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ON-FARM THOUGHTS: Mixed Messages From the Field
by Larry Wegner, MFGA Producer Relations
Mother Nature sure has been giving us mixed messages lately. And, judging by this week’s weather, she seems to have forgotten about the start of spring. I am sure hoping this last brush with winter will be all we get before we can get into the long-awaited and busy spring season. And then, we will be looking for something else to talk about.
Much like Mother Nature in 2023, in a way, those of us in the agriculture world often deal with mixed messages. Think of a mixed message as talking to five other producers and getting five different answers. Sometimes, trying to find the right answer for you and your operation from your peers and industry types will take you down the proverbial gopher hole.
As we celebrate 2023 National Soil Conservation Week this week, and as a person who is very interested in learning as much as I can around soil health, I’d most certainly say soil health is one of those many agricultural topics full of these mixed messages. I have been in these types of conversations many times and if you listen to those who say it can not be done, you will never get it done. And they will be right. Soil health is full of these messages. Someone told me once that You can't change soil organic mater levels (SOM). It only made sense to me as a producer that if I can lower the SOM level then surely I can increase it. I had an instructor for second year soils class when I went to Olds College in Alberta that said, “many soil health issues can be corrected by increasing SOM level.” In my older, wiser years I have concluded that I may have gotten more out of the class if I had been more open to learning about soil heath and not just cattle, cold beer and college partying.
While the right message may be there, we must be willing to be open and take it in. Textbook after textbook tells us that “it takes a thousand years to build one inch of topsoil.” This has been taught in all levels of learning after a scientist measured the soil build-up on the Roman Colosseum. We have seen on our farm near Virden, Manitoba that within the same soil type we can have six to eight inches of topsoil but only a half mile over, there are three inches of topsoil. I am not sure if we built the soil up or built the soil down or does it even matter? There is a difference. But, once again, the messages are mixed. Two fields, two different SOM, same farm. How did we get there?
I learned from innovative producers that I can increase my growing season. At the time, this was important to me as I needed and wanted more than a 60-100 day growing season. I learned that If I can keep my soil covered, I can keep the moisture in the soil longer and thus have plants growing longer. It sounds simple and can be if you keep it simple. For every 15 days you gain in fall you can gain five days in spring. It may not sound like much but it certainly adds up in reducing your feed bill. These days, we usually will have green grass until late October to early November and then we start grazing stockpiled forage. The fall grazing makes sense and is easy to understand, spring growth is different. For a long time, I tried to understand how and why it works. We have seen a steady increase in days of spring grazing. In fact, now we start when the snow is gone. I do not know the number of times I have mentioned early spring grazing and have been told by some that we are just grazing green grass from last year. Yes, there is some in the mix, but if you taste the grass, you can taste the difference - new grass is sweeter and tender, the old has a dry hay taste and smell.
My good wife Rosemary once attended a grazing meeting on our family’s behalf as I had a work conflict. When Rosemary came home, she was fit to be tied. A forage rep told her that the grass does not grow enough to be grazed before May long weekend and we were harming our forage stand. Rosemary has seen our improvements but could not understand why the forage rep would not believe her or even come over to look at our forage stand. It took us a long time to put the pieces together on what is happening in the soil and the forages, they work together.
As we build soil health and develop soil aggregates, this provides a channel in the soil for water to infiltrate. Not only does water use these pathways so does air, and as the warm water and air interact in the soil profile it warms it up and activates the soil microbes. Thus, the start of spring growth. I have seen green new grass as deep as the ten inches of stock-piled forages in April after the snow melted. The grass had to have been growing under the snow. This winter I came on to new research that backs what Rosemary and I have seen. The forage rep was not wrong. Simply, many of them have not seen the work in the fields that the innovative producers are doing.
My push to innovate started taking shape when I finished college. I was going to show everyone how much I learned as I now was modern and up to date with the new knowledge. I drove four hours away to a different area to buy a new certified barley variety. Once home, I had an older producer tell me that seed grown locally will do better and guess what? I proved him right. A few years ago, I came onto research that explained that plant seeds will gather bacteria from the soil and inoculate the seed with these bacteria to help the seed get a better start when it germinates. Think about that one…. how much seed is now grown that travels hundreds or thousands of kilometers to grow our crops? Each year we need new seed to grow. This applies to both annual and perennial crops. Many forage seed production areas are in Oregon on the USA west coast, Peace River, Alberta and the Interlake region of Manitoba.
In a relevant tale, I have gone down one of these mixed message gopher holes in the beef industry lately. I recently heard a cattle buyer say that he wants to buy early big calves that will finish in the 950 lb. plus carcass weight. The industry has recently increased the size of carcass before penalties to over 1000 lbs. plus on the rail in the west and the east has no oversized penalties. That would be 1600 lbs. live weight fat. The cow needed to produce that size of feeder would also have to be bigger. The general rule for finishing cattle is that heifers will finish 100 lbs. lighter than her dam (mother) and the steer will finish 100 lbs. heavier than the dam. Using these guidelines, the cow herd to supply cattle for the sustainability of this system would have to be 1,500 lbs. or bigger. I asked questions of many experts in the beef industry. One key graph I got from CanFax was one that showed while the cow herd has gotten smaller, the beef production in Canada has remained the same mostly due to the larger carcass weights. These types of cows need an elevated level of good quality of feed to maintain and reproduce out of season. I can not find out what the lower limit is for carcass weight, the only thing I was told was the processors do not want small carcasses. But how small is small? On our farm, we have been trying to keep our costs down at home by calving in in the later spring, in synch with nature. We believe this is letting the cattle do most of the work while harvesting their own feed. This has been working for us, it is not perfect, and we always have lots of talk and dialogue around why we do what we do.
With two sons coming back to the farm this is often open for debate. Here is a link on this subject relating cow size to profitability. Please check out the good work being done for our industry in these case studies. I had a beef instructor in college who said, “in a producer’s lifetime they will see the chase of cattle size go up and down and those who chase the trend will always be playing catch-up.” He believed that medium-framed cattle that worked for the producer was where you needed to be.
I was frustrated with the order buyer that started me going down this gopher hole and remembered what my father thought of order buyers. He said, “The first thing a buyer will tell you is that you have the wrong product for the market and the next thing out of their mouth is they will help you out by buying what you have for a discount.” It makes perfect sense now. Finally, a truly clear message.
Best regards,
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