8 Our crops in Berthoud
Rick Bein
We managed a mixed crop and livestock 200-acre irrigated farm just east of the town of Berthoud, Colorado. We grew sugar beets, barley, alfalfa, corn, pinto beans, and cucumbers. Corn supported the beef fattening program and a small family milking practice.
Our farm was locate two mile east of Berthoud, found in the center of this map about half way between Loveland and Longmont. The Rocky Mountain rise starts on the western edge of the map. This Map is copied from the Colorado State Highway map from 1960. 0____3 miles
Our feedlot operation had a capacity of 1000 bovines. Steer and heifer calves, recently weaned, were purchased from cattle ranchers in Wyoming and trucked to our feed lots. The six-month-old calves missed their mothers and together would create a mooing chorus that continued for about a week.
Our cattle feed lot. Photo by Rick Bein 1960.
We fed them a mixture of ground corn and corn silage and alfalfa. This diet varied as we substituted green chopped alfalfa in place of corn silage during the Summer, and in late Fall, the cattle were allowed to graze the harvested sugar beet field for the discarded beet tops. When we switched to grazing the harvested beet field, cattle occasionally clogged their throats on extra-large beet tops. We had a few animals die from this. When chopped alfalfa replace the corn silage in the summer the cattle had to be watched for bloating.
The stomach would become quite distended when an animal bloated. We made the steer move and walk around to allow the gas to escape normally. In severe cases a sharp hollow blade was stabbed into the bulging stomach to relieve the gas before the cow died of heart failure.
When a cow had a beet top caught in its throat, it could not eat or drink. We would push a thin garden hose down the throat of the cow to force the beet top down into the stomach.
A diet of fiber, like hay, grass, and chopped greens was normal for cattle and after three years the cows would be ready for market. We added corn to fatten them in two years. The ground corn was a treat for the cattle but occasionally one steer, would selectively eat only the grain and a condition called “foundering” (laminitis) occurred. It could kill the animal or leave it with locked-up, stiffened leg joints. We had to avoid this by not overloading the diet with too much grain.
We rotated our crops every year except for alfalfa. Alfalfa is a perennial that grows back every year and has a head start every spring because it does not need to be replanted. However, each succeeding year the productivity declined and after the third year it was plowed under. Usually, we would plant sugar beets on that land the following year. Alfalfa is a hardy legume that fixes nitrogen in the soil that benefits the next crop in the rotation.
Alfalfa grows quickly and the three cuttings per season provided us with enough hay (baled or stacked loosely), to feed the cattle. We also chopped up alfalfa as green fodde