Equipment is something Harry Cope steers away from. "I'm dangerous around equipment, so if it has legs and walks, I'm interested," he says. "If it has an ignition switch, I leave it alone."

Rather than using a combine, he lets his 100 beef cows and 400 hair sheep do most of the harvesting at Cope Grass Farms, LLC near Truxton. "My feedlot is my field, and it works very well. I use standing grain crops to replace hay," he says. Although as Cope notes, he's constantly changing. "This is what we're doing now, but it's always a work in progress."

Changing gears

GATHERING GRAIN: Montgomery County farmer Harry Cope relies on his livestock to harvest corn, milo and cover crops from his fields.

Before this, Cope was feeding 800 big round bales per year. "I would bale hay six to eight weeks a year. I started looking at grazing milo and I thought, 'Wait a minute, I can come up with 30 days of feed in four hours.'"

That isn't to say no grain is harvested, but these days, he leaves the planting and harvesting to his brother, Roy, a custom operator, who plants his 60 acres of corn and milo in spring. When fall rolls around, only the corn is harvested mechanically. From January to mid-to-late February, Cope's cattle and sheep graze the grain sorghum.

Realizing savings

"If you stop your costs at planting, which is what you do when you graze a crop, you're at about 65% of your total cost of production," Cope explains. "If you can get 65% of the grain standing in the field in the mouth of a calf, you're ahead. We can do much better than that. With sheep, you can push it up into 90% or better with grains."

However, grain sorghum has plenty of sugar in the stalk, which is also grazed. "Grazing off that whole standing milo plant, they will consume the whole plant. It looks like you chopped the whole field. They eat everything," he says. "If you take a pair pliers and squeeze those sorghum stalks in late February or early March, juice runs out of them."