2015 Hay Season

[foreman Etexas]

I thought it looked a little heavy in the front end to be pure Angus but some have changed a little. Also did not think that there were many pure Angus in your area because of the heat.

There is a lot of black around here,they do stay in the ponds thou. But yeah the Brangus are little harder to me than the angus. I don't think they are near as pickey either eating older hay. I have black/red/motley/smokey/baldies/tiger strip and full Charolais just aslong as it's a good mother.

My other bull SI (my boy named him)

 

[Creamer]

Great name! Nice looking too! Although I am a little partial to red with a white face.

How do the Charolais do in the heat. I never thought of them as a warm weather cattle. Of course they are not cold weather cattle either.

 

[foreman Etexas]

Great name! Nice looking too! Although I am a little partial to red with a white face.

How do the Charolais do in the heat. I never thought of them as a warm weather cattle. Of course they are not cold weather cattle either.

They do good bunch feed hogs. I like the smokey calves the Charolais crossed with Brangus throw,heck of a calf. I tend to keep more of them than any the others.

 

[Creamer]

My brother at home in the Dakotas changed most of the Herefords to Charolais bulls on Amerifax cows about 20 years ago. He was really impressed with the growth as the Amerifax cows milked well and the calves could use it and he was putting 1350 lbs on the market in 13 months. The problem was the bottom line - between the larger cows and and the feed the calves took he wasn't making it so he did not stay that way long. Now he is back to Herefords (some registered as they sell about 40 bulls a year) and Angus with a lot of black baldies. He seems to always get premium at the market and most of the meat is exported. He also sells 250-300 bred heifers every year that seem to be in demand. As much as I like the Herefords I do have to admit the black milk better and less pinkeye and foot rot. The 1150-1200 lb cow that is calving herself and they put the fats on the market at 15 months at 1350-1400 lbs grading choice yield grade 2 without creep feed and on pasture from April thru the almost the end of the year with cornstalks works out pretty well on the bottom line. Still I miss all those white faces in the feed bunk when I go out there. And the black bulls are not near as nice to be around.

 

[STx]

So you're saying that the 2,4-D is not hard on clover? I have a lawn service and fertilization/weed control is one of our services. We're spraying SpeedZone on lawns in the spring, which is a mix of 2,4-D and dicamba that is absolute murder on clover, and any other broadleaf. If you're not seeing the clover burned down with straight 2,4-D, I guess it's the dicamba that's doing it for us.

I'm going to be spraying 20 acres for a friend later this week with Speedzone to kill off his wild blackberry. He doesn't hay but is doing a lot of habitat management for birds, planting some dove fields and releasing a couple hundred quail along with 100 pheasant later this year, so we're trying to get the blackberry out of there to make it easier for the dogs to work in the fall. It's expensive, especially at just over a quart per acre, but the test areas we sprayed last week have done exactly what we'd hoped. Blackberry, thistle and dendelions are toast while the bahia, bluestem and bermuda are doing well.

We're going to be planting peredovik sunflowers, millet, sorghum, yellow dent corn and some milo in a bunch of small plots and overseed some of the grassy areas in bahia and bermuda. A lot of it had been planted already but he's in the Katy prairie, which used to all be rice fields, and got some heavy rain a couple of weeks ago that put most of the place under water for 3 or 4 days and it pretty much killed all the young plants.

Hoping to get fertilizer on this week. It's been to wet this spring here also. Did see one field of red clover cut this weekend. Going with 100 lbs of urea with Agrotain. I rotate between that and triple 19 and chicken litter. Depends on year and what went on last year.

I spray 2,4d at 2 pints per acre. I use a boomless nozzle that will cover 50 feet. I make a spring pass for thistle and then a sure pass. I only use the 2,4d because everything else is so hard on clovers.

 

[farmer2009]

So you're saying that the 2,4-D is not hard on clover? I have a lawn service and fertilization/weed control is one of our services. We're spraying SpeedZone on lawns in the spring, which is a mix of 2,4-D and dicamba that is absolute murder on clover, and any other broadleaf. If you're not seeing the clover burned down with straight 2,4-D, I guess it's the dicamba that's doing it for us.

I'm going to be spraying 20 acres for a friend later this week with Speedzone to kill off his wild blackberry. He doesn't hay but is doing a lot of habitat management for birds, planting some dove fields and releasing a couple hundred quail along with 100 pheasant later this year, so we're trying to get the blackberry out of there to make it easier for the dogs to work in the fall. It's expensive, especially at just over a quart per acre, but the test areas we sprayed last week have done exactly what we'd hoped. Blackberry, thistle and dendelions are toast while the bahia, bluestem and bermuda are doing well.

We're going to be planting peredovik sunflowers, millet, sorghum, yellow dent corn and some milo in a bunch of small plots and overseed some of the grassy areas in bahia and bermuda. A lot of it had been planted already but he's in the Katy prairie, which used to all be rice fields, and got some heavy rain a couple of weeks ago that put most of the place under water for 3 or 4 days and it pretty much killed all the young plants.

Yes it's the dicamba that's killing the clovers. Over 2 pints and 2,4d gets hard on clover. At 2 pints I see 10% or less damage to clovers over a year old. Seedling clover will get wiped. Most of my clovers are a white clover.
Good luck with the food plots.

 

[NativeSon]

foreman-- The new New Holland looks like a good deal. Went over to a friends house yesterday and passed a good size Haying Operation. Looked like they had the entire operation at the barn and we getting all the equipment in working condition getting ready to go full blast once it gets dry enough to work. Last year was the first year in a while that the crews stayed really busy all summer, and it was good to see them working. But it looks like we've got more rain coming this week.

Charlie

 

[Tx Jim]

STx
I hope your friend has better luck with released Pheasants than my neighbor did. He released 1000's of them and very few survived.

 

[STx]

He's done it before, he trained gun dogs for a long time but as Houston has spread and the Katy Prairie has turned into subdivisions he got into obedience training instead because there just weren't enough gun dog customers out there anymore. He has high fence around the 20 acres with chicken wire on the bottom to keep the birds mostly in and the predators mostly out and has water and feeder stations setup so that the birds don't really need to go very far. The climate here isn't ideal for pheasant and they won't last for more than 6 months or so but the idea is just to have something to shoot at for a while.

The quail he's been constantly stocking for probably the last decade or so with a Johnny house for them to recall to at night. He still has probably 30 birds left over from last year and at least one wild covey running around out there.

We know that if he stops putting birds on the place that within a couple of years there would be almost none, this is just for fun shooting with birds that have been out of a pen long enough to have gotten some of their "wild" back so that they'll work better for the dogs and make a more enjoyable shoot.

STx
I hope your friend has better luck with released Pheasants than my neighbor did. He released 1000's of them and very few survived.

 

[Tx Jim]

I thought it looked a little heavy in the front end to be pure Angus but some have changed a little. Also did not think that there were many pure Angus in your area because of the heat.

Here's a photo of my registered Angus bull that will be 3 yrs old in the Fall. My black cattle handle the N Texas heat just fine.