bradley was saying they have some various forages that are looking okay, but I think we know that by and large across the board, quality is just not going to be there this year.
Joe: Let's get away from corn silage and that talk, and we'll get to how you can save hay, and figure out how to stretch what you have as long as you can. Really I've broken this down into three things. I know there's more, but we're going to use the rule of three today to cut down on how much you have to listen to us.
Emily: Rude.
Joe: The first thing that we should talk about is hay storage because that's really where it starts. There's a lot of hay that can go bad and be wasted if it's stored improperly. I know not everyone has the luxury of being able to have inside hay storage. I'm fully aware of that, but it is the best option. There's no getting around that. Getting your hay inside out of the rain is the best option. Most of what we talk about, and the numbers I love to throw out are when we talk about round bales.
The outer 6 inches of that bale, the stuff that's most susceptible to spoilage is a huge proportion of that bale. In a 6 foot bale, we're talking about the outer 6 inches being 25% of that bale. With a 5 foot bale, it's 30%. If you allow that outer edge of that bale to spoil, you're wasting a quarter of that bale. That's not something you want to do. Brad, how do you store your hay up at Morris?
Bradley: We like to store it inside if we can, but otherwise, we net wrap everything. I think we have found net wrap to be the best for shedding water. We can have a debate about how to wrap your hay another time, but we have found that net wrap sheds the water. We probably have less spoilage or less waste when it's net wrapped compared to when it's twine or plastic string. Then we stack it on top of each other and it does quite well. We probably have half inside and half outside.
Another thing is you might be able to work with people if you have to buy it. We buy some hay and we work things out. If the farmer is able to store it for us for a few months inside, maybe there's some benefit there, where it's another dollar or a ton to store it. Well, you can store it for us for four or five months, and then we'll come and get it, or we'll deliver it. There's ways to go about that as well if you don't have enough storage inside.
Joe: That reminds me of an episode we did a while ago now, the B-wrap episode with Krishona. That's another option. I know you have to have a specific baler to make it work usually, but it is an option for outside storage. The other big thing that I like to tell beef guys is if you're going to have to store hay outside, plan ahead so that that's the first hay you want to feed so that it doesn't sit outside all winter and for extended periods if it doesn't have to, you're using that hay up first. That takes some planning and knowing what stage of gestation your cows are in, and their energy requirements for figuring out what hay you want to feed to what cows, but that's the way to go if you can do it.
Emily: One other thing I would add about storage before we move on is we're trying to reduce shrink. We think about just the weather and spoilage and that, but also proper storage helps with pest control. That's another one of those components as you think about the other 5 million things you have to on your farm. How are pests controlled? How is your storage assisting you with that or not?
Another thing with storage too, of course, there are safety concerns, and different things that you should be taking into account in the condition of your hay as you're storing it.
We know that there's a lot of talk about increased fire risk this time of year, and with the conditions we're in and so being mindful of that, being mindful of how the hay is stacked. People get killed by bales, and so making sure that you have things really sturdy and strong in order to keep the safety there as well as you're storing this hay.
Joe: All right. Let's move on from hay storage. That's one way to basically decrease waste and improve quality. The big piece of this is there's other ways that we can decrease waste when we're talking about hay usage, especially when we talk about beef cattle and heifers on the dairy side as well. There's a lot around bale feeders out there. That's better than putting the hay on ground in the paddock, but there's still a lot of waste associated with ad lib feeding of hay. There's been a lot of studies on this. There's a lot of numbers to throw around. I've tried to distill it down into what I think are the rules of thumb when we come to this. With round bale feeders, limiting access to that round bale feeder, and setting up a situation where the cows only have access to that round bale feeder for a certain amount of time during the day is probably the best way to go to avoid waste because cows waste a lot of hay if you give them access all the time.
We're talking about about 25% of the hay is wasted if you give them ad lib access. Fed free choice in that round bale feeder, and it's available all time, that's 25% of that hay that's just not consumed. It ends up as bedding mashed into the ground around the round bale feeder. That's a lot of hay. That's a ton of hay. If you combine that with, let's say you store that bale outside for an extended period of time, the outside 6 inches spoils.
Now you've got 25% that's wasted from the weather, you got another 25% that's wasted by the cows. Basically, you're wasting one out of every two bales of hay. That's not very efficient, and not cost effective at all, especially when we're talking about prices like we're seeing this year. Do you guys use a round bale feeder up at Morris, Bradley? I don't think you do, did you? Somewhere you do.
Bradley: We do on dry cows in the wintertime, and we do it all wrong.
Joe: Hey, you heard it here.
Emily: Because you're in charge.
Bradley: It's tough. They have hay waste and we chalk that up to fertility. We're putting on our pastures, so you can get some fertility on your pastures. I don't view it as waste, I view it as fertilizer for the pasture to grow, but it is always tough in the wintertime. We've really tried to limit waste by providing more bales, so you're not having all the animals surrounding two bale feeders, and they're just going crazy over it, and end up wasting a lot. It's hard to not have waste in a round bale feeder.
Joe: The studies that have been done, there's all sorts of different studies, there are all sorts of different numbers. The thing that I think makes the most sense for producers because some of the studies will say you should limit their access to three hours was the lowest I've seen. Six hours is another recommendation that's been out there. That is really hard to do within the flow of a day, especially if you have a day job. For me, an 8 to 12-hour window is much more accessible for a producer to make work. You still see a lot of benefit. Were talking instead of 25% waste, if you cannot give them access for only an 8 to 12-hour window instead of 24, you're talking about only 10% waste.
Now we've decreased it by 15%. That's a lot of hay that you're saving, especially when you're short. It means a lot to save that amount of hay. For me, an 8 to 12-hour window of access is ideal. Now, the caveat to this whole thing is that you got to have space for everyone to eat at the same time if you're going to give them limited access like that. There has to be enough space for everyone to eat at the same time. You have to be able to reliably keep them out of where those round bale feeders are for the other 8 to 12 hours. That's the numbers I think you can work out in your break evens.
However you're doing that on your farm, it pencils out really quickly to be able to set up a fence, or even put up a temporary fence to keep cattle away from those round bale feeders for a certain period of time, and then give them access. What you'll see is a completely different behavior. They go in and they eat, they don't screw around. They eat right away and then you can pull them out of there, take away the access. Then you're not seeing cows just pull hay out and throw it on the ground, or mess around with it. You won't see big piles of bedding around your feeders anymore.
Bradley: One thing, at least from a dairy perspective, or if you have a TMR, we've probably gone to more grinding of hay, and putting it into the TMR to try and reduce hay waste. If farmers do have access to a TMR, and are able to feed TMR to animals that are maybe heifers or whatever it might be, I would suggest trying to grind it. A TMR wagon will grind up hay quite nicely, and you just reduce the spoilage that way versus throwing it out into hay rings, especially this year with hay going to be in short supply and with high prices. You might consider feeding it in a TMR if you are able to do that.
Joe: On the beef side, a lot of guys do have a bale chopper for bedding, right? You're bedding a bedded pack outside, or something like that. That works perfect for hay as well. That gets into our next topic of limit feeding. I know that was what we were doing with the round bale feeders as well by limiting access, but limit feeding based on nutritional requirements is another way it is to really target how much hay these cattle are eating, and making sure that you're using it most efficiently. Like Bradley said, if you have a bunk, which would be great, it all comes down to bunk space.
Again, if you're going to give everyone limited feed, you have to make sure that everyone can eat at the same time, and get their fill. That's 2 feet per head if you're going to use a bunk. A lot of guys, once the ground freezes, you've got Minnesota concrete available, you can make that bunk as long as you want by feeding right on the ground. That has a lot of different benefits. Not only can you make the bunk as long as you want, you can also, if you're doing that out on a crop field or overwintering on crop ground, now you're distributing that manure across that field.
You can lay down that line of feed wherever you want, and those cattle will deposit that manure for you. I think limit feeding is a great option if you can do it. It's probably the best option if you can do it because you can really target everything. It all comes down to bunk space so that you don't see a drop in body condition in certain cows, and see other cows get heavier because they're hogging all the feed. One more caveat, Bradley, is just pointing out here is that for a lot of this to work, working with a nutritionist like we've been harping on for several episodes is a great idea.
Because knowing the quality of that hay, how much of that hay to feed, how much of other supplements can you add to then stretch your hay, that's all questions for your nutritionist, and probably depends on the quality and testing of some of the hay that you do have. Again, you're hearing me say work with a nutritionist. Hopefully it's becoming normalized for our listeners to hear your veterinarian say, work with your nutritionist because it is a good idea a lot of the time.
Emily: But not all the time. For those times, you got to call your vet.
Joe: You got to call your vet sometime. They're a great resource. Just throwing that out there.
Bradley: Never.
Joe: Never. All right. With that, I think we have a short sweet episode. We covered some highlights. If you have questions on this, scathing rebuttals to anything we said today, comments for what you want to hear us talk about next, please email themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: Catch us on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety. That's all the plugs I got for today. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you guys next week.
Emily: That was sloppy, but I did my best.
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[00:17:31] [END OF AUDIO]
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