"Limit Grazing" Might Stretch
Short Wheat Pasture This Year

By David Bowser

AMARILLO — With many wheat pasture operators facing short stands this year, a beef cattle specialist says limited grazing offers a chance for cattlemen to maintain weight gains on their pasture cattle and stretch the available forage.

"The wheat forage on dryland is going to be pretty scant if we get any at all in terms of grazing," says Dr. Ted McCollum, beef cattle specialist with the Texas Agricultural Extension Service. "Even some of the irrigated wheat may be a little short this fall."

"Limit grazing" is a way to ration pasture out, he says.

"We can use this to either work out a temporary forage shortage or it may be something we can use in a planned program," McCollum says.

As an example of a planned program, McCollum points to a producer who runs 800 head of steers on a 120-acre circle of matua brome grass.

The steers graze only four hours every afternoon.

"He's got them trained," McCollum explains. "He's got a facility next to where he turns them out. At 1 p.m. they go out and get their grazing done. At 5 p.m., his hand comes out there and opens the gate. They all know that they're supposed to leave. They file right out of the pasture and right back over to the lot and stay there until one o'clock the next afternoon. That's how he can run 800 steers on 120 acres."

The producer also cuts silage off the circle. When the cattle are not grazing, they're eating silage.

"If one of the paddocks in his grazing system gets ahead, he can call in a silage chopper and chop silage and pack it," McCollum says. "At the same time, it allows him to run more cattle than he could normally run on that acreage."

The idea behind limit grazing is to let the cattle graze just part of the day, not 24 hours.

"We can increase the stocking rate or we can stretch the forage supply if we need to," McCollum says.

Research in Oklahoma shows the advantages of limit grazing. During a trial, cattle were turned out for one hour a day, two hours a day and four hours a day. Researchers left another group out full time on the pasture.

The longer they were out on pasture the more weight they gained during that limit period. When they were not out on pasture, they were in a trap on 12 percent protein hay.

"In that part of Oklahoma, it was probably bermuda grass hay," McCollum says.

The cattle that grazed full time averaged gains of 2.24 pounds a day versus 1.63 pounds for the cattle that were limited to one hour a day, 1.61 pounds for cattle that were limited to two hours a day, and 1.53 for cattle that were limited to four hours a day.

"They could run two to three times as many cattle on a given area of land and take advantage of some buying opportunities," McCollum explains.

In the spring of the year on grazeout, producers can use twice as many cattle as they can carry through the winter. By limit grazing, they can buy in the fall of the year, limit graze and use hay during that time, and meanwhile have all their cattle bought and ready to go for their spring grazeout period.

"You wouldn't necessarily have to be using 12 percent bermuda grass hay while these cattle are out on wheat pasture," McCollum notes. The cattle could be fed silage when they're not out on pasture.

"One of the reason we would want to be feeding silage on wheat pasture would be to stretch the pasture out so we can run more cattle," McCollum says. "We can make up the difference in silage. We can stock more than we otherwise would, but at the same time we can maintain the performance of the cattle."

Using an oat pasture research study out of Argentina as an example, McCollum says researchers were successful in rationing the pasture forage and still maintaining their weight gain on the cattle.

Another trial from Oklahoma looking at feeding silage on wheat pasture has a different twist.

"The way they limited forage was that they adjusted their stocking rate," McCollum says. "They didn't go out there and estimate how much was out there. They just put out more cattle per acre."

As the cattle ate more silage, the amount of wheat they ate declined.

"If you want to use silage to run more cattle on an area, for every pound of silage we feed a steer, we're going to reduce his forage intake by six-thenths of a pound per day," McCollum says. "If a 500 pound steer is eating 2.67 percent of his body weight per day, he would be eating about 13.4 pounds of wheat forage dry matter per day. If we came in and fed him a couple of pounds of silage a day on a dry matter basis, we would reduce his forage intake about 1.2 pounds a day. We can then calculate backwards that for 1.2 pounds of wheat forage, how many more steers can we run per acre?"

The same thing can be done using a growing ration, he says.

"We could figure out how many pounds of growing ration we want to feed," McCollum says. "They're going to eat less wheat forage when they do that, so we can figure out how many more cattle our wheat pasture will support when we put that extra feed in there."

A study of feeding silage on dryland wheat pasture at El Reno, Oklahoma, confirms that weight gains can be held with more cattle on the same amount of pasture with supplemental feeding.

"Statistically, there was no difference," McCollum says, "but they were able to run twice as many cattle and hold the weight gains up. The silage per day, of course, increased as the forage availability decreased."

The limiting factor was the number of cattle.

"The silage can work in a couple of ways," McCollum says. "It can let you run more cattle or it can extend your forage. We're not going to produce as much wheat this fall as we normally would. We're going to be a little bit short on wheat, but we might be able to put more cattle out and let the silage boost or hold our gains up while we're out on the pasture."

The nice thing about such a program, McCollum says, is that cattlemen can buy cheap cattle in the fall and have them ready to go next spring.

"We don't necessarily need to be feeding silage," McCollum says. "It could be cottonseed hulls and corn. It would have the same effect. Or with corn and some of our other grains, as inexpensive as they are today, you could probably work up some type of growing ration that they could be fed while they’re off the pasture. Instead of having to suffer through the winter with small weight gains, you could have some cattle that do the wheat plus whatever you're feeding, the silage or grower ration, and have them gaining a couple of pounds a day. When they hit grazeout, they could gain a couple of pounds a day, so you can stretch that short supply of wheat or you could run more cattle."

He says if a producer let his cattle graze for from two to four hours a day, depending upon how his facilities are set up, they're going to get trained to come on and off that wheat pasture.

"It may take a week or so to get them trained, but after a while, when they get their routine down, it's not going to be a lot of work to move them around," McCollum says.

"With limit grazing, all we're doing is cutting the amount of time they're spending on that pasture."

Research shows that a steer on wheat pasture only actively grazes about six to eight hours a day, anyway.

Silage might be the same way, he says.

"If you want to use silage on the side, just limit the amount of silage you're putting out for them," he says.