Feeding cattle

I doubt if there is a right or wrong answer. I talked to man that fed steers on pasture and hay. He saidin his area land sold for $2000 to 2500 per acre. Here land is $8000 and up per acre. You can not use that land for pasture unless you have a few acres that you can not crop farm. So at what point is it practice not to graze cattle on this cheap land? Thanks for any good input. J.

I guess it depends on if you owe anything on the land.My farm is in an area where land sells easily between $20K to $50K an acre and I graze cattle and goats on it.I'm not going to sell so its a choice between that and nothing as I'm not interested in doing crop farming much of my land wouldn't be suitable anyway.Ironic thing is the mountain land on my place that used to be consider to have very little value is the highest priced land around because people love the views of the Blue Ridge Mts.to build houses there.

If you have enough land and you want to pasture than do that with it. Like TF said it likely won?t pencil out to borrow money to buy land and just pasture it in hopes of making the mortgage payments but if you have land you?d like to pasture and doing so won?t reduce your income than go for it.

I don't think it matters what the land is worth. What matters is the market price of corn, beans and cattle. Right now you would probably lose less money on cattle then corn.

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking. If you have good fences everywhere it's good to include pasture in part of your crop rotation. Not yearly, but every few years. Splitting say an 80acre patch up into smaller pastures with hot wires and rotating the livestock around in the smaller pastures to let them grow back as they aren't used is ideal. Grazing is good for rebuilding topsoil if done right. You want to not let them eat everything down to the stub, but to trample some and eat some. Then after a few years change the whole setup out with a different field. In our case we will take a field that was crop and turn it to hayground, then a patch that was hayground to pasture, and then the previous pasture gets plowed and turned back to crop. This is if you have a full sized farm. If you are asking if it's worth it to buy land just for pasture, not likely. If you have a small herd and simply need a space for them, than buying a small patch of land so you can raise them is fine, but you will still be feeding them silage or hay, they won't be able to be sustained on just that small patch of land alone most likely. Well, I hope that answered something.

Around my little corner of the world, land that will grow crops will sell for 10Grand a acre all day long . Land that is sought after by several neighboring farmers, can go up up up. And land rent can fetch $200.00 per acre for one year. So what you need to factor against would be the lost opportunity of investment income you could earn buy selling the land, and investing in something that would pay a dividend, or even cash rent. If pasture could support one animal, but you could Grow 15-20 tons of corn silage, how many could you feed then? There is more cost associated with growing corn silage, and feeding, but many more livestock can be fed pee acre. I think there is always more potential to profit by growing a crop than grazing livestock if the ground is good enough to grow the crop on. Cattle can graze a hillside that might not be suitable for any kind of crop.