Feed budget

[triplec]

I was interested in what everyone budgets for feed costs? We can lump in to a general herd or if you have it broken down by dry cow, lactating, weaned calf and finishing. If grass fed what are you figuring since there is a cost in just grazing. Do you just wing it an don't want to know?

My rough figure with home grown hay and balancers is about $50/ month for a dry cow.

My DW and I are doing some budgeting. Just curious.

[RedRidge]

Sounds like yours is close to ours. Although we do an annual budget and not monthly because our expense/head is so seasonally dependent.
Technically our budget is $200/head average for the year, but the majority of that expense is associated with a 120 day window. That expense per head can roughly be broken down into $60 for grain and $140 for hay. But remember, this is an average for the entire herd and does not include any other expenses should we incur any such as banders, tattoes, tags, etc. Thank goodness we have had no cattle vet expenses in the last 2 years, those vet expenses are rate but make quite a negative impact should they occur.

Warning... boring calculations and methodology to follow:
We have calculated this average based on both dry and lactating cows, bulls, and weanling and yearlings. Somewhere I have a breakdown for each group, but over the course of a 12 month cycle the average was pretty consistent so we do an annual budget. Since we calve half in the spring and half in the fall this is counter balanced due to spring born steers requiring more input over their lifetime than fall born. We also run a group of chondro and non-chondro and again the average is pretty accurate since we have only 2 chondro right now. That said, input for chondro would reduce the per head average by 2/3-3/4 for the chondro group seperately. So again, our per head annual is an average for the entire herd. So... at any given time a bred cow could have associated with her 2 other calves (weaned and yearling) who have yet to be processed or graduated into the "adult cow" group. Although we use the 1.5 "offspring" calculation because of our culling and replacement methods when estimating our hay put up for the year. We maintain a pretty consistent number of adult cows... and our estimates assume 50/50 bull/heifer calving - keeping all steers, and 1/5-1/4 of the heifers as replacements. The figure we use for grain (given over the winter for late pregnancy, lactation, or spring steer finishing), is currently $0.147/lb for 14% ration. We grass raise everyone but grain finish our spring calves and grass finish our fall calves as we have two distinct market demands for both. For hay we calculate based on current price we are getting for our own hay. This year's hay was $35/round bale for the timothy/orchard/fescue. We average a bale/mo/head.