Calving 2024 | 4th Cutting Alfalfa | Building Fence

All right, tonight I am installing some Sioux Steel Continuous Fence, but at the moment I'm watching our two kids, Brighton and Steele, because Brookanna had to run into town real quick. Are you guys having fun with Daddy? But there you can see behind me, I've been welding it up to my posts. It's a really nice quality, really nice quality fence there. And you can't beat that view, Coronado Heights back there. But you can learn a little bit more about Sioux Steel's Continuous Fence on their website. I'll do some updates as I get this fence put up and show you guys the finished product when I'm done. Right, Steele? Did we name you after Sioux Steel? If your name is Steele, you like that? Is that funny? That's right, I'm Brighton Louise. You're Brighton Louise. He's Steele David. 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, I kind of forgot to film much of it, but there is the finished product. I'm gonna build a gate over here, but there's the Sioux Steel Continuous Fence in action. Here's our wet rolled corn since we were out of the old stuff. It's wet. It's getting cracked open, though. She loves unloading cattle in the middle of the night. Okay, this cow is standing back. I'm wondering, and her udder is filled up, so I'm wondering if she could be the first one to calve. She had twins for us last year, so I'd be really surprised if she was the first one to calve. I got them all recorded today, what their ages and their months bred they are, so I can keep track of them. Some of them have a year, like that one was born in 2019, so it's a five-year-old. Some of them just have a zero or a one, so it's not an exact science, but I guess I'll leave these tags on them for now. Okay, here's that cow that was acting suspicious. These type of weeds are why we have these cows turned out here, to clean them up. So, I think she's had her calf over here somewhere. All right, I believe that's the first calf of our fall calving season. You can see its head, apparently. Okay, we chopped this field for silage. Right next to this field, we're going to graze with the fall pears when I first calve. I'm putting a hot wire right between them. This is also our silage hauling road from this field over here, a mile away. So, this outer row of beans looks really good. You go out there, it doesn't, you know, the height goes down a little bit as you out in the field. But anyway, I took the rotary mower, mowed off this outside edge so I can put a fence here, keep the calves in. You can see how tall this stuff is. It's really producing. It's why we like to grow something after wheat. Okay, I've got to get from this corner here, over and make a wall here. It's kind of starting to rain. I smashed down that with my bucket and my tires to make a path here, rather than the mower. I forgot to mow there. All right, it's raining. I came to look at the bunks, make sure everything's cleaned up. We changed the ration from corn silage to triticale and I haven't, I haven't really been able to catch up to them since then. They've been hungry every day because they cut back when I switched them over. So, my dad always used to drive and look at each of the bunk lines first thing in the morning and then do his bunk adjustments. I do it a little bit different, whereas I do some more of my adjustments on the fly, just while I pull up to the pen. But I came to look at these before I fed this evening, so I know how much to load if I need to increase my load to 300 pounds or cut it back any. I did find out six is not cleaned up yet, so they won't need fed as much as they were in the a.m. And seven, we just added 27 head to, made it all steers and they are extra hungry, so I'll probably increase them a little bit. And then the other thing is when it rains, the silage and the distillers get wet and that increases the weight without increasing the nutrient density, or without increasing the nutrients. When it's wet, you also have to kind of increase the amount of pounds per head the cattle are going to consume because a lot of that's water. Thankfully, our hay, corn, mineral, those ingredients are under a roof and those percentages will not change. I love that sound. One, two, three, four, tractor! One, two, three, four, tractor! One, two, three, four, tractor! One, two, three, four, tractor! It's on the other side of the house. Get a little louder. Two, three, four, tractor! One, two, three, four, tractor! Yeah, good clapping. Can you clap, Brenton? Now can you wave? Cuties. Oh, there it is. That's your calf, mama. All right, it's Monday morning and Kendall and I are out fencing. We got the wire laid out last week and it's most efficient with two people to put up posts. Yeah, so we're out here putting up posts and it's amazing what this stuff looks like after how much rain have we had in the last three weeks? I think like three and a half inches. Three and a half inches since we made that ain't no rain video. So moral of the story, we need to make more videos about not getting enough rain apparently. Here is the double crop cane, the forage sorghum across the road. This was maybe a foot tall before that ain't no rain storm and this was pretty much dying. It was brown and it's just it's incredible to see how things have changed. That's what rain does. All of a sudden we look like we live in a garden. Also where we chopped this corn, left our insurance strips, the weeds have just taken over in two, three weeks with those rains. So we need to get this sprayed but we're still waiting for the crop insurance to come out and appraise those. So we just got a single wire for part of the fence. The rest is going to be a double. So this is where we tie to this post. All right, number 170 is in the process of calving. I'll show us here. So there's two calves in that pen. Hopefully there's three next time I check. All right, we got the fencing done. Next up is we're gonna, I'm gonna feed a bale to the cows here. All right, got the bale dumped in. We've got a couple baby calves in here and another one on the way. This one's in labor. Yeah! Okay, I'm gonna try to show you guys this calf without bothering the mom. So I'll just stick her in this corner here. I can watch her. Where's the calf? There's the calf. The calf's trying to stand up. I had to pull it, which is pretty, not very normal not to pull one this early in the calving season. But this is one of those bought, purchased cows I bought. So hopefully that doesn't mean I'm gonna need to pull a lot of them. It was a pretty good size bull calf there. Here's that little calf. I haven't really been able to find him much, but oh, pretty spry. I guess he's all right. I thought he's gonna get to go out on that. He's one of the pairs that'll get to go out on that new green. There's his mom over there. That I'm fencing today. We'll get him off of these weeds. That calf was nursing when I pulled. It's nursing. Pretty wobbly, but he wants to get it figured out. Not really interested in putting my face through that web. I need to get some wire out of here though. Here you can see the difference between a forage planted on 30 inch rows and fertilized, and then a cover crop that's just drilled and not fertilized. It's just using anything it can scavenge from the wheat. I put a fence right between them. This is my uncle's. We plant it, but we'll chop it. And then this side here we're with the cows that are in this pasture right here. So kind of a low input double crop, which is more of a cover. And this one's more of a high input double crop, which is more of a forage. But we're going to utilize both of them here. Okay. How big is steel? So big. Brighton's got it. So big. So big. You can tell where the bales were of bale storage area. My dad cleaned out all the millet bales and now we'll take the wire off from around them. They're going to graze these weeds too on the other pond dam. We don't do this a whole lot, grazing all three pond dams at the same time, but I think we got the hot wires all in the right place. They've grubbed that pond pretty good. One of them calved out there. I'm okay if they have their calves out here, you know, the first few of the year, but then I'd like to get them in a pen easier to see than out in these tall weeds. But they got another 10 days to destroy all these weeds, eat them up, finish the last little bit of gestation, and then we'll put them in a little smaller pen to calve in. The other thing is they're getting silage and some ration. So they're not only living on weeds, getting about 20 pounds, a little over 20 pounds of ration. Okay, here's the turnaround. We've got straw bales. Don't want the cattle being able to access the bunk or the bales. They're going to come through here to get some water. I got this fence, this cheapo fence charger on this really short fence, but because it's so short, it's going to really shock them. So hopefully they learn not to mess with the hot wire right off the bat. One thing I learned being dependent on hot wire to keep baby calves in is in the fall, I have to be pretty dependent on hot wire just because of what I'm grazing on crop fields. If you train them calves when they're less than two months old, by the time they're even eight or nine months old, they will not mess with fences. But if you let them be on a fence that's not as hot when they're babies and they figure out they can go underneath things, they will not be as well trained when they're older. Well, it's interesting. We're having a bunch of charlotte and red calves out of these black cows. I had to pull out two of them. All right, there is the finished product. I didn't do a whole lot of filming of it, but got it welded up. Looks good. I'm probably going to put some support posts in the halfway marks there, but this is the first stage done anyway. All right, I got my path. The newborn pairs are going to be out on this. So far I've just had one calf from my own cows. Those ones that I bought, there's now five calves that have come out of that I'm speculating on this one that's still out by the pond and the other cows have walked around to the pen need some evening silage. I got the whole call with like eight cows feeding them distillers. I just need to get one more off and I'll walk to him. I took the Angus bull off earlier. Okay, so they're picking on the distillers out of the sidekick. Got the bull by himself already. That didn't take too long. All right, putting Bubba in this pen of weeds. He's got plenty to eat. He has a couple months break. We'll get Uso with him later. Uso's up at the feedlot with some steers. All right, that's some of the sedan. This mix is mostly sedan. Okay, I've gotten that much down here. A little bit more here. Much taller than the swather. It's not quite taller than me. It's about five to six feet tall. Look at that brand new Dodge over there. Who needs to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a new diesel pickup when you can make your old one look nice? Okay, I don't typically do many night calf checks, but because we did breed heifers this year and I saw this one acting like it was going to have a calf, I decided to do a night calf check. So you can see the cow's white face and then that black dot is the calf. It's up. Calf is up. I just wanted to make sure they were still paired up and that the heifer hadn't left it. It looks like they're doing fine. The calf's following the cow as they walk away. I think I'm going to call that good with that cow because I don't want to spook it any more than necessary and I can just tag it in the morning. All right, I'm going to be gone for 36 hours, so I'm combining the two fall calving groups to one group and put them in a smaller space. They'll be easier to watch. Okay, there's the couple that got locked out last night and I was trying to bring them in this morning. They were standing right by this gate, but when I came to open the gate, they all ran off. So I took the other ones out. I've been feeding them a little bit. Listening to some K-State podcasts. We're a week away from college football season. Saturday we're putting this alfalfa down. It's the best cutting since the second cutting with the recent rains and cool weather. Greg's filming me. Got over half done. It is a little afternoon. Greg just ate lunch, so he's going to trade me off and finish. Then we have a sedan grass to put down on Monday. Kendall started on it just to get started on some and then we will make the adjustments so this this will work better. We have some high-lipped pieces to put on there, but excuse me, I don't do good in alfalfa. I got some allergies. Finishing up this field. Took us most of the day. It's kind of nice to swath some decent alfalfa for once. It's been, I feel like it's been a couple years since we've had, and I mean this isn't first cutting alfalfa, so for it being a fourth cutting, it's really good. It's kind of fun to have a good alfalfa crop for a change. That's thanks to the the rains we've had the last three weeks. About an inch of rain a week. What were you singing? Poor silage on me. You don't like the corn? You want to sing it again? Great job. 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.