NEW NORWAY, Alta. – Larry and Dean Fankhanel had enough silage for their cattle until June 1.
In a normal year, the timing would be right. The cattle would go onto pasture by June for the rest of the summer.
But it isn’ t a normal year. The drought has forced the Fankhanels to change their normal feeding plans.
The father and son from New Norway still have their purebred and commercial Charolais in the corral. The young cattle are on a mixture of hay and grain and the cows were eating a mixture of silage, pea straw and grain.
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But the Fankhanels have run out of silage.
While the young cattle are still fed a hay-grain mixture, the older cows are now fed grain and year-old barley and pea straw laced with molasses, urea and trace minerals.
Barley straw is normally about four to five percent protein and pea straw ranges from six to 10 percent protein. Adding the mixture of molasses, urea, and trace vitamins and minerals increases the protein and energy levels to give the feed a much-needed boost. The molasses increases the palatability of the straw and encourages the cattle to eat the usually unpalatable, low-energy, low-protein straw.
“We’ re trying to stretch the feed out as long as we can,” Dean said.
When the cattle go onto pasture at the end of the month, part of the herd will go onto a strict 60-day strip-grazing program at home. The rest will be shipped to pastures in northern Alberta and northern Saskatchewan.
“We’ ve set up a drought-grazing plan,” said Dean, who is expecting the worst but hoping for more rain.
“We’ re taking measures for the worst-case scenario.”
It’ s the first year Larry has resorted to such a strict feed schedule since he began farming in 1942.
“It’ s the driest I’ ve seen it. The pasture is going to be bad this year” he said.
Murray Erickson of Bawlf, Alta., added a similar molasses mixture to old straw bales when he started to run low on hay. He started with 10 bales of straw and has since added the mixture to 150 straw bales to stretch his feed.
“I didn’ t think they’ d keep their weight up.”
He said the cattle ate it willingly when they were in the corral, but once they were given the choice of grass or the straw-molasses mixture, they chose the grass.
But with no rain in more than two weeks, the grass is chewed off and not growing back.
Allan Macauley, a forage specialist with Alberta Agriculture, said farmers are trying anything to keep their cattle fed.
“They’ re doing all sorts of different things to keep the animals adequately nourished,” he said.
“A lot of people are doing innovative things just to keep their animals from going down in condition. It’ s a challenging year, to say the least.”
Rod Carlyon, an Alberta Agriculture beef nutritionist, said getting protein and energy to cattle cheaply is different on every farm.
Producers need to price out the cost of protein per pound.
“Our advice is each producer needs to shop around and compare the various sources and costs of protein for his farm.”
