LANIGAN, Sask. – Backgrounding newly weaned calves on swath-grazed Golden German millet produced better daily gains than feedlot weaning in a research study that ended for the season last week.
At the Termuende Research Farm near Lanigan, Sask., Bart Lardner of the Western Beef Development Centre and his colleagues found that the variety of foxtail millet produced dramatic daily gains of 2.34 pounds per day when swath grazed by 500 to 600 lb. calves.
Rapidly gaining, heavy calves require at least 11.4 percent crude protein and 62.5 percent total digestible nutrients in their diet to achieve daily gains of about two lb. per day.
Read Also
Why feds imposed EV tariffs
Moe and Kinew have a fight on their hands when it comes to eliminating the EV tariff. Canada has to worry about pissing off the U.S. and Mexico and hundreds of thousands of auto workers.
Forage foxtail millets, such as Golden German, Butte, German, Manta, Sno-Fox and White Wonder, produce metre-high crops in 75 to 90 days, but are shallow rooted, making them poor pasture feeds.
In this year’s Termuende trial, the crop was grown to be windrowed for fall grazing using portable electric fences.
Seeded June 17 with a Morris double disc press drill with six-inch spacings and steel packers, the seed was placed between 12.5 and 19 millimetres deep at eight kilograms to the acre or 112-135 seeds to the lineal metre.
“Seeding this crop deep – an inch and a half or two – wouldn’t work,” Lardner said.
“It has to be seeded shallow, which means you will be counting on some rain in most cases. Otherwise it won’t germinate.”
The crop is swathed when it reaches the 20 percent heading stage.
Late-season drought and high temperatures failed to hurt yields of the warm season grass, which continued to grow from 1.75 tonnes to the acre Aug. 12 to 2.3 tonnes by Sept. 2.
“A barley or wheat, a cool season grass, will finish growing by the end of June or early July. That is when the millet does its best (growing).”
Tim Highmoor, a beef economist with WBDC, said the calves’ daily gains were impressive.
In a 26-day period, after a three-day fence line weaning, the calves grew an average of 2.34 lb. per day.
Expenses to produce the crop included field preparation of $4 per acre, seed at $24 per acre, seeding services $14, herbicides $47.20, swathing $10 and land rental $25. The total cost was $124.20 per acre.
Swath-grazed millet cost about half of what feedlot feeding would have over the same time period this fall, Highmoor said.
If another 15 cents per pound of gain in labour, veterinary services and depreciation costs were added to the bill for the 185 calves in the trial, the cost could be 32 cents per lb. of gain compared to 55 to 65 cents at a feedlot.
The calves also avoided the difficult herd health issues of weaning stress combined with placement into a drylot where pathogen loading could have resulted in disease.
“We didn’t have a single sick animal. Not one in 185. That is pretty good,” Highmoor said.
