Cattle | Increase Conception Rates after Lush Spring Turnout

During the winter most cattle are supplemented with dry forages, grains, and co-products. This ration is balanced and delivered to cattle. Then spring comes along and cattle are put out to grass. While green grass solves a lot of problems associated with winter feeding (manure, pen maintenance, calf health, and labor demands), it can pose nutritional challenges, especially for newly bred cows.

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That lush green grass forage has three major challenges when it comes to meeting cattle nutrition requirements.

• it can lack enough dry matter
• it is high in protein, but the excess can become a problem without the dry matter
• and it is low in fiber

The beef cattle specialists at the University of Illinois wondered if this combination of problems has taken a hand in some of the lower artificial insemination conception rates they’ve seen in one of the three campus herds. Animal Scientist Dan Shike and Extension Beef Educator Travis Meteer set up an experiment to find out. Low dry matter and excess protein has been well documented by the dairy industry as a detriment to reproductive performance. The two wanted to know if a supplemental dry matter feed stock would make a difference. Shike says it did, “We did a synchronized timed A.I. At the first pregnancy check about 58% of the supplemented cows were pregnant to A.I. and 46% of the non-supplemented cows were pregnant to A.I.”

A twelve percent increase is significant. However, Shike cautions he has just two years worth of data to support the findings. Shike and Meteer did a Facebook live video discussing lush spring grasses and the impact on cattle going to pasture that includes more details on conception rate work. Search Facebook for “University of Illinois Beef Cattle Extension”.

Choosing Nitrogen Rates

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The growing season has started and most corn farmers have already applied nitrogen. It is a very expensive plant food and getting the rate right may mean using a little less.

Here’s how the University of Illinois nitrogen recommendation used to work. It was formula equal to roughly one-point-two times the expected yield minus the nitrogen leftover from the previous crop. That “yield-goal-based system” recommends too much for today’s corn hybrids says University of Illinois Extension Agronomist Emerson Nafziger, “That yield-goal-based system flat-out doesn’t work anymore. The reason it doesn’t is that our yields have gone up a lot, and we are clearly showing that yields have gone up more than requirements for nitrogen have gone up.”

Nafziger believes there are two reasons for the change. First, he says the system always recommended more nitrogen than was really needed. The other is that hybrids have become much better at extracting what’s there; water and the nutrients that come with water. Nitrogen is the main one of those. Nafziger says, “Today we get higher yields and do not have to use the 1.2 pounds of nitrogen per bushel or what ever formulation people were using.”

ILLINOIS abandon the formula about ten years ago in a favor of a system used and promoted by Land Grant’s throughout the corn belt. It is called the N Rate Calculator and it actually brought the Illinois rates down by a few pounds for this year.

Nafziger says at current corn and nitrogen prices, guideline rates for corn following soybean are 154, 172, and 179 pounds of nitrogen per acre in northern, central, and southern Illinois, respectively. 200, 200, and 189 for corn after corn. Southern Illinois farmers will make note that their rate for corn after soybeans is higher than in either central or northern Illinois and lower than both of those for corn after corn.

Too Early to Worry About Late Planting

Farmers have been a bit worried about getting into the field because of rains throughout the Midwest. It looks like those will clear out for the week, mostly, and even if they don’t, there isn’t much to worry about, yet. Todd Gleason has more on when the ag economist at the University of Illinois think late planting impacts the markets and yields.

Working to Create New Illini Brand Soybean Varieties

Troy Cary & Lauran Widman (wihd-man) are working to create twelve-thousand 2017 University of Illinois soybean breeding program plots. Todd Gleason caught up with them on Tuesday morning and put together this look at some of the pre-planting season work.

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