This year, most of central and western Oklahoma have gone for over 40-60 days with less than 0.25 inches of rainfall, and in the Oklahoma Panhandle, it has been over 70 to 120 days with less than 0.25 inches of rainfall.
There were decent wheat pasture prospects, with a rainfall event in mid-October that was at just the right time to get much of the grazing wheat acres going and provide enough forage to turn calves out. There was not enough stockpiled forage to maintain stocking rates if conditions weren’t right. The lack of rain since calves were turned out has limited regrowth, and pastures are short again.
When wheat forage gets short, we often look to research from the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Marshall Wheat Pasture Research Unit from the 1990s, where concentrate supplements containing monensin were fed at 0.65 to 0.75 percent of body weight (for example, 4 pounds per day for a 533 lb. steer), and stocking rate was increased 22 percent to 44 percent.
Weight gains during fall/winter grazing were increased by 0.33 lb. per day with a mean supplement conversion of 5 lbs. of as-fed supplement per pound of increased gain per acre. This supplement contained monensin that has been shown to increase gains of growing cattle on pasture by 10 to 15 percent and reduce forage intake by about 10 percent. This supplementation program can also be used to stretch wheat forage when pastures are 60 to 80 percent of normal.
The economics of this program are usually very good when feed prices are low to moderate, with costs of added gain around 50 to 75 cents per pound of added gain when feeds cost $150 to $200/ton, but they escalate to over $1/lb. when feed prices are $400/ton.
However, intake of low quality roughages is not high enough to offset wheat forage intake and can reduce performance of growing calves. Research has shown that offering high quality roughages such as corn silage, sorghum silage or high quality round bale silages can be used to replace short wheat pasture or double stocking rates on wheat pastures.
In the 1980s, research showed that feeding silage daily to calves on wheat pasture allowed stocking rates to be increased by up to two times without reducing steer performance. When faced with short wheat pastures on some research fields a few years ago, this research was used to keep calves on short wheat pastures using round bale Bermuda grass silage.
Several of the fields had normal forage yields of 2,500 lbs. of forage per acre, where calves were grazed during the fall and winter with one calf per acre and a forage allowance of 4 lbs. of wheat per pound of steer, and they had gains of 3.3 lbs./day.
Other fields were planted later and only had 70 percent of normal forage (1,800 lbs. of forage per acre), they were stocked at 1.5 steers per acre (forage allowance of 2.1 lbs. of forage per pound of steer) and steers were fed free-choice round bale Bermuda grass silage (14 percent crude protein and 56 percent total digestible nutrients) weekly.
Even with higher stocking rates and less forage per acre, these steers gained 2.6 lbs. per day, and total gain per acre increased from 250 lbs. for “normal” production to 300 lbs. per acre. This only took about 4.5 lbs. of silage dry matter per pound of added gain per acre. Using high quality, palatable hays or silages, you can stretch wheat pastures when concentrate feeds are expensive. — Paul Beck, OSU Extension beef cattle specialist
