“Why on earth would anyone be interested in what I’m doing?”
Well, Mike Slama, that’s a fair question. Why look for a farm to highlight?
What makes your farm unique?
It’s a challenge to find producers willing to talk about their operations. Most are too busy doing it to talk about it, but once in a while, there’s a farm with a slightly different approach that makes you ask, “Why do you do that, and why is that successful?”
Slama Feedlot fits that bill. Situated about 5-6 miles north of the Missouri River in South Dakota, Mike’s feedlot holds a couple of thousand head of cattle. Pens are big, with good mounds and great bunk space, but I could describe many feedlots with that statement. However, it’s the team Mike works with and how he questions things that set him apart. The small feedlot office has been the site of many great discussions often ending with, “Let’s try that on one pen.”
Mike is a lifelong learner and argues that he actually started learning once his formal education ended. He farms with his son Joey, a recent SDSU graduate, who nobody thought would end up so engaged in the family business. Joey has taken on a big role at the lot, both feeding and doing fieldwork. He’s become a valuable addition and has thrown himself into the work, diligently trying to figure out the “why” behind everything.
Ration work is handled by Brooke Brunsvig from Central Farmers Cooperative. She picks the brain of, and gets guidance from, Dr. Ethan Blom of Purina. Rations tend to be heavy on corn silage in an area that occasionally has trouble raising corn. Feeding exclusively heifers, the feedlot is an all-in, all-out lot, filling up in about 3 weeks and emptying out over a period of about 2 ½ weeks. Heifers are fed well, helping fill the Christmas ribeye market.
Out-of-the-box questions are a staple. An off-the-wall idea turns into a valid discussion, which turns into a brainstorming session that might end with, “Well, that ain’t going to work!” But more often than not, it becomes an idea that needs to be thought out more and eventually tried on one pen. Many of those ideas end with, “That worked!” He wrapped his head around a different way to do or improve something, and next thing we know, he’s doing more of it. For example, he started feeding a couple of pens in a large custom lot just to take notes and learn how the “big guys” do their business. This led to questions about where the calves that go into this yard come from.
A big topic this summer was water intake. There’s enough water capacity, but is there enough during peak heat hours, or does water intake mirror feed intake and happen during the evenings? Dry matter intakes look good, but could they be better? Water meters are being looked at to see what information can be gleaned from them.
Two years ago, when corn was expensive, it was time to look at QLF Energy Balancers (EB) to see if they made sense in Mike’s lot. Mike split the lot into three treatments to find out what and how this product best fit his yard: a traditional liquid diet, one with EB at a full rate, and a blend of the two programs. The end results looked a lot like the SDSU EB numbers from 2013 but really highlighted how much better cattle stay on feed through heat events when on EB. Cattle stayed on feed better, finishing the period eating about a pound of DM more than the traditionally fed cattle did. The next topic of debate is using a high-energy, limit-fed grower diet. It’s not certain if it will go anywhere, but the discussions have been interesting. The base question here focused on feed efficiency: can we do it better with the same end product? Nothing changes overnight, but the cool thing about Mike and Joey is that they are willing to have these conversations and make changes if they make sense for them.