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cattle cattle management minerals supplements

Selenium in Cattle

I just re-read “Reproduction and Animal Health”, by Charles Walters and Gearld Fry. This is a great book that I recommend for all cattle owners and breeders. This text covers a lot of material, and one of the most important subjects to me, is mineral requirement and cause and effect.

Here are some notes from the book.

Selenium is important for the animal to be able to process copper, zinc, and manganese. Without sufficient selenium, you may have reddish brown spots on the shoulders of your black cattle and assume a copper shortage, when it may be selenium instead. Without enough selenium, cows will stay open longer and may not conceive. Fertility is the ultimate measure of health.

Too much selenium causes animal death, so it’s important to not over do it. Selenium may be highly toxic. The above text references a story from 1857 when cavalry horses at Fort Randall, South Dakota became sick while grazing pastures near the post. “Blind Staggers” or “Alkali Poisoning” may be the result. One of the greatest challenges of mineral management is getting enough, without too much.

Copper and Iron are essential to maintain good blood circulation and oxygen in the blood. Copper deficiency results in internal parasites, “depigmentation of hair and abnormal hair growth, impaired reproductive performance and heart failure, scouring, fragile bone, retained placenta and difficulty in calving”.

“Zinc is necessary for the production of sperm.”

Manganese deficiency results in leg deformities, eggs not formed correctly, degeneration of testicles, offspring born dead, delayed heat periods.

As an aside, there are several articles on the NIH website that suggests that glyphosate chelates calcium, magnesium, manganese, iron, and cobalt in the soil, rendering them unusable to the animal or human ingesting them.

I recently went to the local farm store to buy some more loose mineral for my cattle. They were out of the brand that I was attempting to purchase, so I ended up purchasing a bag of Redmond salt with Selenium 90. I will try this out and see how the cows respond.

Ultimately, the best way to know if your cattle are deficient is with a veterinarian and a blood test.

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agh hogs piglets supplements

Hog Fertility and Copper Sulfate

American Guinea Hogs are said to have an average litter size of 6. I’ve been struggling with very low litter sizes – my average is closer to 3 for several years. There are many purported reasons for this, and I haven’t tried all of the supplied solutions. I was able to get a sow to go from a litter of 3 to a litter of 7 recently using copper sulfate as a feed supplement and an increased ration while in with the boar.

Copper sulfate has been used in hogs to increase feed efficiency, manage internal parasites, and increase fertility. Lately, I have been experimenting with this supplement for all of those reasons. My experiment is still relatively young, as far as breeding programs go, but so far it has been incredibly successful.

As far as supplementation goes, I buy feed grade copper sulfate from Concentrates NW in Oregon and feed half a teaspoon for each pound of feed that I give the hogs. I arrived at this dosage from an article that I read on the NIH website talking about increasing feed efficiency for hogs.

The second thing I changed was to significantly increase the ration given to the boar and sow while together. My theory is that if times are tough, they will have fewer offspring to increase the potential survival of the few they do have vs having a large litter and having to maintain milk and resources to feed the larger litter.

While the sow was in with the boar, I doubled the ration they would normally get. I feed my hogs on the lighter side, trying to keep them trim most of the time. My 3 year old boar gets an average of 3/4 – 1lb each day of grain, along with a few flakes of quality grass hay, and any other scraps we happen to have (or fallen fruit in the fall).

The other great benefit to copper sulfate is the internal parasite control aspect. I really hate to treat the animals with wormers and parasite medicine, but I will do it to keep their health if I have to. Using copper sulfate has eliminated the need to worm. I have tested this out by using it for months and then using a wormer on a group of hogs to test. Normally, I would see worms come out in the manure when doing this. During this test, I was not able to observe any worms in the manure after having used copper sulfate for months.

While it’s still far to early to say what I have done is the cause, I will continue to supplement and hope to see all of my sows litter sizes increase to 6+ over the next couple of years. Please note that I have only had 1 litter so far during this program, so don’t take this as success and be cautious in your own supplement program.

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agh farming hogs pigs

AGH: Feeding Time

5 piglets eating

American Guinea Hogs require a plan when it comes to feeding. They gain weight so easily that you shouldn’t free feed. Mature hogs only need one feeding a day, and that helps keep weight down and keep chores from taking up too much of your time. It would be nice if we could free feed them, and leave for a few days with a full feeder and an automatic watering system, but that is not a great idea with these hogs as they would eat all the feed the first day, and get upset without food on subsequent days.

Most of my mature hogs get 1/2 to 3/4 of a pound of feed each day. We have a scale and weigh out the feed so we can be fairly exact with our distribution. At least weekly, we will take a close look at each hog’s body condition, and make adjustments to their feed, based on that review. Recovering sows will get more feed, and young pigs still growing will also get more feed. Pigs under 60 pounds or so will get fed twice daily, as they are not big enough to sustain a once daily feeding over 24 hours and continue putting on weight satisfactorily.

We feed a mix that we buy from a local distributor that includes a mineral mix. We’ve gone to buying it in 1000 pound totes, as we’ve increased our hog numbers to the double digits. It saves money and allows us to stock up on a large amount at a time. It also helps to have a tractor and truck to retrieve and unload without resorting to shovels and buckets (or leaving it in the truck).

It’s also a good idea to provide hay each day for feed and bedding. Our hogs eat quite a bit of hay, unless the grass has been growing and they can graze, so we feed the same hay we feed our cows through the winter months.

We would like to be able to move our hogs regularly, but when we can’t, we will add hog fuel (pole bark) to their pen at least weekly, to provide clean ground to feed them on. We use a tractor to dump a few bucket loads of hog fuel in each pen, and not spread it out – the hogs will spread it out as they eat on the pile, and it will prevent manure from messing up the pile until it gets spread out over a the next few days. When we feed, we will dump the feed on top of the pile, spreading it out as necessary to reduce fighting and allow the hogs to get their share.

Overall, AGH are a great hog since they require so little feed, so it costs less to feed them on a daily basis. On the other hand, they require more management because they are so easily fattened and they have to be fed daily, or more often, depending on the circumstances.

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cattle cattle management dexter hay

Beef: Grain Finished vs Grass Finished

There seems to be a shortage of research on whether grass finished beef is better than grain finished beef. I won’t go into the politics of the issue, but it’s easier and cheaper to grain finish large amounts of beef, from a feed-lot management perspective. It takes a lot of ground or hay to grass finish a beef, relative to grain.

Here are some resources that will help clear it up, with a bias toward grass finished beef.

https://understandingag.com/nutritional-comparisons-between-grass-fed-beef-and-conventional-grain-fed-beef/
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calves cattle dexter

2022 Spring Dexter Calves

We have 5 Dexter calves so far this year. We expect 2 more before calving season is over, but they are not all on the right schedule yet so we’ll be calving until September. Hopefully we can be more lined up for next year, although we’ll have one later than we want.

So far we have 4 red calves and one black one. Our red bull calf has the wild red gene, which gives him the black nose. This picture was taken before the 5th was born (this morning).

Also, we just started moving the cows onto pasture today. It’s been cold, rainy, and muddy and the grass didn’t grow well enough to let them out before May 11th.

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agh hogs piglets pigs

2022 Spring American Guinea Hog Piglets

We are getting ready for piglets this weekend on Red Alpha Farms. Our main American Guinea Hog sow, Jovy, is due on Friday. We have a new farrowing pen setup, with 8-10″ of deep litter (hog fuel), and hog panels to make sure she can see all the piglets all the time.

I set this up outside my office window so I can keep an eye on her and the piglets throughout the day.

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agh construction hogs pigs

Mobile Shelter Solutions for the American Guinea Hog

Since we began raising American Guinea Hogs, we’ve had a number of shelter solutions. We move our animals frequently, so any shelter has to be mobile. They also need to be large enough for a pair of breeding hogs, a sow and litter, or a litter of hogs to get up to around 6 months in.

We began with 2 pigs that were around 8 and 12 weeks, so we started with a dogloo for large dogs. That worked really well for 3-4 months.

We next used a pallet house that was made with 4 pallets screwed together with some leftover plastic corrugated roofing on top. There might not be anything more convenient to build than a pallet house.

That pallet house worked, but it was very open on one side, and was extremely heavy — the roofing supports were 2x4s — not good. I built another one in a similar fashion, but cut down the pallets to 3′ high in the front and 2.5′ high in the back, and then installed galvanized roofing on 2×2 frames.

That worked very well, and was easy to move. It was much lighter. In order to make moving the pallet house easier, I put a 2×4 on each side of the bottom, the long way, to act as runners, and to hold the pallets together. I then put large eye-bolts in each end of each 2×4, to allow me to connect a rope with carabiners attached to each eye-bolt and allow me to drag it around.

The problem with that shelter is that we just got into some weather that was down in the teens, and I didn’t want the hogs to get too cold, so it was time to build the next iteration of the shelter.

This shelter was framed out of 2x4s, with an open bottom, and cedar fence boards for siding. The door is 2’x2′, with the shelter being roughly 6’x4′. The roof is 3′ high, and there is a covered porch to keep the weather out of the doorway. This one also has a front handle and pegs sticking out the back just under the roof to allow it to be flipped up to clean out. I also placed a sheet of 2″ foam board insulation just below the gap between the siding and the roof to make it even warmer.

The shelters open bottom allows a great amount of hay or straw (or other bedding) to be placed inside the shelter. When it gets a bit full, I just rock the shelter around a little bit to get the sides to crawl up on top of the bedding, and it helps keep the hogs up off the ground better.

I’m not moving them much with snow on the ground, so I will likely also install runners on the bottom and pull this around when better weather returns.

What do you use?

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agh construction farming hogs piglets pigs

Piglet Creep Feeder

Our American Guinea Hogs are 4 weeks old this week. They are trying to eat more solid food with some success. Much of their efforts are hampered by the sow and boar in the same pen. It’s much easier to have them all in the same pen, but it creates too much competition for solid food for them to thrive. The solution is to create a creep feeder.

I took a 36″ by 16′ hog panel and cut it into three sections. I wanted a triangle so that the larger hogs could not push it and make a piglet sandwich. It ended up working well, although the hogs still push it a little bit and I have to hold it in place.

After the first feeding, I cut an additional vertical bar out from one section on each side so that they didn’t have to crawl in and out. I don’t have pictures of that yet.

The creep feeder works well at keeping the hogs out.

I place the food dish, filled with milk or water and an all stock type feed that I buy from Xcel Feeds in western Washington called “Premium Blend”.

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adventure agh hogs

The Piglets are Here

American Guinea Hogs are great mothers. If you’re looking for a hog that can farrow on pasture and requires little intervention, this might be the hog for you.

Our piglets showed up on Monday, 9/20/21. We had 6 healthy piglets.

We lost one piglet on the 26th, so we are down to 5. We have 2 gilts (females) and 3 boars (males). We have no idea what happened to the one we lost – it wasn’t there when we went to check on them during lunch that day. It was there for breakfast. I suspect that a pack of crows got it.

Jovy, our sow is doing great. She did lay on one for a minute the first day, but I gently pushed her over and it crawled out and she hasn’t repeated the mistake since. She is very careful every time she enters the shelter to root through the hay to see if there are any piglets there.

It is surprising how flexible the piglets are when it comes time to eat. They just run behind and when they catch up, they start eating again.

We’ve learned some valuable lessons from our first farrowing – some assumptions might not be accurate, so we’ll have to test them:

  • Use a small pen – if it’s large, the piglets can wander off and might get eaten or lay down for a nap. We are using a 16’x16′ pen, with string across the top to prevent crows from flying in (after we lost one). Next time I might go smaller for the first week.
  • It might be better to use pellets or wood chips – the piglets can get lost in the hay. Although, it could be that the deep hay protected the one piglet that was laid on and allowed it to breathe.
  • Using pallets for the shelter walls required filling in the holes at the bottom (the space between the bottom inside board and the outside boards) so that piglets wouldn’t fall in and get stuck! I had to rescue one before I learned this.
  • The sow will possibly become protective within a few hours – if you lift a piglet up and it squeals, she may come running. It’s better to lift them from under them, and not hold them from multiple sides, so they don’t feel like they are being taken by a predator. Our sow became protective, but she would just come running out and grunting angrily – she did not attack anyone.
  • It took 2+ hours between the first piglet and the second. From what I have heard, this is very unusual. The rest came within 1 hour from the second.

Overall, this has been a good experience. It’s rough losing a piglet and not knowing why, and not having any evidence or carcass to inspect. I can’t emphasize enough how important good breeding stock is. The process went well partly because we started with great stock, and a great breed. Also, the Registered American Guinea Hog Facebook group is quick to help and offer advice. I’d recommend joining for anyone who would consider or has American Guinea Hogs.

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agh hogs pigs

Getting ready for piglets.

We raise American Guinea Hogs (AGH) on pasture and in the woods. We move them frequently, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. These hogs have a wonderful temperament, they don’t try to escape, and they don’t root up the soil too much. We’ve found that they root quite a bit more in the wooded areas than the field/pasture areas.

We’re about a week away from piglets, according to my calculations. We have a gilt that should farrow next Sunday, 9/19.

She’s looking very bulky right now, with milk bagging up and she’ll no longer tolerate belly rubs (too sensitive). I am going to separate the two pigs today and move them onto pasture and out of the woods. We’ve had them in the woods over the hot summer, but now it’s cooling off quite a bit, so the pasture will be better, and keep them away from the predators.

Here is what the wooded area looks like when they first get moved onto it. We leave them in one general area for 1-2 weeks.