Beef Operation Feed Setup/Bunk Tour

hey guys we don't have too much going on today so we're gonna talk about how we feed what we use to feed and our feed loss setup as well there's many different ways of feeding that people utilize around the US and the rest of the world and so I've gotten a lot of comments and questions about why we do it this way and and kind of how we do it it since there's not too much going on we're gonna talk about it so the first thing we'll come into is there silage bunker we put this up about six or seven years ago it's all poured I actually helped build this it was during the summer right before I started high school and I was just coming to check on how it was going when he when the fellow was building it and he asked if I wanted to help out so I paid me a little bit of money and gave me something to do for a while in between practice and getting ready for school and so I actually got to help build this say it's about 40 feet by probably 80 feet 40 feet by 80 feet for the past about seven years we've been putting silage in here we filled it probably three or four times now it usually lasts a year or two when we fill it silage is a pretty big ingredient for us in our ration and many people use corn silage but we use sorghum silage because the seed for sorghum is a lot cheaper we actually have a feed guy that comes in tests it and that way we know how much protein we got to add and how much of each ingredient we need and so around the time we were putting this bunker in we actually also concreted a big space right here you can't really tell because there's hay and mud and so snow but this big concrete pad basically extends from the corner here goes about to the corner of that hay pile and then hops it over to that other bunker which we will head to next week on treated this all out because it's just we have really muddy Springs even muddy Falls and before we had this bunker dad was about getting stuck every time he was going to grab silage because we didn't have that concrete underneath and it would just get wet and that silage would just hold moisture and it'd be really tough next ingredient is ground corn for this we bought preformed walls and they were actually used and used railroad ties to hold them up and poured concrete underneath it of course and so every year we grind corn and we used all and we use all the corn in this pit every year and so this is kind of what it looks like this year we used corn crackers made by land Koda which they are out of here on which is just about 45 minutes north of here and so that worked pretty well we got it all cracked it took about a day and a half to fill this pit know many of you probably wonder why we crack it why we don't just use whole corn or it's also possible that you guys don't use corn in your area you might have distillers but you can see we do put plastic over top of it and these tires to hold it down that way rain doesn't get into it you can kind of see there's a crown in it that way the water can run off to the sides and you know it kind of seeps along the sides which isn't the best but we keep the vast majority of this corn up to good quality now in this pit we have about 8,000 bushels of corn that's cracked in here and so this lasts us all of winter and gets us into the summer even and then after that we just start taking corn out of the grain bin and dump in about a semi load at a time in here and just using that we grind the corn for a couple reasons number one is it allows the bacteria to work in there good bring the pH down and then it keeps bad bacteria and fungi from growing it's very accessible you know we just keep tearing backs plastic as we work back and feed the cattle every day I'm gonna get a lot of comments and questions saying why do you do it that way and us farmers we think about everything it's all about efficiency and low cost and high quality and so for every situation we got going on over here and strategy that we use there's probably a better way that can be done but for us this is the most efficient and least costly for us to do it so now that we've talked about our ground corn and earlier we talked about our silage we're going to talk about our hay pile during the entire summer we're putting up hay alfalfa and grass and we get usually three cuttings of alfalfa sometimes four and almost always we only do one cutting of grass but this year it was so wet we got two cuttings of grass and so what we do here is we mix our grass in our alfalfa in the grinder and shoot it out now you can probably see there's a little bit of loss you know it's sprinkled everywhere and that's just how it is sometimes you can't really tell but it's about right here to the edge of the concrete and then shoots back over there and so this is about half on the concrete half off once we start taking enough of the silage out of the pit and we have enough room we do start grinding in the pit that way there's less wind and there's more concrete that it can stay on so we've talked about our three main ingredients of our ration corn silage ground hay so now we're gonna hop in to our commodity shed and talk about what we have in here number one is a protein pellet this wagon never moves the truck comes in and fills it up and so what this is is a protein pellet it supplements them gives them enough protein in the rumen that way you they can break down the hay and keep them healthy keep them digesting well in addition to that we also have mineral we got bags of mineral sitting across another commodity shed you can see there's wood by 2 by 12 sitting around here we used to put our corn in here but then once we've built that what corn pit outside we started just doing that and putting it in the pit out there we've got a protein we got our mineral we got a three maining other main ingredients and then in this stall since we don't put corn in it anymore this is where our feed wagon tractor sits and we're going to talk about our equipment in a minute but on the other side is more storage right now we have this wagon which has our Dakota Gold pellets in it and I'm grabbing from there every day and hand feeding all the critters around here trying to tame them down we also have the short conveyor we use that when we're fertilizing in the spring just helps bring the fertilizer from the semi into another conveyor that runs it up into our fertilizer spreader we have a big snowblower we got our three-point sprayer here and so this other side usually just gets used for storage and now we're gonna start talking about our equipment and after that we're gonna go to each individual pen and talk about what the Pens are used for how big they are I only had we put in each of them and basically water and how all that works so this tractor well both these tractors get run every day 365 days of the year this one we bought used I don't know how long ago it's not two of them older the tractor it's a 60 125 are it runs nice for some reason we're having a problem with the radio which stinks but like I said it gets run every day and we hooked to it we have a 340 farm aid feed wagon it's got this nice reel in it mix in the mix in the feed this feed wagon we bought in 2003 and so it's 20 20 now 2003 17 17 years that can't be right that's an old that's a little speed wagon well we've had this for quite a while and one thing cool about that is it was built in South Dakota the company that makes farm aid I think is that us no corsica South Dakota see the course cutter Stickney but it's just about 40 minutes southwest of here it's pretty cool that we get to use a product that was made here in South Dakota and it's pretty local and then we come to our 61 55 our it also gets used every day more than our feed wagon because it got to do a bunch of other jobs other than just pulling the feed wagon around and we've had this tractor probably for years I think and it's been pretty good for us looked yesterday this tractors got 3,200 hours on it like I said it was used we bought that one new it's probably got 1,600 hours on it talked about our equipment everything that goes into the ration our commodity shed and now we're gonna head over and start talking about each individual a lot and we're gonna first start with our bow lot up front I forgot the side-by-side well I guess I drove the tractor out here but I'm gonna walk around a bit so this first slot which is up towards the front of the yard is our Bowl lot I haven't talked about it much but we sell purebred Black Angus bowls to local beef producers in the area so here we have a hundred and eighty foot of bunk line and you know usually we just put all the bolts that we have raised in that year in this lot and it usually comes out to be anywhere from 60 to 80 some years are weird that's this lot is towards the front of the yard and we have a lot of people come through here we put a fancier bunk lying in here and it's a whole Dazz much volume but it looks a little fancier holds the feet it needs to but if you go too slow and the feet dumps out too fast it will overflow a little bit so that's just something you got to be careful about and for water we got this water drinker right here and it's really nice because it doesn't freeze up very often it we don't have to deal with it you know when it's cold just punched the balls make sure it's not frozen it's still spitting out water for the cattle in one of my last two videos it was a cold day and that did freeze up it was really windy and we showed how we thaw it which is pretty cool we take our skid loader back up to it and we attach a hose to the back of the exhaust and put it down in the water and it'll heat up the valve in there so if you want to see that check that video out I'll put it here and if it's not right here I forgot so sorry about that so this next lot we call our middle lot we have a hundred and sixty foot a bunk line here in every bunk line we have we have about eight foot of concrete run it on the back side of them that way when a lot of poo gets built up or snow we have enough room that we can drive the loader down it with the bucket and push all that off or put it in a manure spreader so the slot that we call the middle lot it's called that because it's in the middle of our three main Lots and most of the time it's used for our heifers or just some feeder cattle right now as you can see we have cows they've been getting the Dakota gold pellets and so they're all coming up to me because they want some wants an ice pellets but holy cow that's a big one you are a big girl yeah come here okay you like a pig wink right now you can see there's cows in it and they're in here because we needed somewhere to feed them they're supposed to be on corn stalks but last week we got about 12 inches of snow and they just can't find the corn and they just can't find the corn or the leaves down in that deep of snow they keep smelling the ground hoping I give them some pellets and they're probably will later today but now we're coming over to where they drink water from BAM this water tank and it's been warm today and you can see there's water all the way around here about two inches down it's frozen solid so it's not too big of a deal looks like they're getting low on water and so I'll turn that back on and right across the fence from them we have our first-year replacement heifers they're gonna be Kevin starting in February and they'll be Kevin for about three months and they've been getting the pellets too and they're pretty excited about them and right now they've been in this cornfield right next to all of our feed Lots but like I said it snowed and so we've been feeding them we've been feeding them even before it snowed but we've had to up the ration since they're not able to get at any of the corn or the leaves there's about 40 of them in there now we're gonna head to what we call the north lot and in this lot we have either our heifers or young heifers or feeder cattle it usually switches between this pen and that pen just depending on who we had to work and bring up to the front it doesn't matter what pen they're in it just kind of depends on how it worked out that year this is our North pen we got some wind breaks out in it just like the middle pen and it's 150 foot long I think that last one was 160 and so this was just one section of bunk shorter the middle pen and the North pen both have this one it's a high-capacity bunk and it works it works great unless the snows then it fills up with even more snow than that South one yes it looks like these guys aren't getting low on water too so I will flip that on but this pen we built probably three years ago along with that bunk line and those were the most recent ones that we put up so there wasn't really much to say about that north lot other than the northeast corner fills with water pretty good and we actually got stuck with a tractor last week right before it snowed because they hadn't froze up yet completely so from the north lot we come over West and this is our West feedlot and it's about 70 foot of bunk line and this lot is mostly used for our cows that have just calves and they're old enough that they don't need to be in the building anymore so usually those heifers that are about to calve in about two months they'll start moving into here after they have calves and it's really nice because there's trees all around it good protection for the newborn calves and the cows and also we got to wind breaks and two buildings out there for the calves as I'm walking over to the side-by-side if you noticed we got the new Sonny Farms perch and that's in the link below if you want to check that out we got hats sweatshirts and shirts and also stickers about guarantee I'm gonna forget those waters that are running and they're gonna run over I somehow forgot to mention this this lot even though it's right next to the bowl lot but we have this nice little pen here we usually have two feeders in it and also some feed bunks that we can put in here and what we do with this those replacement heifers that are out on the corn stalks right now once they get even closer to calving they'll be put in this pen that way we can get them up to the barn so we got two places to talk about left and the second last one is this pen and we call it the triangle pen because it's somewhat shapes like a triangle not like perfectly or we also call it the pen by the white building even though it's kind of faded it's not that white anymore but with this pen we use to wean calves or if we just run out of place in the Lots we put a few in here and we got a bail feeder that we give them and there's also one of those bunks over there and we've been bringing buckets of corn out here to give them a little grain and help grow them up a little bit right now there's 33 head in here and there's a water tank right there and that water tank provides water for this pen and also the 17 acre field right here which we use to calve the majority of our cows out and a couple months we'll start bringing all the cows home and you can see there's a bunk line right there of bottomless bunks and we can move those bunks around and we feed all of our cows in there I hope this answered any of your questions that you had about how we feed but if you have any more or just want to say what's up feel free to comment below like this video hit the subscribe button and hopefully I'll see you next time is that for me thanks

Channel: Sonne Farms

Views: 84,759

Rating: 4.968504 out of 5

Keywords: Farm tour, farming, ranching, feeding cattle, black angus, angus cattle, calves, new calves, old cow, sonne farms tour, Feedlot tour, beef operation tour, machinery tour, john deere, case ih, feedbunks, fancy cattle, heifers, bulls, steers, coronavirus, virus

Id: Y3iJaHhNdTw

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2020