What’s your hay strategy?
By Jason Cavadini
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably one of approximately 532,440 beef operations in the United States. Beef producers exist in every one of the 50 states under a vast array of climate and soil conditions and ranging in herd size from under 10 head to more than 35,000. With that diversity, the adage “there are no two operations the same” is pretty fitting for the beef industry. You’d be hard pressed to name many things that are the same for most operations.
Perhaps one of the few things they share in common is the need to rely, at least sometimes, on stored feed. Most operations feed at least some hay at some point in the year. That said, economics, scale, climatic conditions and personal preference heavily influence the hay feeding strategy of each operation, and as a result, it could also be said that “no two operations feed hay the same.” With so many options available, which one is right for your operation? Identifying a hay feeding strategy that best suits your beef operation requires understanding the options available and how they fit the scale, climatic conditions and overall goals of your operation.
Identifying goals
Hay feeding strategies often combine several inter-related goals, including maintaining appropriate nutritional quality, managing labor and minimizing waste, all ultimately in aim of reducing cost. Stored feed is often the largest proportion of beef operations’ cost of production, sometimes reaching well over 50% of the total, so minimizing cost should be an underlying goal, even if your primary concern is forage quality.
Perhaps hay feeding strategies can be boiled down to four goals:
Maximize ‘self feeding’ (grazing)
Optimize hay quality
Minimize hay waste/loss
Minimize labor, equipment, infrastructure
While the overall goal is reducing feeding costs, sometimes investments are needed to adopt a particular strategy. For example, feeding unrolled bales is one of the best ways to minimize hay feeding loss, but a bale unroller can be a significant investment. Likewise, research shows that to achieve that minimum hay loss, only one day or less of hay must be unrolled at a time, which increases labor costs. So, weighing all the costs and benefits before you choose a strategy is a good practice. This article is intended to help you weigh the options and develop a strategy that best fits your needs.
Maximize “self-feeding” – if pasture is part of your feeding strategy, extending the grazing season to minimize the amount of hay fed is a goal that maximizes the value of low-cost managed grazing. Every day the herd is harvesting its own feed and spreading its own manure generates savings. But even operations that take advantage of crop residues, annual forages, and cover crops to extend the grazing season often utilize stored feeds at least part of the year.
Optimize forage quality – while hay prices are certainly impacted by supply-and-demand, they are mostly influenced by forage quality. But better quality doesn’t always translate to better animal performance, and just because better quality is available doesn’t mean the cost is justified. The quality of hay must be matched to the nutritional needs of the cattle being fed. Nursing cows and 400 lb stockers have much greater needs than dry cows and 800 lb stockers (Figure 1).
Minimize hay waste/loss – losing dry matter that you paid for is like money out the window. Some loss of dry matter during storage and feeding is inevitable and can range from 10% to more than 50% depending on management practices (Figure 2). While losses cannot be completely avoided, they can be managed within reason.
Storage losses – storing bales under a roof can keep losses under 5%. While this may be viewed as the gold standard, building permanent storage facilities can probably only be justified for larger operations. Storing bales outside can result in losses of 15-60%. Losses can be kept on the lower end of that range by wrapping bales in plastic or covering them with a tarp. These measures too, however, add extra cost and labor. Losses for bales stored outside without wrap or tarp can be kept to a minimum by using net wrap instead of twine and placing them on well-drained sites that are not shaded.
Feeding losses – some feed loss is inevitable regardless of how hay is fed, but there are low cost methods of minimizing these losses. Making available an adequate, but not generous amount of feed at a time encourages animals to clean up the hay and reduces loss. Having appropriate quality hay without mold or other weathering helps ensure the hay is palatable and is consumed readily. Fortunately, some of the least costly options, such as hay rings or cone hay rings have the lowest losses (2 to 8%). More costly hay trailers and cradles waste 10 to 20%, with unprotected bales resulting in the highest losses, ranging from 20 to 50%.
Minimize labor, equipment, infrastructure – as with storage, a permanent feeding structure such as a concrete feeding pad, a bedded pack barn, or other animal housing/feeding structures may be the gold standard for preserving quality and reducing losses. However, permanent facilities and the associated costs in terms of labor, equipment, and maintenance are hard to justify for most operations, especially smaller ones. For these reasons, many operations choose to feed hay outside, in the pasture, in a crop field or in a sacrifice area. It is by far the most cost-effective method of feeding stored feeds but requires careful planning.
Considerations for feeding outdoors
Siting your feeding area – if you’ve decided to feed on pasture or crop fields, the planning focuses mainly on minimizing the impact that feeding hay can have on the land by spreading it out (bale grazing), moving it around (rotating the herd through multiple areas), or concentrating it to a small area (often referred to as a sacrifice area). There are several strategies for achieving this, but there are also equipment and labor (Figure 3) implications that impact the cost-effectiveness of each one. So, which one is most suitable for your operation?
The key to success with outwintering or any outdoor feeding is site selection. While most soils can withstand cattle feeding under frozen conditions, a poorly chosen site can turn into a mudhole when soils are wet and unfrozen (what we call the “mud season” here in Wisconsin). Soil drainage class is the biggest indicator of this, and this information can be found in the Web Soil Survey. Hay feeding should be avoided on soils classified as poorly drained. Feeding can occur on somewhat poorly drained soils when soils are frozen or dry. Moderately well drained soils may be suitable for feeding even during wet portions of the year. Well-drained soils are ideal for outdoor feeding, although all types of soils can experience erosion, nutrient loss, compaction, and renovation that result from improperly placed sites all add cost to feeding hay.
Choosing your feeding strategy – there are two broad categories of feeding strategies, one that allows the cattle to feed on intact bales and one that involves unrolling or processing the bales and spreading them in a feeder or on the ground.
Why unroll or process hay before feeding? The concept here is to disperse the feed over a larger area with the goals of 1) improving access for all animals, thus improving animal performance, 2) reducing the concentration of animals around feeders, thus possibly reducing soil damage and keeping animals cleaner, and 3) improving utilization and reducing waste. Bale unrollers work only with round bales, laying out a strip of hay on the ground as the round bale is unrolled. There are also chained and chainless bale processors/feeders available that provide the additional step of chopping or fluffing the strip of hay as it lays it on the ground or in a feed bunk. Most processors/feeders are designed to work with multiple types of bales, including balage. Both unrollers and processors can be costly, from around $10,000 for used equipment and up to $30,000 or more for new.
To effectively achieve the goals for investing in this type of equipment, producers must be willing to also invest significant labor into daily feeding. Research has demonstrated that waste was minimized by unrolling only enough hay for 24 hours at a time (2 – 8% wasted), and that feeding enough for 4 days at a time resulted in waste in excess of 20%.
Options for feeding intact bales – several of the goals listed for unrolling bales can be achieved through carefully planned feeding of intact bales. Ensuring adequate access to feed for the entire herd can be accomplished by providing enough bales at a time to make sure each animal has space to access them. Reducing damage to soil can be achieved by moving the feeding area to different locations over the course of the season. There are several approaches for this that will be covered below. Finally, several low-cost bale feeder types are available that achieve waste levels similar to hay unrollers, under 10%. Hay trailers and cradles are designed to keep hay off the ground, which suggests that there would be less refusal and less waste. Research has shown this tends not to be the case. They actually produce higher levels of waste than a simple hay ring. Effectively used a hay ring has waste levels of 4 to 8%, whereas hay trailers have 10-15% and hay cradles have 15-20% waste – meaning an average of 15 out of every 100 bales you feed are not consumed by your cattle.
The practice of “bale grazing” is still a relatively new concept to many and has perhaps the greatest potential of balancing all the goals a producer might have for feeding hay.
Bale grazing – for those who feed for long periods, as we do here in Wisconsin, producers may want to consider bale grazing – a method of preplacing all or part of a season’s hay requirement in a grid pattern out in the field (Figure 4). Cattle are allowed access to enough bales for several days at a time using temporary electric fencing. One benefit of bale grazing is that it enables a producer to treat areas where soil fertility is low with a relatively high, uniformly applied layer of manure and waste hay. These areas can then be renovated and brought back into the pasture system or crop rotation at a much higher plane of fertility.
The amount of waste with this method depends on whether hay rings are utilized and how many bales are fed at a time. The impact on the land can range from low to high depending on the soil type, and nutrient distribution can also range from low to high depending on the density (# bales/acre) at which the bales are fed. Very low labor and equipment requirements in addition to the ability to manage the impact on the land and nutrient distribution make bale grazing a hay feeding strategy that can be advantageous for many operations.
Bale grazing shows much promise as a method of minimizing hay feeding costs and labor, but how do cattle perform under this method? Research conducted in Saskatchewan in 2008 found that dry cows fed under bale grazing were able to maintain similar body condition scores and even better average daily gains compared to dry cows fed in a dry lot or with a bale processor. And bale grazing had a much lower cost per cow/day than bale processing and dry lot feeding. Part of that cost is the use of tractors for feeding, which was tracked in the same project, where bale grazing required zero “tractor starts,” bale processing required 39, and dry lot feeding 264.
Over the past two winters, we have conducted an on-farm bale grazing project across Wisconsin to learn even more about the impact of the practice on the land and the value of the nutrient distribution to the operation. This project is an exploration of how 13 operations are managing bale grazing. These farms were all required to preset their bales in a grid of approximately 25-30 ft between bales. Participating farms averaged 4.1 acres of pre-placed bales. We calculated an average manure application rate of 53 tons/acre, equating to approximately $464/acre of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium being added to the soil based on current fertilizer prices. The soil conditions of these sites were observed before and after bale grazing, and while sand and clay soils had higher compaction levels than silt loams, there was not a significant increase in compaction across sites as a result of bale grazing. The full report from the first year of this project can be found here.
While bale grazing requires significant planning to select an appropriate site, preset bales, and ensure water availability, as well as some post bale grazing site renovation, the tradeoffs are lower labor and equipment costs. This and other options described here are just a few available for operations needing to feed hay, whether it be for a few days or a long winter. The key is to select the right combination of practices and equipment to achieve your financial, land stewardship and quality of life goals.
*Much of the information and data shared in this article are derived from work completed by Dennis Hancock, director of the USDA-Dairy Forage Research Center, Madison, Wisconsin, and colleagues, as well as from materials presented at the Driftless Area Beef Conference by Hancock.
Cavadini is a grazing outreach specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.
