We have excellent prospects for wheat pasture this fall, but the market conditions and low cattle numbers will make purchasing stocker calves more difficult than normal. How can we best use this valuable forage resource? Small-grain winter pasture is an excellent protein and energy source for beef cows. Fall-calving, lactating cows perform extremely well when grazing abundant wheat pasture throughout lactation. We tracked performance of lactating Angus cows and their calves grazing wheat from January through grazeout in May
Notice cows averaged 26 pounds of milk yield during late-lactation and still managed to gain over 2 pounds per day along with tremendous increase in body condition. The combination of forage quality and high forage intake can result in cows becoming over-conditioned. This would certainly be a concern in spring-calving cows as their nutrient requirements are substantially lower during gestation.
Limiting wheat pasture forage intake can serve to control cow condition and stretch the expensive, high-quality forage over more grazing days. One approach is to limit-graze the wheat as a protein and energy source to complement low-quality standing forage or hay. We discovered that about 9 to 12 hours per week of access to wheat pasture (3 to 4 hours per day, 3 days per week) met supplemental protein and energy needs for lactating beef cows. Using this method, we were able to stock cows at about a cow/calf pair to 0.7 acres of wheat pasture from mid-November through mid-May. Hours on wheat can be adjusted to maintain a minimum level of cow body condition. We simply fed low-quality native grass hay in dry lot pens when the cows were not grazing wheat. Stockpiled forage in a pasture adjacent to the wheat pasture would be an ideal situation to minimize wintering costs. In our situation, automatic waterers were available in the dry lot pens. After about 3 to 4 hours of grazing, the cows were ready to get a drink and lay down, so they would walk into the dry lot pens and we would shut the wire gate behind them. Next to the gate, we simply raised the electric fence so the calves could pass under it to graze.
In our experiment, another set of cows were wintered grazing tallgrass prairie stockpiled forage and fed about 5 pounds per day of dried distillers’ grain with solubles. Calf weight averaged 467 pounds in mid-April in this “traditional” system whereas calves in the limit-grazed wheat pasture system averaged 565 pounds in mid-April.
