A Weed Control Success Story Just when Byron Gossett had his cattle operation running about as smoothly as a cattle operation can, a broadleaf weed explosion threatened to strip the gears, throw the bearings and burn the belts off his machine. On any given day during the grazing season, Gossett intensively grazes around 1,800 stocker calves on about 600 acres, mostly under five center pivots, near Follett, Texas. For a little over a decade, he’s fed an all-natural program, buying weaned, 600-pound calves. “I liken our approach to a supply chain,” Gossett explains. “We need consistent gains through the grazing season to stay on schedule through the feedlot and then to packers to fulfill the program and earn substantial premiums.” Because all-natural programs prohibit growth-promoting implants, daily gains aren’t as robust as they are with conventional cattle. For Gossett, success comes with intensively managing pastures through irrigation and fertilizer and, more recently, working with a consulting nutritionist. “We base our math on head days grazed per month,” he says. “The goal is to increase daily gains on as many head as possible. We stock about 1,800 pounds of beef per acre. As they grow and we hit 2,100 pounds per acre, we sort calves and move them to the feedlot.” A fresh group of calves follows quickly and restarts the cycle. “We’re managing an inventory,” Gossett says. “I could run 1,400 head for the entire summer and make a good profit. But 3,600 head will make a better profit.”
Trial and Error It wasn’t always grass and cattle for Gossett, who grew up near Dumas, Texas, earned his undergraduate degree at Texas Christian University and a master’s degree from Texas A&M University in 1974. He returned to the northeastern Panhandle and bought some rangeland that was mostly sagebrush “and not much else,” Gossett recalls. He began developing the land for irrigation, drilling wells, bringing in electric power and putting up center pivots. “Our somewhat false assumption was that if you’ve got enough water and can buy enough fertilizer, you can grow things,” he says. “Even with all the water in the world, these marginal, variable, sandy soils made success with row crops difficult. As my youngest son, Jordan, says, ‘Trying to grow crops on this land is like trying to water-ski behind a canoe.’” Gossett’s next pivot was to annual forages. “We were cattle people anyway, so we liked cattle better than row-crop farming,” he says. They planted annual forages, including sorghum sudangrass and winter wheat, and started grazing. Then, about 20 years ago, Gossett decided it made little sense to plant a crop, graze it off and then plant the same crop the next year. In 1988, they had put some of that marginal ground into the Conservation Reserve Program. “When the CRP contract was up, we decided we could graze those acres,” Gossett says. Eventually, they sprigged some Tifton bermudagrass under three pivots and then seeded a commercial StockMaster grass under 1½ pivots (the other half being a large holet in the ground not navigable by irrigation equipment, thus earning the moniker Pac-Man pasture).
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