This evening, the group visited La Traversia. The main goal of the operation at La Traversia is not to save money but to be productive. La Traversia is a farm that focuses on precision agriculture as well as growing and finishing cattle. In the past four years, the managers of La Traversia have transformed all of their land into crops. They have sprayed all their pasture land and transferred it into crops and have shyed away from grazing cattle and have switched to growing and finishing cattle in a feedlot setting.
At La Traversia, satellites are used in order to map rain index and soil type. When using satellites to map soil type, a system of four colors to classify soil type. Once these four colors are mapped out, they're broken into a more distinct color coding system for the owners to further classify these soil types. Here, they plant corn at two different times. Each field is broken into two parcels, the first parcel is planted around September 20th and the second parcel is planted around April 20th. The reason for planting at separate times is the avoid the harshest part of the year, which is in January when it is very hot and dry. They also use different packages of software for late corn and early corn. When using this software, each year is entered into a system and then the average yield is found by comparing the present year to following years. Currently, La Traversia farms 5408 hectares. They own 4311 hectares and rent 1097 hectares.
In the feedlot operation at La Traversia, they can manage approximately 5,000 head of cattle. The put up corn silage two times a year to correspond to the two different planting times. They also make cane silage which they use as a forage. There are two different diets fed to cattle at this feedlot which consist of a growing diet and a finishing diet. The growing diet is 80% silage and the finishing diet is 80% corn. Changing diets takes 15 days. During this period of change, the growing diet is fed in the morning and the finishing diet is fed in the evening. At this facility they also have a custom feed yard. They started off with 500 head of cattle and now are up to 1000 head. Their custom feeding operations focuses on supermarkets, this way the feed yard is always full and the cattle perform better and they have larger frames and the cattle don't get too fat too fast. Ten years ago at this facility, everything was on pasture but now they have altered genetics to change everything to feeding in a feedlot. They have 1,200 hectares of corn and they use 300 of those acres for silage.
At this facility, they also finish Holsteins. The Holsteins don't get the growing diet and they go straight to a finishing diet. The Holsteins are sold at 360 kilos to 400 kilos. If the Holsteins have American genetics they grow faster but on average it takes approximately 5 months to finish Holsteins.
Mandy Hoistad
Holstein steers that are being raised in a feedlot.
Taylor Jensen and Chad Knoblock looking at feed composition. These Holstein steers are on a full finishing ration the entire time they are in the feedlot.
