We Moved The Cows! | Grazing Stalks

All right, today we are out picking up fence that we were grazing at this field here. So we're picking up the fence posts. I've got some new gloves on. So these gloves are DLY brand. You can find them on Amazon. Nice, rugged, durable gloves for picking up fence. The other nice thing about them, of course, is that I can actually run my touchscreen with these fingers. So as a YouTuber who's constantly filming with his phone, it's really nice to not have to take your gloves off to open up your phone camera or answer your phone. And so you don't have to be a YouTuber. I mean, even if you just like to not have to take your gloves off while you're using your phone, pretty slick gloves for that. So DLY, DLY gloves, plenty durable for working on the farm. How do you like your new gloves? Really nice, help us cold day as the cold front comes in. It has been very blustery, give two thumbs up. Give two thumbs. You like your gloves too? I've been using them to float on these cabs. Keep your hands warm. Meet the Peterson family. Our dad, the three Peterson brothers, and our families farm together in central Kansas. Our family farm started in 1882 and has been raising cattle and crops ever since. Please subscribe to this channel and give us a like and a comment if you enjoy the video. All right, we went all the way around the field and then this was the entryway from the pen here, which a couple of those calves are out. But look behind there, we got water. The creek's running again. Kendall showed this creek, Kendall showed this creek a couple of weeks ago and he said it's muddy. That's the first steps of getting it back flowing, but we've got a little trickle. How long has it been? I don't know if it ran last winter or not, but it has ran for a while. Come on guys, get back in the pen. Cows are happy with their new forage out here. So I drove over here. These are Nathan's milo stalks. He said there was a little puddle of water when we cut the milo. Now there's more water. I guess we'll put the cows on this field after they're done and they got water. Crosby found the pond, he's real happy. This stuff is what the cows and calves are gonna graze after the milo stalk. So it was our earliest planted, Triticale. It's gonna make some good grazing. I'm hoping to do it in kind of three paddocks. There's pond here, pond over there. I could maybe let them out two different places. Because if you put a pair, those cows will just eat green like this, clean in the late winter. Then the calves won't get all that chance to eat it as much. But if you rotationally do it, maybe feed them a little silage. That's what I'm hoping to do with this. Here's a cow just pulled a whole turnip out of the ground. Chews it up into pieces before she tries to swallow it. I don't know if I got the video in time. You can see some of them they munched on. This one, one of the cows bit off and then it stayed in the ground. There's one that's out of the ground. Yeah, they've been chewing on them here. They look like they're chewing on apples. Those are the turnips. 507 likes turnips. Worked calves this morning. These calves are for auction. It appears we missed a little bit of that milo right along there. So I'm fencing this big field of milo stocks. We're not letting them have the whole thing all at once. We're gonna start off with 60 to 80 acres, probably 60 acres for the 32 pair. And then once we finish, once we open up to the rest of it, we'll bring over the rest of it, the other bull worth. I ran out of wire on both my spools, a little bit short. So I left a marker back there. Drop this off. Here we go. Nice and gentle. We have got wire up in cattle grazing and a lot of places right now. So I was kind of at the bottom of the barrel on wire. So using some of those real narrow spools. I know where to get wire, finish this. So I just got to get the wire, finish this, then steal the posts from where the cows currently are and then get them turned out here, hopefully within 48 hours. All right, we finished picking up the posts on that last field. And then we brought those same posts over to this field and we're going to put them up here. What's nice is that we've gotten enough rain recently that the posts just push right in. Fencing in the last couple of months, we've been having to bring a hammer along with us to hammer these down. And so, yeah, they just go right in the ground. It's kind of nice. All right, Kendall and I have got the sidekick. We've made our way around this half of the field. Dad and Nathan, if you can see them, are along the road there, coming this way. So we'll meet up and we'll have the whole field fenced. How many Petersons does it take to build a fence? The answer is four. Yeah, I'm going to take this up there. Every day is voting day, if you're Kendall. Oh yeah, that's like my fourth time wearing this hoodie. I need to go and eat again. Sorting cows and calves. We're going to put the cows on the trailer, the other calves on the stock trailer again. I'm down to my last few. We're still up next here. Craig's helping me with some gates. All right, we're loading the cows and calves up. Kendall's putting the first three in the semi. 13's going to go on the top. And then we'll get 15 more to put on the bottom. The numbers are a little different with cows than with feeder cattle, because the cows are obviously bigger. So they take up more space. We can all about 62 head of feeder cattle on the pot. And then with cows, you know, it's only about 30. Somehow, the last couple of years, it's always soft ground when we need to move cows and calves. With all the dry we've had, it likes to get soft when it's time to have them on the field. Hey, dad, they're going that way. Kendall! They're not wanting to come out. So all their calves are getting spread out. We haven't found them yet. Gotta go see if they caused any mischief. What? Gotta go see if the cows have caused any mischief. You got poop on your hood there. Yeah, well, the cows like sprayed it off the trailer. I would imagine they... And then kind of like Nathan was saying before, social media, while it has its pros and cons, like the cool thing about it is that... We're getting some soil testing done today. So just stood there with the post while I wound up. Didn't have any places to catch or rip. So that was nice and simple. Cows are already going from this field. So I think some of them were here for 70 days. Some of them were here for the last ones we hauled down. Well, let's see, we filled this side of the creek. I'd say they were here for 70 days. So over two acres per cow for 70 days. So it was basically an acre cow for that amount of time. But that's an acre per cow at peak lactation, not an acre per cow during their dry, dry off season. Like what corn stalks can be. Bread cows, these are for nursing mamas. And they could have eaten more off of this, but we left plenty of residue out here and plenty of manure pads for fertilizer for next year's corn crop. So Nathan should be happy about the seed bed of this. So I basically Paul Bunyan these things into the ground. Is that the name of the legend? So I was, couldn't pull them out by hand. So I need tractor strength. So a tractor can just pull them right out of the ground. Obviously. Several more of those to do. Got another 70 hundredths of rain and the creek finally has some water. Well, this one's real strong, sturdy telephone pole. That's the brace to this gate has seen better days. So it's a, we, we pushed, lifted it up, shoved a rock in there, put another one down. Anyways, it's, it's rotting off a bit. This pin that the cows and calves were in should see heifers probably by the end of next week. It's getting kind of muddy actually, which we will gladly deal with the mud at the home place. And with that mud means we will spread the cattle out a little bit heading into winter. We'll haul a load of heifers down here, probably end up with two loads of heifers down here. Comes time to sell them. We'll have the heifer groups all straight to the sale barn from down here in like January or around then. Just got in 62 head. And lined up even. Back to bunk. Well, it's getting muddy up here. So we are shipping some lighter heifers down to my dad's to some dry pens and he's based that hasn't been trumped up. It's at 198.87 on the nearby. So some of these are on a new pen. We ran back to explore the pen. And now they're running back up on the spot. Also just pretty close to even on the day. In fact, 25, 72, 40, we have 25, 73, 30. Okay, now we're sorting some up to sell like a week ahead of time. Again, trying to get pens set right ahead of another one to two inch chance of rain Sunday and Monday. Okay, we got more rain in the forecast. So hopefully, you know, we're putting water in our ponds and stockpiling for next year. In between rains, we had enough sun and these fields have been dry enough. That rain is soaking in and it's a little tacky on top to be drilling the last of this cover crop. We are going ahead and doing it because it's supposed to rain this weekend again. So you can see there's just basically no residue, like even less than if we chopped it, you know, because we swapped it and bailed it. So this will give us some cover. There's a small chance we end up bailing this cover too, but I'm hoping not. I think we have a better plan, but either way, we'll have something keeping that ground covered. Another day, another cover crop. More wheat Triticale blend on this field where we swapped and bailed the Milo stubble. So we took off residue, but now we're gonna put some more in. Hopefully by spring, this field will be nice and greened up with this cover crop. And then we'll plant right into that soybeans green and that builds more residue. So even though we took some off, we're hopefully kind of replacing it, kind of a win-win scenario. We might be a little on the wet side, but there's another big rain coming this weekend. Today's Friday. And if it rains another inch and a half, we're probably not getting into this field for at least a couple of weeks. So we're trying to finish this up and we might do one more field later. Okay, got a load of heifers headed to my dad's house. It ended up being two partial pot loads. So, once he gets back up here, there's some more in there. Time to put heifers down at dad's lot. There's the second load in there. So we brought down enough to fill pen one and pen two. And so we'll have two pens of heifers to feed down here in a couple of months. We'll bring down another load, probably another 10 days or so. I'm gonna run a guy if he's been banged up and they're in the same boat we are. We need to look at them. Thanks for watching, everyone. Check out our music videos linked in the description. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and explore our website, www.petersonfarmbrothers.com. See you guys next time.