Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, is talking with Oklahoma State University Extension Beef Cattle Nutrition Specialist Paul Beck about the value of wheat pasture. The southern plains offers wheat farmers who also run cattle an additional opportunity to harvest their wheat crop annually. Harvest for grain is the way that is the most common cash harvest method- but in the hard red winter belt from north Texas, throughout Oklahoma and into southern Kansas- fall planting of the crop allows producers to turn cattle out into the growing wheat fields and harvest via grazing in late fall into the winter season. Pounds of fresh forage grazed by stocker cattle are turned into pounds of gain worth up to several hundred dollars of live weight when those calves are marketed as yearlings.
“Wheat pasture is an awesome resource for us,” Beck said. “It has been really short the last couple of years due to the drought conditions. We are seeing the cattle that are coming into town from some of these graze-out wheat fields, and the performance has been really good this year coming off from these wheat pasture calves.”
Most calves in the U.S. are born in the spring, Beck said, so there is an abundance of calves available in the fall during weaning to go out to graze wheat pasture.
“There are not a lot of other forage resources that are green and growing, and high in quality during the fall and winter,” Beck said. “That gives the wheat producers in Oklahoma a pretty good competitive advantage in buying calves that would be seasonally low in price in the fall, and then marketing them at a point in the spring when they are generally higher in value.”
Looking at the vegetative state of wheat in the fall and early spring, Beck said wheat pasture can provide close to 30 percent crude protein and is 85 percent digestible.
“Based on that, we should see gains of up over three pounds per day,” Beck said. “More likely, we are going to see gains of about two to two and a half pounds a day for those calves on wheat pasture.”
Because of the hay shortage this year, Beck said many producers used wheat pasture for their cows instead of stocker calves.
“Cows can really put on a lot of condition when they are grazing wheat pasture, so it is a great resource for that when it becomes an emergency,” Beck said.
Beck said he recommends that producers let their wheat reach six to eight inches of above-ground growth before they turn cattle out to graze.
“It is going to quit growing when it gets colder in late December and early January,” Beck said. “That gives us a little bit of a stockpile. I try to get the stocking rate set to where we have three to five pounds of forage dry matter per pound of calf that we put out.”
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