Ellie with Carol Pittman, her 4-H leader
it isn’t caused by a late calving date. If they have a bad calf the first year, I will give them the second year. If it doesn’t change the second year, they are gone.” As we tour out to look at the calves, we drive by the golf course at Saskatchewan Landing and Will comments the grasskeeper should have been a cattleman, his grass management is so superb. The cost of pasture has gone up in the area in recent years and Will rents
his. He says, “I would rather have the cows than buy land, the cattle are what make the money. Even if you own your own land, you have to include the cost of the land like a rental fee, in with your production costs or you are fooling yourself to think it is less. You could be renting it out for the same or equivalent as what you would pay. In this area we can run one cow on about 15 acres. At Dundurn, I can run 127 pairs on two quarters of land for 91 days and it
isn’t overgrazed. You wouldn’t get away with that here in a normal year. You would maybe get one month and that would be pushing the limits of your grass.” “Finding land to rent hasn’t been a problem. I have had more people offer me grass. The increased availability is probably because there are less people grassing yearlings as previous years, that and the overall decrease in cow numbers. There is certain land that just isn’t useful for anything else. Uneducated consumers think that cattle are born in a feedlot and live confined all of their life. They think they should be on grass all year. What they don’t understand is there is a lot of land here that would have absolutely no other use if we didn’t graze cattle on it. They also don’t understand that we have winter and it would not be in the best interest of the livestock to grass them year round. I also like renting pasture as I don’t have time to fix fence and it isn’t my responsibility.” They start calving on April 10 and run a 60 day calving period. They just don’t have the facilities to pull the bulls when they would like. They would like to get up to 220 cows and they rent all of their grass. “Water is the issue, once we get past that, we can get a bit bigger. 250 would be the maximum we could run unless I get continued on page 32
30
Charolais Connection • February 2015