Okay, we'll kick off now. Good evening, everyone. My name's Brett Littler.
I'm with the Local Land Services based at Mudgee. Good evening.
This is part of a program that's coming from Saving Our Soils
and I'm hosting tonight's webinar. So, welcome, everyone,
and thank you for taking the time to join us this evening. The presentation that we're going to be giving tonight
is Feeding Cattle in Dry Times, and this webinar is gonna be delivered by Jeff House,
who's a consultant based in the Central West of New South Wales. And during this webinar,
Jeff's gonna cover a number of principles dealing with feeding cattle in dry times, looking at the management of those animals during that time
and sort of some of the, trying to meet the nutritional needs of those animals as well, plus some of the pros and cons of different things.
So Jeff's got a wealth of experience and knowledge and will be sharing it with us tonight.
Before we get to Jeff, I'd really like to acknowledge
that we're dialing in from what always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
I pay my respects to the Wiradjuri people who are the traditional custodians
of the land and waters which I stand on today,
and also extend that, and extend that to traditional custodians you're all representing today
as well as Elders past, present, and emerging. Really need to acknowledge
where our funding's coming from this evening. The webinar is part of a series that we're bringing to you.
It's coming from Saving Our Soils During Drought program. This project's received funding from the Southern New South Wales Drought and Innovation Hub
as part of the Australian Government Future Drought Fund. So we're gonna be holding these webinars.
This is number four in the series that we've been holding,
and we've still got another one that we'll be hosting next week.
Thanks very much for all those people who've registered and come onboard.
We've got this upcoming webinar next Wednesday from (no audio)
seven o'clock to 8:30. And that one will be on early weaning of cattle and sheep,
covering both species, looking at the pros and cons. We've got (indistinct) answer,
or I might be able to try to answer some as well. Please feel free, on the side of the webinar,
there's a question option. You can put your questions in there. Type them in and we'll answer them once we get there.
So, as I said, Jeff House of Jeff House Livestock is presenting this evening.
I've known Jeff for one or two years. We started in the department together as livestock officers.
We were substantially younger than we are now 20-plus years ago.
Jeff had done a great deal of work in the feedlot side of things in the department.
He'd also worked originally in a lot of early weaning work
with a researcher by the name of (indistinct)
So came in, he was lucky enough to be trained going through the system, the department, working with well-recognized researchers
and experienced extension officers where we were able, he was able to gain some experience.
He had the misfortune of being next door to me district-wise, but went through it all.
And, you know, he's left the department a few years ago now and has gone out into private consultancy
where he now works with ALFA and also does other work working with farmers and producers and industry groups.
So a huge amount of experience and knowledge with Jeff.
I've always found him a very practical soundboard whenever I've been talking and always a good one to bounce ideas off.
So welcome, Jeff, and thanks very much for being available
and talking this evening. Over to you, Jeff. - Thank you very much there, Brett.
Yeah, no, I look forward to presenting this evening, and, look, realistically, those years with the department,
yeah, put us in good stead for dealing with feeding animals and the nutrition side during dry times.
So, look, what I want to cover off on tonight,
really wanna talk about establishing realistic targets with your livestock and what you're aiming to do with your cattle
in regard to feeding during dry times. Talk about identifying limiting nutrients and, you know, often the discussion swings
in a different direction to what I wanna talk about. A bit about managing feeding,
a little bit about stock health if we've got time, quite brief, and some of the resources that are out there and available
to help producers make decisions around feeding.
First slide, this is just a reminder I wanted to throw in there, just be really careful during those dry times
of feeding unusual feeds, feeds that are not produced generally for stock feed.
So it might be, you know, there's photos there of potatoes, there's pumpkins,
you know, cotton trash listed there. You know, there's a whole heap of foodstuffs
that are produced for humans that may actually have chemical residues that can cause us a problem in the livestock industries.
So we need to be really careful just around what we're feeding animals,
what chemicals may have been used on those products. And just because they're fit for human consumption
and acceptable for humans unfortunately doesn't always mean that they're acceptable for animals
and, you know, we can really have a lot of problems there with chemical residue. So it's really just be very careful
of where you're sourcing your product and what chemicals may have been used on them in the past. They can really give the industry
a very big headache moving forward.
I wanna start talking about feeding targets. Now, if we're gonna feed cattle during a dry time,
there's a lot of different terms get thrown around. So from survival feeding, maintenance feeding, production feeding,
all of these different terms. But, look, in my mind, we need to be feeding cattle for production.
If we're gonna maintain, we need to maintain that production in our animals,
there's no economic sense in a cattle herd to feed animals for survival
or even just truly maintenance, just to maintain their weight, just hold their weight.
We need all of the animals within our herd to remain productive so that we can come out the other end when it does rain
with a productive and efficient herd. The timeframes in a cattle herd are just too great
for us to allow us the sort of, I suppose, the ease of not having animals productive.
So from that point of view, from a cow point of view, I'm really looking at, you know, maintaining the weights
of our cows. We'll talk a little bit later on, you know, ideally I don't want them to drop below a fat score two,
but they need to stay in the production cycle. So, you know, they need to get back into calf.
I would imagine, you know, we're gonna have people from a lot of different areas on tonight. So your schedule and your timing of events
might be quite different. But, you know, if your cows are already calved down and the bulls are meant to go out,
well, they need to go back out and those cows need to be joined, they need to get back into calf,
and they need to remain productive. So we're not looking at running fat cows by any means,
but we need them to get in calf and we need to maintain their productivity. Likewise, if we've got replacement heifers coming through,
you know, in my mind, most herds, you really do want to continue to grow those animals.
You do wanna have targets in mind. What is your critical mating weights for your heifers?
You're gonna join them at 15 months of age, then we need to make sure that we're getting them up there
and we're getting those weights into those females to join. If you choose not to join those animals,
they still need to grow and they still need to be productive. And, you know, in that situation,
I would imagine you're looking to sell those animals as, you know, maybe trade weight cattle.
You might sell them to the feedlot a bit like you'll do with their steer brothers.
I don't really encourage people to hold heifers over for another year and join a year later.
I don't think there's, you know, there's not the profitability in doing that. So if you choose not to join the heifers,
then, you know, they're treated like steers. And they still need to grow and we want modest growth out of those animals,
if we can achieve half a kilo a day out of those younger animals, so they continue to grow,
and very much with a target endpoint. We wanna move those animals off, get them to a weight so that we can market them
and move them off. And then, lastly, our weaners, our really young stock,
they have to keep growing. Realistically, if they're weaned early
and not continue to grow at at least that 0.5 of a kilo a day, ideally, I'd rather see it at sort of 0.7, 0.8 as a target
for our really young animals, we need to get them up over about that 300 kilos live weight
before we can sort of back off there. We need them to keep performing. If we don't grow them out,
that's when we end up with those animals that, you know, reduced marbling potential later in life.
In the worst case, we end up with those stunted calves that just don't ever grow out. So it's really important that we actually have those targets
and we grow those animals out and we set ourselves goals with our animals and, you know, potentially reviewing them
about every three months so that you've got a goal. Where do we want our animals to be? We need to monitor that.
We need to weigh animals and, you know, really stay on track. A lot of experience with droughts, you know, and dry times.
Producers just need to keep making decisions. It can be really hard and you can get set in your ways, but by setting those sort of triggers
and saying, "Well, okay, I'm gonna review this in six weeks' time, three months' time," you know, they're really good triggers
to keep you making decisions and keep you moving forward.
Don't ever look at the decisions you've made with hindsight. You know, hindsight is a cruel master
and, you know, if producers are making decisions, that's really where we want you to be.
Continue making decisions, continue to move forward. Don't look back with hindsight
and decide that you shouldn't have made those decisions. Just another slide in here quickly too,
just a reminder right upfront, good-quality water is essential.
Doesn't matter how good the quality of feed we've got, if we don't have access to good-quality water,
then feeding cattle is really difficult. The quantities you see there, so between 30 to a hundred liters a day.
So 30 liters for younger stock. If we've got cows that are lactating, they can drink up to a hundred liters a day.
And, you know, those top figures are across the months that we're heading into.
So, you know, if you're in a situation where water is restrictive,
then, again, that's gonna influence your decision to feed. If for any reason cattle can't consume the amount of water
they need in a day, then they will also reduce their feed intake. So it's gonna have a really,
you know, compounding negative impact on their performance. So we need access to good-quality water
and we need plenty of it. So, you know, that may well make the decision. Preferably through troughs.
You know, dams are gonna continue to dry in hot weather over summer. They'll get boggy away from,
you know, around the edges as they drop. So, ideally, we want water in reticulated systems
so that we can manage the quality of it. And, ideally, away from where we're feeding a little bit.
So it doesn't have to be a huge distance, but if we're feeding grain,
we often see this where people set up grain feeders quite close to their watering points and their troughs.
You can get a lot of grain and a lot of roughage material actually deposited into those water troughs
'cause animals will instinctively, they'll go and have a feed and then they'll walk from the feeder and then they'll go and have a drink.
So if we can separate them a little bit, just allow more of that feed
to actually go off the muzzle of the animal before they reach the water trough, that will keep your water troughs clean.
Really important, too, that we keep cleaning our water troughs, we're checking them.
Depending on the size, you know, you might be cleaning them once a week, you might even be cleaning them once a day
depending on your setup and what you've got there, your flow rates and the like. So, yeah, good-quality water.
Can't stress enough how important that is to the whole system.
We then start talking about nutrition and it's really important,
again, because there's gonna be a lot of people in different stages. So, you know, there'll be people in the north of the state
that may well have been feeding for months now, you know, may well have been feeding since the start of the year.
There might be people in the south who may have been feeding but for different reasons,
you know, late last year and then they might have got through for a while now. So it's really important that in whichever situation you're in,
you identify which nutrients are actually limiting the production of the animals.
For the majority of the time, the first most limiting nutrient will be energy.
So I often like to use analogies when I'm talking about nutrition, and I use the analogy of a motorcar.
The energy in the diet is the equivalent of the fuel in your fuel tank of your car.
If you don't have enough energy, you're not going anywhere. You're just not gonna perform.
Next is protein. So often during dry times,
protein seems to take a much higher emphasis with people. Often a lot of feeds are sold
based on their protein content. But, realistically, protein needs to be in balance with energy.
And using that same analogy, I like to think of protein as a bit like the oil in the engine.
So the energy is the fuel in the tank. The protein's like the oil in the engine. If we don't have enough of it, the system breaks down.
But if there's no fuel in the tank, we can have as much protein as we like and our engine, our animal, is still not gonna perform.
So those two need to be in balance. At certain times a year, they get out of balance depending on the feed that's available.
We need to make sure they're in balance. And generally speaking, if we talk about it from an energy point of view,
we talk about megajoules of energy per kilo of feed and we talk about protein as a crude protein percentage,
if we've got 11 megajoules of energy, then we're generally gonna want somewhere around 13 to 14% crude protein.
It's usually two to three units protein higher on a percentage basis than our energy level.
So that's where we balance the rations. We then start to talk about minerals and vitamins.
Now, these are really important that animals have sufficient amounts of them, but in the analogy,
I tend to talk about minerals and vitamins a bit like the battery in the car.
Probably not something you think about every day, but if a particular mineral is missing
or a particular vitamin is missing from the system, then, again, the whole system is gonna break down quite quickly.
So we've gotta be mindful of them, but they're not what's driving production.
Minerals and vitamins are really there as a, you know, they need to be there at a certain level. If they're missing, then they will limit production.
But by having excess of minerals or vitamins, you're not gonna increase production in any way, shape or form.
And if animals have access to any sort of green feed, often our minerals and vitamins are actually dealt with.
It's when we start to get in that situation where cattle haven't had access to green feed for a length of time,
that we can really start to run into problems.
If we then look at the rumen, so we're feeding a ruminant animal
and there's a lot of differences in feeding a ruminant to, you know, how we feed ourselves,
how we might feed pigs or non-ruminant animals. And so a really important part of our ruminant nutrition
is actually keeping that rumen functioning well and properly. And so when we're feeding animals,
if we're giving them energy, a lot of that energy goes into the rumen. That grain, that feed that they're taking in,
goes into the rumen. It gets broken down by the rumen bugs, all the bugs that are in there.
They break it down. They produce volatile fatty acids that are absorbed by the animal, and that's a big part
of what drives the production of that animal. So that rumen really needs to function correctly.
And this is where I think sometimes we get a little bit hung up on protein
because protein is really important to maintain that population of microbes in the rumen.
So we do need, if we don't have enough protein, then those rumen microbes will decrease in number
and they won't be as effective at breaking down the feed. So we need nitrogen in there.
So we need protein of some form. So that might be a true protein.
It might be a non-protein form of nitrogen that we can feed. So that's where at times we feed urea to cattle in mixes.
That's providing just a little bit more nitrogen to the rumen to keep those bugs, those microbes functioning well.
And we need that correct balance in the whole diet of protein and energy
to allow the ruminant to make best use of its available feed. Because when we start to look at this rumen again,
there's a lot of different pathways to how protein is actually utilized in the animal.
Energy is generally broken down in the rumen, those volatile fatty acids are produced.
But from a protein point of view, we have protein coming into the animal as food.
Now, some of that protein, so we talk about crude protein when we analyze a feed from a protein point of view,
some of that is true protein, some of it may be in a diet as non-protein nitrogen.
You know, they get broken down into ammonia in the rumen. In true proteins, there's a small percentage,
and it does vary from one feed to another, what they call bypass protein.
So that's protein that's not actually broken down in the rumen, moves through the rumen and then gets broken down later in the animal's system.
So through gastric digestion, which is much more similar to ours.
But if there's excess ammonia in there, then that simply gets excreted out of the system
as urea in the urine. Some of it's recycled through saliva, but the majority will get excreted out of the animal.
So we need to have it in balance. We can't feed excess protein to try and improve performance.
We need our protein to be in balance with the energy that that animal's taking in.
And the big arrow there, the microbial protein, this is actually the major source of protein for the animal
in terms of its gastric digestion, is actually those microbes flowing out of the rumen
and then further down the digestive tract. So we need to have an actively functioning
and proper functioning rumen with plenty of those microbes in there to actually give the animal its requirements for protein.
So in a lot of cases when we talk about ruminant nutrition, we're actually formulating diets and systems
where we feed the rumen so that the rumen then feeds the rest of the animal.
And we need to keep that in our mind. We need to feed that rumen and keep it functioning.
So, you know, we're working through the different forms of feeds that we might have.
So in terms of supplements or feed types, there's supplements that we use for energy
as an energy source. And generally when we're feeding animals, cereal grains are gonna be the cheapest
and most economical way to supply energy. They're the most energy-dense feed
with the exception of oils. But, you know, in terms of our general feeds, they're the most energy dense,
and they provide a good opportunity for us to get energy into the diet of the animals.
We've got options like silage and hay. Silage, of course, we've gotta be really careful about the quality of the silage.
It can vary considerably. And also the moisture content of the silage.
So when we buy silage in, we're buying a lot of water. If we've made it ourselves, we've made it on farm,
then, you know, it can be a really good palatable source of energy. Hay, same sort of story.
Generally, there's no set difference between silage and hay in quality.
It's just that we can make silage earlier when the plant is less mature
and will often be of higher quality in the starting point. So silages can have quite high metabolizable energy
and be a quite high-quality feed. Likewise, hay that's cut early, lots of leaf, lots of color,
is more likely to be of higher quality than hay that's been cut later and the plants are more mature and of lower quality.
And then, lastly, I've got pellets listed there. So, you know, pellets offer opportunities in some cases.
Generally they're one of the most expensive ways of actually bringing energy into the system
and feeding our animals, but they do offer a degree of convenience for producers. So, you know, we need to keep that in mind.
If we're looking, you know, the situation you're in is gonna very much determine what nutrient you're lacking.
So, you know, if you're in a situation like this where you've got a crop that's, you know, hasn't really got up that well,
but it's green, you know, there's plenty of energy in this paddock and there's also plenty of protein in this paddock.
What we might do in this situation is actually supply an energy type feed.
So supplement with cereal, grains, wheat, barley, the like, or even a little bit of silage or hay.
And we're really supplementing there to actually extend the length of time
that we'll get grazing out of an area like this. So we're actually, we're not actually supplementing in that situation.
We're actually substituting. So we're supplying part of the animal's diet so that we get longer period of grazing
out of a paddock like this, for example. If we then, you know, move to an example like this
where we've got a crop that's failed, it hasn't been harvested, again, there's still plenty of energy out there
in this paddock. The protein's gonna be a little bit lower. You can see there are patches
that are still a little bit green in there, but the energy is gonna be still in that paddock.
People often talk about the grain and the heads. You know, you've gotta be really careful
that we don't overstate that. You know, the reason that the header hasn't been through here is because it's a failed crop.
So there's a limited amount of grain in there. A lot of the grain's gonna be pinched and quite small
and may not be used by the animals too effectively. So we're really looking at the leaf material
as our predominant source of energy and feed for the animals. If they get a little bit of grain out of that,
that is a bonus. And in this situation, we may actually have to supplement with a little bit of protein to improve that.
Whereas, you know, back in this green situation, there's gonna be plenty of protein in that situation.
If we start talking about options for protein supplements, you know, if you've still got plenty of dry standing feed
that we often talk about and, you know, there's probably not a lot of places in New South Wales at the moment
that would be in that situation, but that's when we can use things like lick blocks,
roller drums, fortified molasses mixes. These are all systems
where we're using a carrier to actually get often a non-protein nitrogen source
into the animal. So often it's urea that we're using there. Lick blocks, really convenient for producers,
but, you know, effectiveness is quite questionable just basically because of the variation in intake
that animals have. So, you know, remember doing these workshops for years with the department.
We'd do them in a local hall. I'd talk about protein supplementation and the best methods
and then you'd walk out afterwards and they'd always be utes parked there with pallet loads of lick blocks on them.
So, you know, they're convenient for producers, but they are quite limited in their effectiveness
and they're often quite an expensive way to supply the nutrients. Loose lick systems often work a lot better
where you're just supplying a loose lick in an open container. Roller drums and, of course, fortified molasses mixes
both rely on molasses as a carrier to get that protein into them.
If we end up in a situation where, especially with the fortified mixes, where animals are consuming molasses as an energy source,
then we've gone too far and we're in the wrong situation.
We're feeding the wrong feed. We're really using molasses as a carrier there. Because it's sweet,
it can allow animals to intake that nitrogen protein.
Once we get to a situation where we're really lacking in feed, then that's when we start to look at some of our grains.
So lupins, you know, any of those sort of grains
like lupins, fava beans, you know, we can use those types of things
as a protein source. Whole cottonseed is an excellent feed.
Unfortunately, excellent feed been recognized by essentially the whole beef industry,
and so hence is sometimes very difficult to source when conditions are dry
and can be quite expensive. But a whole cottonseed is kind of the whole package. It's high in protein, it's high in energy,
and so we're talking about the white cottonseed there, you know, that lint and the seed on the outside
do actually provide a little bit of roughage there as well. So that's where, you know, whole cottonseed
is an excellent energy source. It's an excellent protein source, but, you know, we would normally use it
as a protein supplement. So we're gonna use whole cottonseed to balance up our protein requirements.
And then we've also got the meals, the oilseed meals, so canola, cottonseed, soybean, copra meal.
You know, there's a range of meals that are available there that are also generally high in protein.
Really encourage people to get feed tests on those products 'cause they can vary considerably
depending on the methods that are used to extract the oil out of them. But yeah, can be really good quality feeds
that we can use to balance the protein in our situation. So again, if we're in this type of situation
where, you know, it's dried off, protein's dropped a little bit, we might use, you know, whole cottonseed,
we might be able to use a fortified molasses mix in that situation to allow those animals to keep functioning, to keep the rumen functioning,
and allow animals to utilize that feed even better. This is probably our normal situation where we'd be using those fortified molasses mixes
where we've got a stubble in front of us that, again, there's still lots of energy out there in the paddock,
it's quite dilute in terms of the quality of the feed, but by keeping that rumen functioning,
we can allow animals to utilize that feed. So they're sort of options that we've got
when where we're really looking to supplementary feed. Of course, if we get to this situation, and, you know, there's lots of parts of New South Wales
at the moment that are like this, then we're really tipping over. We're not supplementing anymore.
We're really moving into a full feeding situation. So, you know, it's a bit of a different scenario there.
We can use some of those same feeds. Cereal grain is still our most cost-effective form of energy
and we're looking to balance a ration with a form of protein. When we move to full hand feeding,
there's a few other things that are really important just to keep it efficient in its system
and efficient in what we're doing. So really encourage producers to confine their animals into a smaller area,
whether this is a small paddock, whether it might be yards or pens that you've designed,
confinement area feeding, you know, that's a good way to go.
And why do we do that? So we're trying to limit pasture and soil degradation across the whole property.
You know, we might have to sacrifice an area that we can re-sow or we can re-vegetate later on.
But it also allows us to keep a really close eye on our stock so that we can keep an eye on them
and observe them really on a daily basis. They're not expending any extra energy
walking around the paddock looking for food or water. And we see this especially after it rains
and we get that short pick of green feed. Animals will spend a lot of time chasing feed
that they really can't access if they're given access to big paddocks.
We reduce the spread of weed seeds if we're introducing feeds, grain, hay, silage.
By feeding in a small area, we can keep an eye on any weed seeds we bring in.
It greatly reduces our time to feed. Ideally, we wanna try and get these confinement areas,
you know, close to our yards, close to where we process and prepare our feeds, so we can reduce the amount of time,
and the travel time especially, it takes when we feed out. And the other point there at the bottom, all-weather access.
It's gonna rain and we need to keep feeding after it rains. It doesn't rain feed.
So we need to make sure that we can get to these areas and have good all-weather access to them.
So, you know, if we're getting to this type of situation, we don't want to allow animals to have free reign,
open multiple gates, and let them go over a larger area. We actually want to confine them back into a smaller area
and keep a closer eye on them. Just got one slide here about weaning the calves.
Yeah, wean calves, Brett's gonna cover this next week in detail.
Just a quick slide. Ideally, don't let the cow slip below fat score two,
and if they've got a calf at foot, you know, we wanna get that calf off as quickly as we can.
These are kind of the old recommendations, you know, minimum a hundred days of age, lightest calf a hundred kilos.
I can hear Brett laughing in the background there. You know, the experience that people have had over the last 10 years,
you know, there's a lot of people doing it very well with calves a lot younger and a lot lighter than that.
And, you know, Brett will cover that in more detail next week. If in doubt, wean earlier rather than later.
And the main reason I'm talking about it from a feeding point of view is by feeding that calf and cow separately,
we're gonna save somewhere between 10 to 15% on our feeding costs. We can actually feed a different ration
to those two animals individually than what we would as a unit. And there is a bit of, you know, inefficiency
in a cow producing our feed, turning our feed into milk to then feed that calf.
So when things are tight and conditions are dry and we're full hand feeding,
much better to feed those two units separately. But, again, we'll go right back to the targets at the start.
We need to make sure those animals are growing and putting on weight. So once we wean those calves, they've gotta keep going ahead
and, you know, keep putting on weight. So don't wean them and let them slip.
A few other ideas around full hand feeding. We're really in a situation where all animals need to be fed at once.
We're not feeding enough feed that all animals are going to meet
their genetic potential for growth. We are limit feeding them to some extent.
So we need to be able to allow all the animals to feed at once and to try and reduce bullying
by providing, ideally, several troughs spread apart so that, you know, the dominant animals don't go in there
and eat more than they're supposed to and then we end up with a tail of animals at the end that don't get as much.
From that point of view, best to draft stock into management groups based on live weight and body condition or fat score
so that we can actually, those lighter animals, those animals that are in lower fat scores, we can actually draft them off
and feed them separately and deal with them a little bit separately compared to maybe some of the stronger animals
that are in better condition and have got more fat on them. In terms of feeding equipment,
look, there's a lot of different ways of doing it. You know, I've had many discussions with people.
I keep talking about grain as being, you know, the most cost-effective. People will turn around and say, "Well, look, I don't have the equipment to feed grain."
It doesn't have to be elaborate, the gear that we're talking about. So, you know, storing grain in hay sheds is achievable.
You get a few bales of hay or the like, put them around the outside as a bit of a bunker,
then, you know, store grain in there. We can feed out grain if we have to with a front-end loader.
You know, there's options there. There's feed-out bins that we can have on the back of vehicles
or trail units that can take grain out to the paddock. We don't have to have really elaborate equipment
to feed cattle. If we've got feed mixers, that's fantastic. You know, that makes the whole process a lot easier
and we can control it a lot more. But there are other ways of doing it. We don't have to go to that sort of process.
What sort of quantities do I need to feed? These are a rough guide,
you know, to minimum amounts that need to be fed. So, you know, for a dry animal, 500 kilos,
if we're feeding grain only, then we're gonna get away with about five kilos a day. So that's just to maintain production.
If we go to hay at 8 1/2 megajoules, the animal's gonna eat or need at least 7.8 kilos,
but they're probably not gonna actually be able to maintain the production we want. We then go to grain and hay.
There's different options there. The value for silage, of course, is a lot higher. You know, our grain and our hays are about 90% dry matter,
so only contain about 10% moisture, whereas, of course, our silage is much lower in dry matter.
So, you know, it can be as low as 35%. Some bale silages might be a little bit higher.
They might get closer to 45, 50% dry matter. But we need to know that and we need to take that into account
when we're actually working out how much to feed an animal. And some of the calculators I'll show at the end can help you with that.
We've got animals that are breeders that are in late pregnancy, then these numbers increase up.
And, of course, if our animals are heavier than this, so, you know, a 500 kilo animal in fat score two,
you know, genetically, your animals might be 600, 650, 700 kilos in fat score two,
they're gonna need significantly more feed than these numbers that we're presenting here.
So I don't really wanna hang up on these numbers. The calculators that you can use
are a much better way of actually calculating the amount that you need in your particular situation.
For breeders that are lactating, grain only is not suitable. We need more roughage in the diet
for those animals to actually produce milk. So we need to have, you know, at least 50/50
or, you know, we could go down to 80% grain, 20% hay in a ration. You know, that's what we're sort of looking at
for those animals, not actually grain alone. And, look, in most cases, from the point of view of safety of feeding
and, you know, being able to do it long term, look, you know, a grain-hay mix is awesome,
is a great way to do it. We might use grain and cottonseed. We might use, you know, different ingredients
just depending on what we've got available, what are prices at, and what we can source.
They're the real challenges. If we're starting cattle on grain, come back to that rumen again.
Rumen is designed primarily to utilize roughage type feeds.
So, you know, pastures, grazing crops, hays. That's what our animals in the paddock are more used to
in terms of their diet. So if we're gonna start cattle on grain, we need to introduce it slowly
so we don't really overload that rumen and cause problems, such as acidosis.
So we need to feed those animals hay, you know, larger quantities of hay
for those first three days. We're trying to reduce some of that hunger in those animals so that they're not gonna gorge the grain
when we start to introduce it. We can then, in the sort of next days,
we can feed the hay first and we slowly bump up the amount of grain that we're providing animals on a daily basis.
And we continue to reduce the hay and increase the grain until we get to what we're required.
If we've got a mixer, then, you know, we can mix those together. We can start with a ration that's 20% grain and 80% hay,
and then every three or four days, we just bump up the grain percentage and we can drop down the hay percentage again.
But it's really important that we do this gradually. And one of the really key indicators
that this is working well is actually if you look at the manure of the animals. So the manure will actually be a really good indicator
on how well that rumen's functioning. When animals are on really dry feed, we tend to get really tall, sort of mounded manure pats.
As the quality of the feed increases, those manure pats get lower and closer to the ground.
But if we actually push the system too far and we do induce a little bit of grain poisoning or acidosis,
then we can end up with feces that are, or pats that are really flat.
They can be quite bubbly and sort of really indicative that that rumen is not functioning well
and we're causing damage to it. So just monitor the pats as you're increasing your grain
and see how you're going. The other important factor is trough space. We need to make sure we give animals enough space.
I'm a real advocate when we're feeding cattle, regardless of what the feed is, we want it in a trough, we want it off the ground.
Again, it doesn't have to be elaborate, but we need to get that feed off the ground. Otherwise our wastage is gonna be huge
and, you know, the ability of animals to ingest soil and dirt when they're trying to pick grain up off the ground
is quite high. So, you know, we want to provide adequate space so all of our animals can feed at once.
We also then want to, you know, look at different ways of producing troughs.
So, again, they don't have to be fancy. These are tractor tires that have got a bit of conveyor belting
just covering the hole in the bottom of them. They've cut a bit of the side out of the tire. These actually make really good feed troughs for cows
where you can put a fair bit of feed in them. Because they're round, they actually provide significant amount of space
and, you know, you can easily fit sort of 10 animals around a tractor tire in that type of situation.
10 mature cows. Conveyor belting. You know, this is a system that someone had set up down south
where they used the fence to keep the animals off the conveyor building. But, you know, there's no reason
why you can't just have conveyor building flat on the ground as well. You know, that works. The animals will tend to trample over it
if it's flat on the ground and, you know, they've got free access to it. This one has got the advantage
that, yeah, it stops the animals wasting feed and it stops the animals from spoiling the feed.
But, you know, again, just a great simple method there. For younger stock, you might, you know, use,
sort of build your own sort of troughing like this. The one on the right there's just done with a bit of lightweight sort of conveyor belting
or rubber material, plastic type material. The one on the left there has just used corrugated iron
that's been bent around the frame. Again, just to try and get that feed up off the ground
so the animals aren't ingesting dirt as they're trying to consume that feed.
This type of situation, if you're feeding roughage, you're gonna feed that separately. You know, feed that in racks or have something around it
so that, again, you're protected and the animals don't waste too much. Not a fan of racks where the animals feed from underneath.
They can get a lot of grass seed and a lot of debris in their eyes. So, you know, those sort of racks
where the animals are restricted from getting in there too far, but, yeah, preferably not feeding underneath.
You can go to the extent of concrete troughs. You know, they're fantastic. They are expensive, they're heavy,
and it really depends on, you know, what else you might use them for down the track. Do you feed your weaners every year?
Do you yard wean and feed weaners in the yards for a few days? If that's the case, then, you know, some troughing like this
might be really suitable for your system. But, you know, just remember the expense there's
gonna be considerably more. And self feeders. You know, there are self feeders around
that can, you know, handle a mixed ration or a mixed feed. Very difficult to really screw them down
and restrict intake. So it tends to be more for younger stock or animals that you're trying to actually grow
at a higher rate and finish and move off from the property and use those sort of feeders.
We come now, just a couple others, so minerals, calcium and sodium are the major minerals.
- Jeff. - That are likely to be missing if we're feeding a cereal grain.
So we can add them quite simply. So calcium, finely ground ag lime,
1.5% of the weight to grain to a ration. And, of course, salt will provide us with some sodium.
So half a percent coarse salt to a grain diet. Now, most of our cereal grains,
our wheat, our barley, our oats, they're all quite low in calcium and sodium,
so that's why we're adding them. There may be situations where you've got a lot of salt in your water.
If that's the case, you may not need to add additional salt. And likewise, there might be areas
where you're quite phosphorous deficient and you need to add phosphorus to the diet as well.
But for the most part, calcium and sodium are likely to be your most limiting nutrients
in terms of minerals and the most likely that need to be provided. From a vitamin point of view,
most likely deficiencies are gonna be vitamin A and E. And vitamin A is found,
you know, quite good levels in green feed, but the longer animals have been off green feed,
the higher the risk of vitamin A deficiency. So about three months without access to green feed. Now, green feed might,
you know, if you're feeding silage that's green, if you've got hay that's got a bit of green in it,
then that will provide a little bit of vitamin A. But if it's, you know, cereal grain and straw,
then, you know, your vitamin A intake for those animals will be quite limited. Some of the symptoms you might start to see,
night blindness, discharges around the eyes, and just a general ill-thrift in those animals.
And, you know, we can give an intramuscular injection of vitamin A, D, and E that'll give them protection for about three months,
and it ensures every animal actually gets that injection.
So, you know, if we're feeding for a short period of time, vitamins are not likely to be an issue,
but the longer the period of time goes on that you need to feed, then we need to start to look out
for potential symptoms there. Some of the other considerations, I've sort of touched on a couple of these
as we've gone through. Make sure we get our feeds tested. I really can't stress that enough.
Important to know what you're buying. Get a feed test done. You know, not necessarily on the mixed feed at the end,
but on your individual ingredients, grains, hay, silage, there can be really big variations in the quality of feed
and I know Brett's presented data on that in the past. So, yeah, make sure you get your feeds tested so you know what you're feeding.
It then allows you to create rations and formulate rations, so to use some of those tools to do it.
If we're including buffers in there, there are additives that we can add that will, you know, reduce your risk of grain poisoning
to those animals. So, you know, potentially we need to make sure that we're doing that all correctly.
We need to be consistent in what we do. Once we start feeding, these animals are really reliant on us
and we need to be consistent in what we do. We need to weigh out our ingredients so that we're accurate in what we're doing.
So, you know, consistency is really, really important. We need to monitor the animals, the performance of animals.
Now, that can be through fat scoring, but, ideally, you're gonna weigh animals.
And, now, we don't need to be weighing animals weekly or anything like that. But, you know, maybe every month, every six weeks,
you know, bring them in, weigh them, and monitor how you're performing. If you're keeping an eye on their fat score
and actively going out and fat scoring them, that's a plus as well. Sometimes we can get a little bit close
and we can not notice when animals are actually losing weight because we're with them all the time.
And then if we do need to cull animals, if we need to reduce the number of animals we're feeding, cull with a purpose.
This was a phrase I actually copied off one of Brett's presentations. But, you know, cull those animals that aren't performing.
Cull animals with bad teeth. You know, cull for a reason. Cull females that are empty.
Our cows and our females, if they don't go back into calf, they're the ones we want to cull. Don't just cull based on age or some arbitrary factor.
Actually make really good decisive decisions about which animals you stop feeding.
And because we're production feeding, 'cause we're feeding animals to main productivity,
you know, some of those yearling type animals, those slightly older animals, we're really looking to feed them to move them on,
find a market for them and move them on and reduce the strain on our feeding.
So, you know, we really need to be positive and work through it. Just from a health point of view,
look, make sure we drench the animals if feed intakes reduce, which it will be.
Normally our cows are quite immune to internal parasites, our mature cattle, but in this situation,
they'll lose a fair amount of that immunity. So it may well be necessary we drench our mature animals
as well as the young stock. Vaccinate, especially for things like 5in1.
Pulpy kidney can be an issue with grain feeding. So make sure we're covering that
and we're not losing animals inadvertently through things that are quite preventable at quite a low cost.
Potentially looking at fly control. You know, if it's dusty conditions, we've got a lot of flies,
we might need to control some of those nuisance flies around our animals. BRD is bovine respiratory disease.
Sometimes we can get a bit of coughing and respiratory disease in those animals. There are vaccines available out there. But I'd really encourage you to talk to your vet
just around, you know, just monitoring the health of your animals in these types of situations.
Utilize the vet as a sounding board that you can use to really keep on top of your health challenges.
There's a couple of calculators out there. I said I'd touch on these. So New South Wales CPI have got a couple of calculators
that you can download on your phone or a tablet and use. This Drought Feed Calculator is a really good simple program to use.
You put in your individual feeds that you've got available, what price they were on farm,
dry matter, their energy content, and crude protein. Now, it'll put default numbers in there for those,
but, again, I really encourage you to feed test and get those numbers so you know exactly what you've got.
Put them in together. You can then make mixes and it'll give you figures. You know, what's the energy content of your mix?
What's its crude protein? You know, what's it costing you in cents per megajoule of energy or kilos of crude protein?
And, you know, what's the cost per ton as fed? They're the sort of numbers
you really need to know with your ration. And then this one, you can actually, you can also put in the livestock
and it will calculate how much you feed, how long you're gonna feed for, and will calculate costings based on that as well.
So, you know, once we start feeding, it's important that we've got enough feed to go for, you know, a period.
We don't wanna be chopping and changing too often. That can cause problems with the rumen. So, you know, we need to know
what sort of quantities we need. This is a Drought and Supplementary Feed Calculator. So it's similar.
It's can also put in sort of what's available in the pasture
and allow you to work through as well and select different feeds and how much you need to feed to animals.
So there's a couple of handy little apps there that can work. And, you know, I really encourage people to look at those
so that they're actually developing something that's really practical and useful for your own situation.
In terms of other resources, the Managing Drought Guide, look, you know, it's in its ninth edition.
I believe they're working on a 10th edition. But, you know, this has always been a really valuable resource
when it comes to feeding animals. Really encourage you to, available on the net, you can download it,
or it's still available in hard copy from different locations.
LLS offices have often got copies of it. Really good resource.
Water requirements for sheep and cattle. This is a great Primefact, again, on the Department of Primary Industries' website,
specifically looking at water requirements for sheep and cattle. And also give a plug
for the guide to confinement feeding of sheep and cattle, which is a publication put together by the Local Land Services.
Brett and myself were both involved in the development of this document. There's a wealth of really good information in there
for people looking at confinement feeding, you know, setting up confinement areas,
what to feed, how to feed it. Yeah, just really encourage, there's resources out there for people.
At the end of the day, it is gonna rain. You know, we need to look after the stock.
You know, it's really important that you look after yourself as well and your own mental health.
But, you know, keep making decisions, keep looking at your options, monitor your stock.
Any decision you make in a dry time is a good decision. The fact that you made a decision
and you've worked on that I think is a positive. So really encourage you to look after yourself
and your own mental health and wellbeing. Talk to your neighbors, talk to your friends, compare notes.
Look, utilize your own experience. There's a lot of people out there that have got a lot of experience in feeding stock
and often it's just fine-tuning what you've done before. So, look, I hope that's provided some information for you.
I know there's not a lot of really specific details there. I think the broad range of producers
we've got online here tonight makes it impossible to really get down into the nitty-gritty
of exactly what's the most suitable for your situation. But, look, there's a lot of resources out there.
Utilize the Local Land Services staff and, yeah, look, I hope that's answered
some of your questions. I'll hand back over to you, Brett, and, yeah, if there have been questions that come in,
I'm happy to sort of cover off on those. - Yep, no worries. We've started to get a couple of questions come in.
One of them was one that you covered there regarding vitamins and minerals.
When would it be advisable to administer vitamin A, D, and E into a supplement or injection?
And the same for calcium phosphorus. - Yeah, look, from a calcium point of view,
as soon as you start feeding cereal grains, I'd be putting my lime and my salt out there.
Now, if you've got the ability to mix it, if people have got situations
where they're actually moving grain through an auger, you can make a slurry and actually pour it on the grain as it goes up the auger.
You can mix it into a feed mix as a dry mix. Or, you know, if you can't do that,
then, you know, there is the option to have it separately there just as a dry lick. A mix of lime and salt would be great for cattle.
If you're in an area that, yeah, is phosphorous deficient, then, you know, again, you're gonna start
to potentially use phosphorus, you know, just as you normally would in your production system.
If you're in phosphorous deficient country, then you're gonna use a phosphorous additive.
In terms of your vitamins, you've got a little bit longer. You're sort of really probably looking at a couple of months of feeding feed
that's got no green in it at all before you're really gonna start to run into issues with vitamin A and E.
But, you know, if you have been feeding for a considerable amount of time, then, yeah, three months is that window
where you'd really be strongly starting to look at providing some form of vitamin E or A
into those animals. - Thanks, Jeff. Look, and the other one I would cover
that calcium is also deficient in cottonseed and a few of the other things.
We also know that calcium will bind gossypol. So one to be aware of there as well.
Got a question here. Can we talk a bit more about the pros and cons of pellet feeding for weaner stock, Jeff?
- Yep, sorry, that's probably something I glossed over. Look, for really young stock,
so they have a really high protein requirement. So if we're talking, if we've weaned early, and I'm sure Brett will talk about this a bit next week too,
with those young weaners, if we've weaned early, we've got young animals that are lightweight, you know, even at that a hundred kilos,
they have a higher protein requirement and they require that through a true protein.
So in some situations, pellets are a really effective way of providing that
if you don't have mixing equipment. So you know, they're there. They're an alternative. The challenge with pellets
is really their cost per megajoule of energy is usually quite high and we need to treat them like a grain.
So we need to be careful with them in terms of their risk of grain poisoning, acidosis,
is equivalent to a grain, so we need to really handle them with care
and we need to make sure that we don't change pellets quickly.
So, you know, if you go and buy a batch of pellets, I'd encourage people to try and go and buy a batch
that's gonna, you know, feed those young animals, you know, maybe for the entire period you need.
Maybe it's 50 days to get them up to a weight, then you can start to use them on a different diet.
But try and buy enough pellets that can get them through that period so you're not going and buying another batch.
Even though they might be the same, labeled the same pellet, you don't know that the pellet manufacturer
hasn't changed their formulation or the base grain that they're using. Maybe one pellet was based on wheat.
The next pellet may be based on barley. So the rumen of that animal,
that is actually like you've just changed grains. So we need to introduce it slowly.
And this is really difficult. We always talk about it. In practice, it's really hard to do.
But, you know, if you've got a silo with pellets in it, don't let it run completely empty
before you start to use the next silo of pellets. We wanna shandy them together and do a similar process that we do to changing grains.
So, you know, you might need to do that over a week, five to seven days, to shandy those together.
So, look, pellets can be an effective feed. It really does come down to cost.
But we also need to be careful with how we use them and some of the risks that are,
you know, they're not a fail-safe feed, but, you know, it might be a way that we can actually get that higher protein
into those younger animals in a more effective way. And those young light animals, they don't need a lot of feed a day.
You know, you might only be talking a couple kilos per head per day for those animals. So the quantities can actually be quite small.
- What I would say is for young animals,
be very careful with your rearers what's being used to lift the protein.
There's risks associated there and, also, we tend to find not get the benefits
with young animals. So the younger they are- - When you're looking at those pellets for really young animals, you're often actually buying a specific calf pellet
and they've actually been manufactured by using more of a true protein,
so one of the protein meals I spoke about. Might be cottonseed meal, might be canola meal more likely,
has been incorporated into that pellet to raise the protein rather than a pellet
that might be just fed as a drought pellet for mature stock where its protein level is gonna be,
definitely gonna be raised by sort of non-protein nitrogen. So they're not as effective for those young cattle.
They actually need true protein. So you're actually looking at buying a specific calf protein pellet or a calf pellet.
If you can get analysis on the energy value of it as well, that's great. Often they're just sold on protein but, unfortunately.
- I've got one here, "Thanks, Jeff. Good presentation covering a broad range of aspects and maintaining a stock in dry time.
Thank you." Next question is, what's your view on suitability of DDG pellets?
- Look, probably, I'm happy to flick this to you Brett, to be honest. DDG is not something
that I've had a huge amount of experience with over my time, but I know you have, Brett,
so I think this is one I'm gonna throw straight to you. - I like DDG pellets.
We're having a few supply issues currently. I've fed them myself personally.
Been advising on DDG and DDG pellets now for,
late 2000s was when I first started working with them. Minerally, our WAC, you definitely need your lime with them.
There have been, in the pellets, they have changed that around. Very, very, very useful tool for early weaned stock.
There's a fair degree of bypass protein and the like. They're relatively safe, low level of starch.
What I would say is you probably, if you're looking at feeding sheep,
you need to be aware where the lambs can be a bit of an issue, but they do have a specific brew for that
that can help with bladder stones. But, yeah, so I don't mind DDG pellets.
It's what I fed my calves when I early weaned my autumn calves about three months ago.
That and a mix of cottonseed, until I couldn't get cottonseed anymore.
Next question, Jeff. You mentioned confined stock during drought, head per acre.
How many? And do they recover from poor nutrition during drought
for the rumen? Do they recover from poor nutrition during the drought
for the rumen? - Yeah, look, in terms of confinement feeding, look, ideally, the smaller, the better, to be honest.
So we're trying to minimize the area that we're causing damage on. If we've still got cows that have got calves at foot,
then small paddocks, you know, we're talking, we probably tend to come down and start talking about square meters per head
rather than animals per acre and the like. But, you know, we're talking for cows,
you know, somewhere a hundred plus square meters per head
would be what we'd be looking at for those. So small paddocks. For our other stock, we can get away with pens
and, you know, down to 15, 25 square meters per head
is plenty of room for those really light cattle. You know, we can be down around sort of, you know, seven to eight square meters per head
is adequate space for those animals. It allows us to keep a really close eye on them and monitor them quite well.
In terms of the rumen recovering after poor nutrition, yeah, look, the rumen is an amazing vat
and amazing organ in an animal. It's changing and adapting all the time.
We can through, not so much through poor nutrition, through acidosis and grain poisoning,
we can actually cause permanent damage to the rumen. We can actually burn sections of the rumen.
The wall of the rumen has got papillae on it, which are like finger-like projections that come in
and help the animals absorb nutrients from the rumen. If we have a bad incident of acidosis,
we can damage sections of that rumen and reduce the numbers of papillae that are on there.
But short of that, that rumen is changing all the time. So, yes, we can absolutely turn animals around
and, you know, through good nutrition and good management of the rumen, we can actually adapt that rumen back
and get that animal quite productive. Where we can run into problems but,
those really young light animals, they're the ones we've gotta keep growing. We can end up with stunted type calves
if they do it too tough early in life. But for most of our other classes of cattle, if we look after them, we feed them well,
we can actually, we can revitalize that rumen and actually get it functioning quite well again.
So, you know, sometimes that may need a bit of roughage. So might need a bit of hay or something in there
if you've got animals that are really, they're rumens really stopped working. So we probably need a little bit of hay
and a little bit of roughage in there and we've gotta get a little bit of energy in there as well. So that's where a little bit of cereal grain would come in
and then balance up our protein to get that all functioning. But look, yeah, the rumen is truly an amazing organ
that, yeah, is regenerating all the time.
- This is a good one, Jeff. Might seem like an overly simple question,
but how many times per day would you recommend feeding when animals are in confinement,
the entire ration in one go or split over two feedings? My thing would then be,
and I've said this is a good question, are you, in fact, better off feeding every couple of days, et cetera,
when you're actually in this confinement feeding situation? I'll hand that one to you, Jeff. - Yeah, look,
that's a fantastic question. Yeah, and it's absolutely, and something that I didn't cover off there at all.
When we're feeding, so mature animals and we're feeding them just to maintain their production,
so cows, we've weaned the calf off and, you know, we're maintaining that condition of that cow
so that she's gonna get back into calf, get pregnant, and continue to perform, look, we're gonna be feeding a lot less
than that animal's got the potential to eat. So in that situation,
you know, potentially feeding every other day where you've got a mix of feed there.
If you've got a bit of roughage in there and you've got grain, then we can get away with every other day feeding.
It's a larger quantity that you're feeding there. So that allows all the animals to get access to it.
The provisos to that are you need to have enough troughing that all the animals can get there at once
and, you know, we need to make sure that we're monitoring animals so that every animal is getting sufficient.
And then monitoring the manure and the dung so that you're doing that. Probably my preferred would be to feed at least daily.
I think that's safer and it allows, you know, just to monitor better
and it stops the dominant animals from getting too much feed
and, you know, some potentially missing out. So, you know, we monitor that. If we're feeding a higher amount
and we're feeding younger animals that we're wanting to put more weight on, we're really wanting to get production gains out of them,
then absolutely feeding them daily. I'm happy with once a day. You know, I don't think you need to necessarily split feed.
But, you know, once a day feeding provided you've got the trough space that everything can feed at once,
you know, that would probably be my preferred would actually be to doing that. We can get away with, you know, every-other-day feeding
on those mature stock, but, yeah, my preference would be once-a-day feeding
for pretty much everything. If you've got limited trough capacity
and you are trying to feed animals for production at a higher quantity, that's sometimes where you might need to split a feed
and feed twice in a day so that you're actually, got the capacity to feed that
into your troughs or into your system. But generally speaking, once a day should be enough, and try and be consistent with it as well.
Again, it's trying to get that rumen to function and to be consistent in what it's consuming.
- Yeah, look, that's a complicated and we see the social side of things really kick in.
It's where the hard and fast rules that we put down in centimeter space that Jeff has talked about really come into play.
Where we see problems is when people try to shortchange the minimum trough space
or the amount of feeders, et cetera, et cetera. And then all of a sudden, what we see in two, three months is this huge tail
and when I go out and do inspections during droughts, all of a sudden, I go,
"Okay, we've got a 25% pool rate here, you've got animals underperforming, da da da da,"
and you sit down and start measuring trough space and things like that and you go, "Yep, that's why."
So some of those fundamental rules that are in the confinement feeding manual,
they're there, we know they're there, we know they're hard and fast. So just that really comes into that feeding and management.
- They're all in there as minimums, but if you can supply more trough space, that's better.
Even those tractor tires where you've got separated, you know, if you sit down and watch actually
after you feed out, if you've got dominant animals in the group, if it's one long single trough,
a dominant animal will start at one end and push its way along and continue to eat from one end to the other.
If there's breaks in that trough or if the feed situation, they're separated a little bit,
they're much less likely to actually leave feed to go to another spot. So that often gives those shyer animals,
those lighter animals, more of an opportunity to get into feed if you've got more space.
And, also, that monitoring and that drafting, you know, if you do have have animals that are not getting on the feed, they're not performing,
then we do need to draft them off and, you know, put them in smaller groups and, you know, look after them a bit more in that situation.
- Question here, is creep feeding an option to get these younger calves off cows earlier?
- Absolutely. I didn't go into that 'cause I think Brett will cover that in a fair bit of detail next week.
But yeah, look, creep feeding is excellent. I think it's an excellent management tool every year,
not just in dry times. So, yeah, I think it's an excellent tool to take some pressure off the cow.
In that situation, you're doing what I said before where you're actually, you're substituting a little bit of feed,
so you take a little bit of pressure off the cow by creep feeding. But, yeah, I think it's an excellent tool and it's probably, it's an underutilized tool
in the beef industry nowadays. I think probably 30 years ago, I remember a lot of those Tablelands guys,
you know, they were producing for a different market. They're often producing those vealer animals and, you know, every property had creep gates
and creep feeders where they'd really push those calves along. So, yeah, an excellent option.
Again, when the animals are light, you don't need a large volume of feed
to make a big difference. Yeah, I'm sure you'll cover that in a lot more detail next week, Brett.
- Yeah, look, and creep feeding is particularly useful. I was actually on a place recently
where the producer had a better paddock with really good feed.
If he put all his cows in there with the calves on, they would've smashed it. He actually put the creep on the gate,
he put a pellet in the feed,
in a feeder, and all of a sudden, you know, as he sort of said to me, he said, "These things are going in.
They're aware of what a feeder is now. They're eating that. They're eating the better feed. I've got them up bigger, heavier than what I would've,"
and experience with the creep feeding side of things where they've been introduced to a grain
as someone in the north told me, he said, "I've never had a shy feeder when I've used creep feeding,"
'cause they're very, very used to it. We've had a question on DDG again,
which I think we've covered, but what is DDG? It's a byproduct from the ethanol plant.
It's dried distiller's grain, sorry, we do use acronyms quite freely,
and there's two forms. There's the wet, which is the syrup,
and the dry form that comes out that's made from the process of getting ethanol.
Okay, this one here, how can farmers maintain regenerative practices,
i.e. rotational cattle, rotating cattle through smaller paddocks regularly during dry times, Jeff?
- Look, unfortunately, I don't think you can. Look, I think realistically, in dry times like this
when you get to the stage that you're full hand feeding, you're better off actually,
people talk about sacrifice areas, but I think you're really, you're not sacrificing the area;
you're actually choosing the best area that's the most suitable for you both to feed those animals,
have all-weather access, but then maybe to rehabilitate afterwards. Maybe it is an area
that you can sow a crop back into quite easily. It's not too, doesn't have too much slope,
so erosion's not an issue. I think realistically, the most sound thing we can do
is actually bring those animals into a smaller area and try and free up as much of our country as we can
and take stock off there when, you know, feed requirements are not able to be met.
That's really the best we can do. Try to rotate through areas I don't think is really something we can do that effectively
when we get into that type of situation. - Yep, and I think that's sort of fair few of the questions.
Yeah, question here about the presentation. We will be sending this out.
It'll go out tomorrow afternoon, tomorrow evening. Also, there's some resources that are there and available.
There's the confinement feeding booklet, plus also the Managing Drought Guide, and Jeff was right, there's currently an update happening
with the final review just happening on Friday of last week, which will be coming out shortly.
There's a lot of information that we've gone through here this evening relatively quickly.
So I'd really like to thank Jeff for this evening and that,
and the fact that we've got so many people hanging on, we really haven't dropped off much at all,
shows the value that people have put in this. So really appreciate that, Jeff.
So thank you very, very much, everyone, this evening. If you've got any questions,
feel free afterwards to email through. We can look at that.
There's a range of assistance around in the LLS to assist you,
but, also, the number of resources, but can't say how important the tools that are now available,
the Drought Feed Calculator and the Drought and Supplementary Calculator. What Jeff and I, when we started our career,
we'd have to do longhand now can be done very, very quickly.
I wasn't great at maths, but soon learnt to become a lot better. But, yes, and thanks very much, Jeff,
and thanks, everyone, for hanging in there and being part of this presentation. Appreciate it. Thank you.
- Thank you very much, Brett. And, yeah, thank you to everyone that's joined online today. At the end of the day, just remember,
you know, every day, it's a day closer to rain. It will rain. Unfortunately, agriculture's a cyclical business.
It's gonna rain. Conditions are gonna improve. Prices are gonna improve. Look after yourself
and, yeah, be in a position to capitalize on it when you can. Thank you very much.
