By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

NORTH JUDSON, Ind. — Bob Troike was host, guide and tractor driver Sept. 18 when the North Central Beef Cattle Assoc. and Purdue University extension of Fulton County hosted a beef pasture walk at a farm established by his father, the late Charles Troike.

Troike has 60 acres of pasture in addition to row crops and hayfields that annually allow him to sell 4,000 square bales, while putting up 5,000 bales for his cattle’s use.

“We’re on sandy muck,” he said as he eased his tractor into gear to pull two wagonloads of guests through fields on the family farm and nearby acreage. (It was a “walk” in name only.) “It was a good year to be in sand. Our crops fared pretty well in spite of a dry August.”

Pausing in a soybean field, he pointed out newly seeded cereal rye emerging beneath the ripening beans.

“We’ve been aerial-seeding rye for the past 30 years, using both planes and helicopters,” he said. “Either way works well, and it is cost effective. They charge $10 an acre, plus five cents a pound. This year they seeded 324 acres in an hour-and-a-half.”

Troike prefers cereal rye over rye grass because of its hardiness. “It will lie there a long time,” he said. “It makes good pasture and it’s good for baling.”

Sudan grass, he noted, is poisonous at different stages of development. While he finds Millet a safer grass, he had a number of sorghum/Sudan grass round bales near his mother’s home. All were capped with bonnets to protect feed value.

Glenn Nice, a Purdue weed specialist riding the lead wagon, hopped off in the middle of the pasture to talk about weed control, focusing his attention first on a Carolina horse nettle.

“The bane of my existence,” one man observed, a statement with which Nice agreed. The toxic, creeping perennial produces berries that are even more toxic than the plant itself.

“We don’t mow pastures enough to kill weeds,” Nice said.
Discussing the poison hemlock that frequents many ditch banks, he said the best way to differentiate it from wild carrot is by examining its stems. “Hemlock has purple blotches,” he said. “Wild carrot doesn’t.” He noted that horses often reach across fences to eat hemlock.

Returning from the “walk,” guests enjoyed ribeye sandwiches and a wide variety of foods they provided for the carry-in lunch. Although many participants went home as soon as they finished eating, others opted to view Troike’s gluten hopper, a Rube Goldberg-type device he formulated with help from neighbors and suggestions from his wife.

“It works,” he said, “and it’s saved us a lot of back-breaking shoveling.”

Troike likes to augment hay with high-protein corn gluten that he purchases from an ethanol plant for $51 per ton – nearly half of what it would cost to buy corn. After physically shoveling the first three semi loads into feed bunks, he reviewed his setup with a neighbor who suggested he use his front-end loader to fill a fertilizer cart that would drop the wet brewer’s grain into a conveyor (an old hay elevator) and then into another conveyor.

He was still wrestling with how to move it from one conveyor to another when his wife suggested he use flexible tubing he’d been saving from inside a roll of field tile. It worked as perfectly as a Troike-designed cattle-handling system devised from old Harvestore silo panels, which moves animals without human involvement.

“We have to be creative here,” he said. “We’re trying to get the best return on our investment. My dad always told me a farm runs in three cycles – the first generation establishes it, the second generation improves it and the third generation pilfers it away. We’re trying to avoid that.”