Making sugar while the sun shines
- sloscalzo6
- Jun 2
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 16
With the sun shining and the grasses busily using it to fuel their sugar-making, more than 50 farmers and ag service providers recently gathered to tour Cotton Cattle Company’s fields and enjoy the fruits of Bryce Cotton’s efforts, eating delicious burgers and hot dogs made from his well-finished cattle.
While these “fruits” may not be sweet themselves, a focus of the tour was Bryce’s goal to harvest as much sweetness as the grasses could photosynthesize from the sun overhead. Bryce exclaimed, “When it’s coming from their forages, the cattle can’t have too many carbohydrates.”
Bryce has turned much of his attention to this trickier task of finishing cattle on only forages without any grain. Direct-marketing more than a hundred grassfed animals annually, he knows the importance of getting the cattle’s diet just right for them to marble nicely year round to meet his customers expectations. To achieve this, Bryce has developed a system for which he devotes part of the farm to an annual rotation of cool and warm season annuals. This provides forage for his cattle earlier in the spring, later in the fall and during the hotter summer months when his cool season perennial pastures have markedly slowed.
Bryce has also been converting an old hedgerow along the field where he grows annuals into a shady retreat for the cattle during the dog days of summer. Keeping the cattle more comfortable also keeps them gaining weight and promotes that ever-important marbling . Multiple studies out of southern universities have shown that during times of heat stress, cattle with access to shade can gain nearly an extra pound of gain per day compared to those without shade. And the cattle prefer natural tree shade even more than artificial shade.
He also dedicates some fields to high quality baleage to feed cattle for a couple of months in the winter as well as those animals close to harvest. Feeding baleage and hay in a Total Mixed Ration (TMR) to a set of finishing animals at the barn also allows Bryce to keep those particular animals near at hand for scheduled year-round slaughter dates.
One way Bryce monitors the quality of the forages is through frequent cattle weight checks. He placed an Arrowquip handling chute and scale in the barn to facilitate tabulating weights every two months. Checking weights throughout the year allows him to consistently sort out the next group of cattle ready to be finished, while also correlating growth rates with forage quality throughout the grazing season.
Bryce also monitors the quality of feed through ongoing testing of his forages. He wants protein levels to be 14-16% and Total Digestible Nutrients (TDN) to be at least 60% dry matter, and preferably 70% or higher. TDN percentages in this range help ensure cattle are gaining two pounds a day on average. And like vintners testing their fruits, farmers can also crush their grasses and use a refractometer to test the dissolved sugars (brix level) in their forages. Brix readings higher than 9% have been correlated with high average daily gains.
Although he’s raising cattle, you might say that sweet, nutritious forage is Bryce’s crop and the cattle are his harvest crew. Bryce’s job is to manage the forages and the cattle’s movements so that the cattle are always on the side of the fence where the grasses are greener, and sweeter.
Don't miss out on the next Regenerative Farm Network (RFN-NJ) Farmer Network Tour! Learn more about RFN-NJ here. If you're not already a member, sign up here to stay up to date on the latest RFN-NJ events and opportunities. Keep an eye out for North Jersey RC&D's upcoming Garden State Graziers program and Grazing School in the fall!
Craig Haney
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