Small-Scale Livestock Farming

by Carol Ekarius

  Multiply the number of steps (S) along the length of the paddock by your step length (SL); then multiply the number of steps along the width by your step length. You now have the approximate length (L) of the field in feet (or m), and the width (W) of the field in feet (or m). Multiply these two numbers together (L x W) to estimate the area of the paddock in square feet (or m2). Divide the square-foot value by 43,560 square feet per acre to come up with the acreage in the paddock (or the m2 value by 10,000 to arrive at ha).

  Let’s look at an example. Gary Miller checks his step length along the side of his chicken shed. The wall is 22 feet (6.7 m) long. Gary paces the side of the shed in about ten steps. His step length (SL) is 2.2 feet (67 cm) per step (S).

  Gary paces the length of his paddock, and comes up with 143 steps, so the length equals 315 feet (95.8 m).

  He paces the width of this field at 125 steps, which equals 275 feet (83.8 m). With calculator in hand, Gary multiplies 315 feet (95.8 m) by 275 feet (83.8 m) to find 86,625 square feet (8,028 m2). Finally he divides 86,625 by 43,560 square feet per acre to arrive at about 2 acres. (To find hectares, he divides 8,028 by 10,000 to get 0.8 ha.)

  2. After you have the paddock size established, you need to determine how many pounds of forage are available in this paddock. Use the 300 pounds per inch, per acre (or 136 kg/cm/ha) estimate, or monitor intake on the same days of the year that you monitor the quantity of available forage to get an even more accurate number. You determine the total available forage dry matter in the paddock by multiplying dry matter per acre (or ha) times the number of acres (or ha).

  In Gary’s case, he has taken samples as outlined in monitoring quantity, and determined that there are 2,565 pounds of available forage dry matter per acre (2,837 kg/ha) in this paddock. Since he has 2 acres (0.8 ha) in this paddock, its total available forage dry matter equals 5,130 pounds (2,300 kg).

  3. The next step is to let your animals in to graze as normal, but before allowing the animals in, measure the grass length (GL) of the sward. Then estimate the total pounds of livestock in the paddock — use the weights in Table 3.1 on page 24. This is as far as you can go until the animals leave the paddock.

  Gary measures his grass length at 8 inches (20 cm). He estimates the weight of animals in the paddock at 23,200 pounds (10,524 kg) (2 draft horses at 1,600 pounds [725.7 kg] each; 20 ewes at 120 pounds [54.5 kg] each; 35 lambs at 40 pounds [18.1 kg] each; 12 cows at 900 pounds [408.2 kg] each; 12 calves at 250 pounds [113.4 kg] each; and 4 steers at 600 pounds [272.2 kg] each).

  4. As the animals leave the paddock, measure the grass length again. To calculate how much of the forage the animals consumed, divide the grass length as the animals leave by the grass length when the animals came in, and multiply this number by the total available forage you calculated in step 2. This calculation gives you the dry-matter disappearance (DMD).

  When Gary’s animals leave the field, there is 4 inches (10 cm) of grass left. He calculates that his herd consumed 2,565 pounds (1,150 kg) of forage while they were in the paddock.

  5. Now, to find the intake factor (IF) for a herd, first multiply the total pounds of dry matter disappearance (DMD) consumed by 0.75, and then multiply the total weight of the herd (HW) by the grazing period (GP) in days that the herd was in the paddock. Now divide the first number by the second.

  The 0.75 that you multiply DMD by in this equation is another correction factor. It takes into account the fact that in a sward of grass, there is more weight of grass closer to the ground than at the top of the plant. For example, if you have 8 inches (20 cm) in the sward that averages 300 pounds per inch (132 kg/cm), the top 4 inches (10 cm) of grass may contain only 225 pounds per inch (99 kg/cm) and the bottom 4 inches (10 cm) may weigh 375 pounds per inch (165 kg/cm).

  Gary’s intake equals 0.041, or 4 percent, of his animal’s body weight during his two-day grazing period. He calculated this by:

  Weather Trouble

  Monitoring forage quantity regularly during the growing season allows you to make adjustments when Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate with your original plans. And make no mistake about it — no matter where you live, there are occasions when she is a curmudgeonly old bird and doesn’t cooperate. Every place has its droughts, and every place has its washout periods. Both are at the minimum a nuisance, and at their worst a disaster.

  Your first protection against the ravages of the weather is healthy land. When the ecosystem processes are operating well, the land has resilience; it’s less impacted by weather events.

  Heavy Rain

  During heavy rains, healthy soils with good vegetative cover absorb water like a sponge. And during droughts, healthy fields remain shaded and cool, retaining what moisture they have for much longer periods than do those that have been abused.

  The second thing that helps you cope with the vagaries of nature is having a polyculture of plants growing. When your fields are populated by a wide variety of different grasses and legumes, you’ll find that something will grow in most conditions — wet or dry. An abundance of legumes, which tend to be more deeply-rooted than the grasses, will help move what water is available from deeper in the soil matrix up to the surface.

  When bad weather does strike, and your forage budget (which looked so good when you prepared it in February) is suddenly just ink on paper, you have to adjust. The sooner you do, the less strain it will cause emotionally and financially.

  During very wet periods, the grass can get ahead of you quickly, but getting into the field to cut hay becomes almost impossible. Keep moving animals as quickly as possible through the paddocks. Consider adding a few extra stocker animals. If you can’t afford to purchase more animals, look for an area farmer who keeps growing animals in confinement — you may be able to work out a mutually beneficial relationship. If the feed gets just too far ahead and you can’t add animals to take up the slack, drop one or more paddocks completely from your movement. It’s better to have a few paddocks that become overly rank than to have the whole pasture go too far. When things dry out, the reserved paddocks can be cut for hay or green manure, or chopped for haylage.

  Drought

  Droughts are harder, because you have a forage shortage. There are two ways of handling this situation: Purchase additional feed, or destock. The first option isn’t so bad if the shortage is very minor, but if you are falling far short of production it’s best to destock early. In fact, the earlier you begin destocking, the fewer animals you’ll have to remove altogether during an extended drought.

  An example, using numbers from the Joneses’ forage budget, may help you see why this is so: Under normal circumstances in most of North America, almost 60 percent of annual forage production grows during the April-to-June period. But in this example it’s July 1, and April, May, and June were extremely dry in central Wisconsin; there’s no sign of relief.

  Gil has already grazed the grass a little closer than ideal, and the first cutting of hay, which he expected to yield about 85 tons (77,110.7 kg), came to only 70 tons (63,502.9 kg) — and part of this was from a subirrigated (naturally wetter) field. Common wisdom says that Gil can make up the hay shortage by selling off more young stock at weaning than he planned for in his budget. But Gil knows that this approach doesn’t help the current shortage of grass; and if he continues grazing as hard as he has been, the yield will drop even farther (because of insufficient plant energy and recovery periods). Monitoring indicates that by slowing down the grazing a little, and giving extra time for recovery, the end-of-year yield will be about 340 tons (308,443 kg) of forage. Grazing can be slowed either by supplementing with purchased feed, or by selling some animals now.

  Gil and Jenny sit down at the computer and begin experimenting with various scenarios. Table 15.1 shows their budget for forage requirements based on the immediate sale of five cows and their calves, two steers, and five ewes and their lambs. These sales result in the forage required being about 340 tons (308,443 kg). Gil hauls the animals to the sale barn. />
  What would have happened if Gil and Jenny had decided to wait it out, hoping against hope for late-summer and fall rains to make up the shortfall? If those rains didn’t materialize — and the odds are that they wouldn’t make up a shortage even if they did come — the end-of-growing-season yield would probably be down around 300 tons (272,155 kg), because they were grazing too hard. Table 15.2 shows how heavily they would have to cull in fall to make up for holding on in July. By waiting, they have to sell 100 percent of their calf and lamb crops, and more breeding stock — from both the cow and sheep categories. Table 15.3 summarizes the end-of-year impacts of July sales versus October sales, compared to their original plan.

  The moral of the story: If you have to destock, do it early! One other point about early destocking that doesn’t appear in this example is that you often get better prices. As a drought progresses and more people come to terms with their shortage of feed, they begin dumping animals en masse, thereby driving the price down. The time to sell is before everyone else has figured out that there is a problem, or while they are still holding out for divine intervention.

  Table 15.1

  JONES FARM FORAGE BUDGET REQUIREMENT BASED ON JULY SALES

  Table 15.2

  REQUIREMENTS BASED ON OCTOBER SALES

  Table 15.3

  SUMMARY OF A DROUGHT’S IMPACT ON END-OF-YEAR ANIMAL UNITS DEPENDING ON SALE IN JULY OR OCTOBER

  Stock Density

  In chapter 3, I said that stock density is a measure of AU per acre (or per ha) on a given paddock at any one time. It can also be reported as pounds of livestock per acre (kg/ha) at a given time.

  Management improves as stock density increases. In pounds of livestock per acre, desirable stock densities can run anywhere from 10,000 to 80,000 pounds per acre (11,208 to 89,666 kg/ha), depending on time of year, pasture condition, and grazing period.

  You can calculate an appropriate stock density by using the following equation: Stock density (SD) equals the result of the available forage (AF) multiplied by the utilization rate (UR), then divided by the result of daily intake (DI) times the grazing period (GP).

  The utilization rate is the amount of plant material you want to take off. Somewhere between 50 and 60 percent utilization is about right.

  The DI is the amount of feed (as hay equivalents) per day that the average animal consumes. It’s derived by dividing the required feed in HE/day by the AUs on your forage budget.

  The grazing period is one you determine.

  As an example, let’s say Gil and Jenny are calculating a stock density for one of the two paddocks in field 2 in May. Since it’s early in the season, the paddock has about 6 inches (15 cm) of forage growth, and they plan to take 50 percent of it in this grazing. They are aiming for a GP of 1 day. Use the HE/day and AU figure from May on the forage budget to calculate daily intake. Plug in the numbers:

  Or in metric:

  You come up with SD = 29 AU per acre, or approximately 29,000 pounds per acre (72 AU/ha or 32,659 kg/ha).

  FARMER PROFILE

  Alan and Sharon Hubbard

  Alan and Sharon Hubbard don’t own any land, but they ranch on more than 6,000 acres in northeastern Kansas. Their 375-acre home place is part of a trust from Sharon’s family; the remainder is land they lease from seventeen different landlords. “Buying land for ranching and farming doesn’t really pay,” Alan says. “Beyond owning a small piece for a headquarters, it’s better to lease.”

  I first heard about Alan from Jerry Jost at the Kansas Rural Center. Jerry told me, “Alan is one of the most sophisticated managers in Kansas. He does extensive financial planning and monitoring, and he is finishing up a study in partnership with Kansas State University that looks at time management and production on set-stocked ground versus intensively managed grazing ground.”

  Alan elaborates on the study. “We’re just about done. . . . It looked at how long it takes to care for the animals in the two systems, and at pounds per acre of beef productivity off both approaches. We’ve found — and it surprised us — that it takes less time to care for animals that are grazing intensively than it does to take care of those on the set-stocked land, and that we produce almost twice as many pounds per acre of beef where we are managing the grazing.”

  Alan and Sharon began developing their financial planning program almost a decade ago. “We do detailed enterprise analysis regularly, both on current enterprises and on possible other enterprises. Over the years, the time we’ve spent on financial planning has paid off well. When we first started, it did take a lot of time; now that we know what we’re doing, the time commitment isn’t so great.”

  As a result of their planning, the Hubbards have done many things over the years that raised a few eyebrows. “I guess it’s actually getting better, because this year, when we brought in 160 Spanish meat goats from Texas, the neighbors only looked slightly baffled. When we began subdividing fields and running 100-plus head on only a 20-acre piece of land, it was the talk of the town! They didn’t understand that those 100 head wouldn’t be on that piece of ground the next day. They were sure we would ruin the land and ourselves.

  “Then we sold all our equipment, except one loader tractor for moving any purchased round bales, pushing snow, and things like that. Selling the equipment set off another wave of shock.” Today, the Hubbards’ equipment lineup consists of one loader tractor, one four-wheel-drive pickup, one four-wheeler, and one stock trailer.

  “We use horses quite a bit for working on the ranch. But originally, the horses were like farm equipment: they cost us money. Since we wanted to keep them, we did some enterprise analysis on horses.

  “When you can ‘stack’ enterprises within existing enterprises — like figuring out a way to make some money with the horses we were keeping anyway — that’s when you can really increase profitability. We now keep a breeding stud, and are breeding and selling colts. He is also used for some stud service for other horse owners. And Sharon has begun developing a trail-ride business using the horses. By using our enterprise analysis approach, we’ve been able to put the horses in the black. Someday they’ll go from paying their own way to being more profitable.”

  During the winter, the Hubbards spend lots of time planning and monitoring. They run their cow herd in groups of 80 to 100 animals. Groups are established according to management needs: mature cows (4 years old or more), young cows and heifers (2- and 3-year-olds), and young heifers. They keep a detailed ledger for each group: how much they’re eating, what they cost to maintain.

  The Hubbards run their own herd and custom stockers. Most stockers come from area ranchers and farmers, who retain ownership. The Hubbards are paid a per-pound fee based on the gain the animals make.

  One year, Alan needed some more grazing animals to match his forage. He ran several scenarios through his enterprise analysis (including purchasing stocker steers, stocker heifers, bred cows, and open cows) but bought 100 open cows and then bred them for fall calving. “We strictly do spring calving for our own cows, but these cows sold well to farmers that wanted fall-calving animals.”

  Alan concludes by saying, “I can’t stress too much the importance of enterprise analysis for profitability. We need to look at all we do and ask ourselves if it meets our life goals, and if it’s profitable. Should I keep bulls? Should I raise these heifers up or buy replacements? Should I keep this hay equipment and put up hay, or buy my hay in? When you study these questions in detail, you can make good decisions.”

  Paddock Sizing

  From the stock density, you can now determine the ideal paddock size (PS) to meet the criteria you’ve established. The paddock size equals the actual total number of animal units in the herd divided by the desired stock density.

  Again Gil and Jenny plug the numbers in and come up with a figure of approximately 2.1 acres per paddock.

  Or in metric:

  On a 240-acre (97-ha) farm like the Joneses’, to develop 2.2-acre (0.9-ha) paddocks would require ove
r 100 subdivisions. The best way to achieve these high levels of subdivision is through a combination of permanent paddocks and temporary fencing: The most flexibility is provided by establishing 8 to 21 permanent subdivisions, and then using temporary fencing to further subdivide these during the year. But initially use temporary subdivisions for the entire farm, until you’ve developed the landscape plan. Your landscape plan will help you define the best long-term placement for permanent fences and other improvements.

  Long-Term Monitoring

  When we purchased our farm in Minnesota, the land was hurting. By the time we left, the ecosystem processes were operating at a much higher level, yet we really didn’t have good evidence of this. We could tell people that there was a much greater variety of plants living in the riparian area than when we first got there, but we couldn’t provide specifics. We could say we saw more wildlife, but we didn’t have documentation. Now we are beginning our monitoring immediately, so we’ll be able to define the improvements as they take place.

  Long-term monitoring requires that you select some permanent points for performing the monitoring. You can choose these to represent different soils, or different niches — for example, sandy areas versus loamy areas, or river bottomland as one niche and hillsides as another. How many points you choose will depend on your own motivation, but at the minimum try to establish 3 points; at the maximum, 12 points. Monitoring will require about 2 hours per point each time you monitor it.