Summer Farming Update

Back in August I shared a bit about how we planted some hay and cover crops for the cattle to graze this fall. I know it’s a little late, but I just wanted to let you know how that turned out. It seemed like there was a lot of interest in our summer farming so here is just a little bit about how it all turned out.

These pictures were taken in the middle of October. Now things look a lot different between the grazing and snow. The photo below is of the winter wheat. It came up very nice a generated a good amount feed to be grazed. I’m excited about this stand for next spring. There was more alfalfa in it than I had hoped. We were planning on planting new alfalfa in it after we harvest the wheat hay, but alfalfa actually has an allelopathy against itself. This means that it prevents germination of other alfalfa. I think we will have to plant something else after the wheat and then come in with alfalfa. It will take a little longer than we wanted, but we should be able to plant some sudan grass or another warm season annual and grow a lot of hay.

I don’t have a picture of the ryegrass that we planted with some oats. It didn’t grow as well as the wheat. We did manage to grow some pasture. The oats grew better than the ryegrass. Unfortunately, the deer and elk managed to eat more of the ryegrass and winter wheat than the cows did. We only moved the bred heifers onto it recently and we had a LOT of deer come in for quite a while. Then, a little before the heifers were brought up, a couple hundred elk came in at night and worked on it, too. The cows still had a little bit left to graze. It was less than we wanted though.

Above and below are the oats that were planted as a nurse crop for the alfalfa. This crop grew very well and the calves and some cows grazed it. Some deer worked on it, but it was very little. The alfalfa looks like it germinated well and we should have a good stand to hay next summer. Below, you can see the calves were scattered out in the oats getting a belly-full of good quality pasture.

As with everything it seems, there were some ups and downs in our summer farming. We were hoping to do a little more this fall to get ready for spring, but it has been so wet that we couldn’t get it done. Hopefully next spring will have some good farming weather. We need to get some more oats and alfalfa in the ground.

Again, I would like to encourage anyone in Wyoming that would like buy beef this year to get in touch. Our final beef processing date until next fall is coming up quickly! Just give us a call or shoot us an email and we will get you taken care of.

by Brandon Greet