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THE WESTERN PRODUCER | WWW.PRODUCER.COM | JANUARY 10, 2013
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HAY | STORAGE
CATTLE ID | INFORMATION
Give hay breathing room: specialist
Producers able to use valuable ear tag data
Preventing mould, rot | Moisture accumulates in stacked bales and wind cannot dry them out BY KAREN BRIERE REGINA BUREAU
SWIFT CURRENT, Sask. — Neat triangle-shaped stacks might be producers’ favourite way to store bales, but that method causes the most damage to the hay, said Barry Yaremcio, Alberta’s beef and forage specialist. He told the Foraging into the Future conference last month that producers who are short on feed and looking at old hay should consider how it has been stored and for how long. The quality will have been affected even if the hay was put up in the best conditions. He said deterioration begins within 20 days of baling, and every inch of rain results in 180 pounds of water on a six-foot-diameter bale. Moisture accumulates wherever bales touch each other, causing mould and rot. Bales in a triangle stack lie lengthwise and most of their surfaces are in contact with other bales. Water or snow runs down between all the top bales into the middle and then into the lower layer. Damage can be as much as 20 percent, Yaremcio said. He said the mushroom stack, in which a bale on its flat end is topped with a bale on its side, is better, but it still causes damage of about 10.6 percent, according to research at the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute. The best method is not to stack the bales at all. “Keep those bales in single rows and keep them about six to 10 inches apart,” he said. The rows should be about a metre apart, and it also helps if they can be set on higher ground. “If you’ve got a northwest-southeast wind, make that row in the same direction so the wind blows and takes all that snow out from between the
Assess management | Information from packing plants could help make business decisions BY BARBARA DUCKWORTH CALGARY BUREAU
A forage specialist says the best way to store bales is in single rows, six to 10 inches apart. |
JEANNETTE GREAVES
PHOTO
rows of bales,” he said. The best way to prevent deterioration is to store hay under cover, such as plastic, tarps or sheds. Plastic can attract magpies and deer, which make holes and allow moisture inside. “Net wrap compared to twine provides a better cover and a more uniform surface that water and rain or moisture will run off those bales and go onto the ground,” Yaremcio said. “Twine that is spaced more than four inches apart will provide valleys and hilltops on that bale and anyplace you’ve got that difference in height on that hay, that’s where the moisture is going to try to seep in and get into the bale itself.” He said producers should consider
using hay sheds with open sides to let the wind through. An $85,000 shed can store enough hay to feed a 250-cow herd for one year. The payback is 20 years when hay costs $60 per tonne and six to seven years when it is $90 per tonne. Hay stored indoors offers better digestibility, he added. Yaremcio recommended a proper feed test to make sure cattle are receiving adequate nutrition from old hay. “If you have an 11 or 12 percent protein hay the first year with 60 to 65 percent (total digestible nutrients), the second year that hay could only be eight to 10 percent protein, maybe 55 percent TDN, so in fact the loss in quality will prevent you from provid-
ing adequate nutrition to a cow in late pregnancy with a two-year-old hay, compared to that first year hay, which will be good enough to feed cows through lactation,” he said. Cattle eat less old hay, and it should never be fed to weaned calves and replacement heifers. Mature cows and older cows in mid-pregnancy have the lowest requirements and could be fed the older hay, but Yaremcio advised producers to remember there will be waste. He also said a balanced ration can save producers $40 to $50 per cow in feed costs. As well, no studies have been done into the value of three-year-old hay. He advised rolling it out as bedding.
OBITUARY | DUDE THE QUARTER HORSE
Thanks for the ride: passing of a good partner COWBOY LOGIC
RYAN TAYLOR
I
knew he couldn’t live forever, but it sure seemed like he was going to do just that. His given name was Mose Hollywood on his Quarter Horse registration papers. We just called him Dude. He was a sorrel gelding, born near Ray in western North Dakota in 1984. He became my horse in 1988 for a $500 cheque of my own money I’d saved from the entrepreneurial activities of my youth. Best $500 I ever spent. Like most horses, he had his good points and a few things we needed to work on. He wasn’t necessarily a sure
footed horse when I first got him, but the more I rode him the better he got. The best point he always had and always kept right up to his last day was disposition. He was the nicest, calmest, kindest horse I’ve ever been around. There wasn’t an ornery or ill tempered bone in his body. Anybody could ride Dude, and everybody did. Novice riders, foreign visitors, cousins, girlfriends, kids of all ages, an occasional baby calf in a storm, and, I think, even our Border Collie. He never complained, balked or bucked about any of it. Dude became kind of famous in 1993 when I wrote about him in a writing contest put on by the American Quarter Horse Association. I wrote a little essay about this sorrel gelding and me and our life on the ranch. The association picked it to be one of 10 out of more than 1,000 entries to use in an advertising campaign. I got a little prize money, Dude got a little
notoriety, and, in a way, it put me on the path to where we are today. Being one of the winners in that essay contest got me interviewed for a story in a Sunday Grand Forks Herald. That story got me work for its sister publication, Agweek, as a freelance writer, and eventually writing a column we came to call Cowboy Logic. Someone who regularly read that column offered me a job with Fort Dodge Animal Health. While working for Fort Dodge, I put on a supper meeting for ranchers with a veterinarian from New Town, N.D. Into that meeting walked the woman who I would ask to be my wife. Together, we’ve been able to ranch, publish three books, serve in the legislature, campaign for governor and raise three beautiful children who — full circle here — all learned how to ride horse on that kind hearted sorrel gelding named Dude. That horse earned every bale of hay and bite of grass he ever took on this
ranch. I wish we could have given him more. But everything that has a beginning must, someday, have an end. The end came recently for our 28-yearold equine friend. I had told the family that Dude was getting awfully old. You could see it in his hair coat and his eyes and in the slowness of his movement. He was still eating and getting around, but when he started losing weight, I told the kids, and myself, that this might be his last winter. I was prepared for the grisly job of saying goodbye and putting him down, but old Dude spared me that pain, laid down on the ground of the ranch where he’d spent 24 of his 28 years and drifted off. Thank you for all the rides, partner. You were a good horse and one that we won’t ever forget on this ranch. Ryan Taylor is a rancher, writer and senator in the state legislature from Towner, North Dakota.
NANTON, Alta. — The introduction of mandatory radio frequency ear tags in Canada immediately prompted some cattle producers to look for ways to take advantage of the information potential. Attaching birth dates, health records and other facts to the individual numbers embedded in the tag turned cattle into walking databases. By working with the Beef Info Xchange System, these producers can now find out how each animal measured up at the packing plant, said Larry Thomas, head of the program run through the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association. Cargill Meat Solutions at Guelph, Ont., and High River, Alta., joined the program last Januar y and have returned carcass data on 1.5 million head. XL Foods at Brooks, Alta., was participating until E. coli contamination forced it to temporarily close last fall. It is expected to rejoin. Since November, producers have been able to check the results attached to their cattle’s numbers. Several years of data will be needed to turn the numbers into useful information, but it will be able to show producers if they are making progress or need to make changes. “It is about you getting hard data back to make effective business decisions based on hard data and just not innuendo,” Thomas told a recent beef education day in Nanton. Packer data includes slaughter date, hot carcass weight, gender, yield, grade, fat depth and marbling scores. Total days to slaughter may be added later. A cross border committee is talking about going wider because the data is now lost if Canadian cattle are exported to the United States. The next phase is working with feedlots to provide health scores and information about implant and beta agonist use. Producers join the program by providing their names and contact information. The database includes space to add statistics about their cattle, such as health programs, hormone use, breed, colour, dehorning, castration methods and other facts that could be useful to a potential buyer. A buyer can send a query looking for a certain type of cattle and the system administrator forwards it to selected producers who may have that type. They can reply to the buyer if they wish. “You can connect up to players in the industry seeking what you might do on your ranch or feedlot and then help your bottom business line,” Thomas said. For more information, visit www. bixs.cattle.ca/go.