by Doug Toburen
CNHI
Parson, Kansas —
Tailgate to bumper, around 60 folks recently set out on an excursion over the hills and through the dells of southwestern Elk County, Kan., on the 73rd annual Elk County Livestock and Conservation Tour.
From livestock to conservation practices and anything in-between, folks on the tour were able to look, listen and learn from those in the agricultural industry by visiting individual farms and ranches throughout the county.
“We try to have a good mixture of things for people to see,” Richard Fechter, Rolling Prairie Extension District agent said. “We don’t want it to be just cattle or just conservation. We try to get a little bit of something for everyone.”
The tour offered a wide array of informative livestock stops.
“We started out at Rob Miller’s place to look at his show cattle operation,” Fechter explained.
According to Fechter, Miller is fairly new to the county and has put together quite an operation in a short time.
“Rob sells show cattle all over the country and most people don’t think of that type of operation when they think of typical cattle operations,” he said.
In addition to learning about the show cattle business, Don Coover, a veterinarian and owner of SEK Genetics in Galesburg, Kan., was on-hand to discuss some cattle health issues.
“Don talked about some new technologies in the cattle industry as well as giving a disease outlook,” Fechter said.
As the tour rolled on, visitors had the opportunity to stop at Marion Reece’s operation.
Reece explained the great strides he had gone to in order to convert a once overgrown, woody and somewhat wasted piece of land to a piece of land growing lush forages and having the capacity to raise several species of livestock.
“We have cut more than 30 acres of trees off this place,” he said.
After cutting the trees, Reece then began grazing goats in order to try to control some of the other woody species growing on his place.
“It didn’t take me long to get tired of having goats,” Reece joked. “It’s true what they say—if a fence can’t hold water it won’t hold goats.”
Although he felt the goats did a good job with the brush control, Reece switched species and went to sheep to aid in cleaning up the less desirable vegetation on his ranch.
“We now use Katahdin and Dorper sheep to clean up the brush,” he explained. “We decided to go with hair sheep because they shed and we don’t have to get them up to shear them.”
Reece admitted that the sheep aren’t as good as the goats when it comes to brushy species of plants but he felt they did do a good job of eating the weeds.
“Our goal is to hopefully design a rotation where we can rotate sheep in behind cattle over the en-tire 400 acres,” he explained.
The tour made its final stop at Ken Liebau’s where he brought up a set of replacement heifers he was pasturing for 90-100 days on fescue.
In an area commonly thought to be more native grass, K-State Extension Agronomist Doug Shoup told those on the tour that cool season grasses like fescue and brome are a great complement for the native warm season grasses in the county.
“Fescue offers good forage production for grazing, haying or stockpiling and also has good heat tolerance,” Shoup explained.
The agronomist re-minded producers that this is a good time to be thinking about cool season grass seedings as well.
“Fall seedings are a good idea for a couple reasons,” Shoup explained. “First off it allows the plant to establish itself in more favorable temperatures and secondly, you can then get some spring utilization out of the forage.”
According to him, fall fescue seedings can be done between mid-August through the first of October.
This year’s Elk County Livestock and Conservation Tour offered a wide range of topics for those who attended.
“I was very pleased with the tour and the number of people who were on it,” Fechter said. “The tour featured a variety of topics as well as a good number of things for people to see and hear about.
“We never feel like we are going to have enough for folks to see yet we always get good comments from everyone that goes on the tours,” he concluded.
