Forage Types

Have you made your new year’s resolution yet? If not, I have one for you: Let’s all lose weight – the weight of not knowing what to do with those winter-feeding areas.

“People think rotational grazing is an exact science, and it’s not,” says Roy Boldridge. Boldridge grazes Angus-Hereford-Simmental-cross cows in Culpeper County, Virginia, and has put haymaking and grazing days to the test to find his profit center.

Last year we asked producers from around the country how their hay season had gone. We had such a great response that we decided to do the same thing this year. We gave three specific questions we consider to be burning questions in the industry.

The New Zealand cattle and sheep industries depend on an inexpensive supply of quality grass, but this feed is seasonal.

Haymaking was difficult this year in many regions of the country. Now is the time to analyze what happened and think about what could be done differently for next year.

The winter of 2018-19 was one of the worst years in memory for winter cattle feeding in much of the eastern U.S. Near-record rainfall during the winter months kept pastures and drylots saturated and turned areas where cattle were concentrated into mud pits.