Hi, very informative thanks. You don’t need shade, it’s a protein excess. - move them more regularly and leave your grass taller, this gives them the opportunity to eat at the top of the plants where the energy is highest - when they graze the bottoms/everything they get too much protein. Good luck
There is a farmers coop here by me in Texas that sells 1000 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer for about 775$, may be something good to look into for your area. Coop here will even mix herbicide into fertilizer for me, costs 12$ an acre to completely cover a field with duracor. One thing I found that helps a lot for me raising stocker cattle is that if an animal is having a lot of difficulty when they first get to pulled from their dams then shipped to a new farm is to tube them with electrolyte solution, it usually wets their appetite enough to stop bawling then start chewing on some calf manna mixed with a commodity grain when they get pulled into a sick pen.
I run stockers on grass and rotate in northern Missouri. You are on the right track. But a little grain every day will go a long way. Without it you just are not going to get significant gains with sale barn cattle.
I don’t understand his math for how fertilizer failed to pay off for him. It seems that he jumped to the conclusion that fertilizer wasn’t profitable without the proper analysis. Also, his 5% death loss on 70-80 calves - even if they’re high risk - is pretty bad.
