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Superintendent
David Davis
21262 Genoa Road
Linneus, MO 64653
Phone: 660 895-5121
FAX: 660 895=5122
Email:
DavisDK@missouri.edu
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January 1, 2002
Forage Systems Update
Vol 11, No. 1
How do you make $300 per hour grazing?
Anyone who has attended a grazing school, workshop, or field day at FSRC has heard the emphasis we place on strip grazing stockpiled fescue to maximize utilization. What is it worth to go out and move an electric fence every day in the winter time? If we start with the cost of feeding hay to a dry cow in the winter to be about 90¢/day and grazing stockpiled pasture to be 25¢/day, the savings earned by grazing an extra day is about 65¢/cow/day. If you have a herd of 100 cows, you save $65 every day you're grazing and not feeding hay. If a pasture is set up with permanent electric fences every 435 feet, then a strip 100 feet wide equals one acre. At the winter grazing workshop held at FSRC on December 8, participants kept time as I took down one 390 ft polytape fence and put it back up for the next day's strip. It took six minutes from the time I left the group until I returned. If we estimate ten minutes to move a fence to feed 100 cows, then I just made $65 in those ten minutes based on our earlier assumptions. It follows that every hour spent moving fences earns about $300.
The bad news is that most of us don't have the cattle and land to be moving fences eight hours a day and drawing that kind of pay all day long. The good news is moving fence in the winter is some of the easiest money you will ever make in the cattle business.
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