Tip for Winter Grazing Cornstalks
An innovative rancher makes easy work of strip grazing.
Farmers who grow corn and raise cattle often use cornstalks as winter feed for their cattle. This works best if the corn can be strip-grazed rather than just turning the cows into the whole field — making them utilize most of a certain portion before going into the next segment. Otherwise, cattle go through the whole field and select the ears and most palatable parts of the plants first. Toward the end of the grazing period, they have nothing but the coarser and less nutritious parts of the stalks left.
Timothy DelCurto, Nancy Cameron Endowed Chair of Animal and Range Sciences at Montana State University, recently attended a rancher meeting in north central Alberta, Canada. He talked about ways to reduce winter feed costs. He shared a story about when one of the ranchers asked him to come out to the ranch.
“When I went out there, he showed me the way he grazes corn. He ran about 500 cows and his entire winter feeding program for them was grazing field corn. He grew a lot of corn, and in each big field, he’d let the cows graze in 100-foot strips, utilizing electric fence to strip-graze,” says DelCurto.
Thanks to his own innovation, the rancher had figured out how to plant the corn in 100-foot segments and leave a 4-foot blank space between them. This blank space allowed for quick and easy set up of the electric fence.
“He told me that the weather was really nice in the spring and early summer when he plants corn but not so nice in the winter, trying to fight bad weather and all those cornstalks to put in the fences,” DelCurto says. “With the 4-foot strips through the corn field, he could zip down those alleys with his 4-wheeler once a week and move the electric fence.”
The rancher said he didn’t have to start his 100-hp tractor at -22° F or -40° to go feed cows. He added that he didn’t have to worry about snow depth because the cows would eat the stalks down to the snow, and when it started thawing in the spring, they would go back and find what they’d missed.
In DelCurto’s opinion, this is a great way to make it easier to utilize cornstalks for winter feed. He said it is also something he’d never thought of trying.
“Happy cows make happy ranchers.” added DelCurto.
“This rancher didn’t mind farming — raising corn — as long as he could do all the tractor work in the summer. He didn’t want to operate tractors or any other equipment in the winter, so this was a great way to feed his cows.”
Editor’s Note: Heather Smith Thomas is a freelance writer and a cattlewoman from Salmon, Idaho.