Rebuilding Regeneratively

Push the pencil before trying to push cattle numbers.

Like many cow-calf producers, we’re puzzling over how to rebuild the cow herd at Noble Ranches.

Depending on a producer’s context — type of operation, geography, business goals and more — rebuilding may look different from ranch to ranch. In any case, it’s an important time to take stock, not only of your animals, but also of your forage and carrying capacity. Let’s push our pencils before we push cattle numbers in the months and years to come.

As a part of this thought process, I’ll share what we’ve been doing to sustain our commitment to using regenerative management practices to restore and maintain grazing lands as we’ve navigated the recent years of drought here in southern Oklahoma.

Sorting through options

If you want to begin to rebuild and optimize your opportunity when you’re at the low end of cow numbers and the high side of the marketability for any category of females, you’ll need some way to feed them economically.

Across Texas, Oklahoma and other locations hard-pressed with drought over the last three to four years, we’re beginning to see a bit of recovery. We had close to 20 inches of rain at Noble’s headquarters in Ardmore, Okla., during April and May, setting us up for good cool-season growth and a good start for the summer. If we have a good forage year in this region there will be opportunities for producers to look at retaining more heifers, not necessarily for their herd, but to provide opportunities for others to purchase them as either yearling heifers or bred heifers.

Many of us culled so hard through the drought that females within our herds are typically of good quality. If you know that you’ve got a good herd and plenty of grass (hay, haylage or just standing grass) going into weaning, ask yourself how many more females you could keep beyond what you normally would retain to develop into potential replacements for yourself or someone else.

That’s one opportunity. Another option is buying heifers from your neighbor or another known source, or perhaps from an auction market that can verify the heifers have not been implanted with a growth hormone. Ideally, these purchased heifers will match up with your own retained heifers. The plan would be adding value to these quality females you’ve raised and purchased by offering them for sale as bred, spring-calving heifers to help begin rebuilding the nation’s cow herd.

Another way to capitalize on surplus forage and realize a quicker return on your investment would be to buy older, yearling heifers that are ready to breed. If you buy good-quality heifers now and turn bulls out in mid-December, you will have a few big, bred heifers you can sell for fall calving next year. Whether you purchase younger heifers born in the spring or older heifers born last fall, they won’t be cheap, but they’re usually $10-$20 per hundredweight less than similar-sized steers.

We typically can count on spring rains. So, if we’ve got enough forage, either standing or stored, to get us through the winter into spring, we don’t have to push those animals very hard. Keep the heifers in good shape with decent nutrition, especially those being exposed to bulls for fall calving. Then come spring, with your annuals and that early spring flush, expose them to the bulls. Maybe not all of them breed, but even a big open yearling heifer is ripe for the feed yard and will bring a nice price.

Of course, you may need more bulls for those heifers. If so, start looking now, because bull prices this fall will be more economical than in the spring, when everybody’s looking. If you can find some young, easy-calving bulls at a good price, you can pick them up and hedge your bet a bit.

To afford to do this, you need to start monitoring your forage now to know how much standing or baled grass you can allocate for additional heifers. Knowing next spring will bring another flush of grass, do you have enough standing or stored grass to get to spring? The extra heifers and bulls may pencil out if your forage supply is 15% to 20% above normal.

Capitalize on culls

Even with your culled cows, there’s another opportunity to capitalize on the demand for bred animals.

In the last few years here at Noble, our genetic selection has been to lower our frame score, so we’ve been trying to move some of our older, big cows. And with the drought, we’ve had short breeding seasons, expecting some of our cows to roll out. We really want to try to market everything we can strategically, so if the cow doesn’t breed, we’re going to get her in condition and sell her. If she’s old or a problem cow, she goes to a packer. We’ll turn the young ones around and expose them to bulls to be fall-calving cows. Historically, they have sold extremely well the following spring.

Given the current market, if you’ve got some young cull cows that are open, but sound and healthy, it could be worth exposing them again and holding them until spring. Our producers aren’t getting younger, on average; many would rather handle a bred cow than a bred heifer.

Forage comes first

To maintain soil health and be realistic about our carrying capacity, our decision tree at Noble begins with forage. August into early September is an excellent time to take inventory of forage supply. We hope that up to this point in the year, we’ve managed our grazing resources well and have stockpiled a surplus of standing grass for winter. We don’t make hay at our ranches; however, we stockpile about five months of standing grass annually.

When it comes to hay, the rule of thumb is to plan for about one bale per mature cow per month, assuming the bale weighs 1,000-1,200 pounds. For heifers, it’s about 80% of that. This helps you assess your stored hay supply and how far it could go if needed.

Estimate your standing forage inventory using a measuring stick or deduce it based on your grazing rotation and history, then compute your reserve herd days and plan how to manage your forage for your existing herd and any animals you may add.

As you take your inventory of how many months of grazing you have in front of you, consider the approach of rationing it out a few days at a time, like you would for cattle in a feedyard, where they get one day’s worth of feed at a time. If you’re set up for rotational or adaptive grazing, moving cattle through paddocks sized for one day’s worth of grazing at a time is about the most efficient strategy. Two days at a time is not quite as efficient, but even twice a week is better than once a week.

If you can overseed a cover crop or if you have cropland to graze, make plans now to have this extra high-quality forage in place to provide at least some winter pasture to add to your stored and standing forage until the spring greening takes off. This works well as a cost-effective way to help your heifers be in shape for breeding in early spring without pushing them too hard.

We seed a cover-crop mixture in the fall, using cereal rye as the cool-season annual grass in sandier soils and wheat on tighter soils. We always hope to have a diverse mixture in the seed box, including some legumes. In terms of timing, we’ve delayed our fall cover-crop seeding to avoid insect issues. We’ve managed our summer forages so that we don’t depend on grazing the newly seeded areas in the fall — we don’t need to, and we’re looking forward to that big spring flush.

Silver linings

Although cow numbers are the fewest this industry has seen in a very long time, we’re also more productive than ever, as far as pounds of beef. I’ve seen this happen after each cattle cycle over the past 40 years of my career. We always have a better, higher-performing cow herd when we come out of these cyclical lows that follow destocking due to high numbers or drought. The silver lining of these events is that we’ve seen continual improvement in our beef herds.

Besides culling the poorest producers during these cycles, improvement stems from adoption of advancing technologies and our increasing ability to measure, monitor and analyze metrics. We’ve also made great strides in the genetic improvement of many performance traits, thanks to producer use of genetic selection tools, such as expected progeny differences and selection indexes.

Let’s hope the weather and feed costs continue in cattle producers’ favor as the industry looks toward rebuilding a productive and profitable cow herd to meet consumer demand for beef.

Editor’s Note: This is part of a continuing series of articles about regenerative ranching for the American Hereford Association. Follow the series in future issues of Baldy Advantage and Hereford World, as well as in special “1881” podcasts, at Hereford.org.

Hugh Aljoe

Hugh Aljoe serves as the director of ranches, outreach and partnerships at Noble Research Institute, where he focuses on regenerative management of range and pasture, high stock density grazing and holistic ranch management. He has been associated with Noble since 1995 and, before joining, managed a 3,000-acre, 1,500-head cattle operation in Texas. Hugh received his master’s degree in range science from Texas A&M University with an emphasis on grazing management.