Cattleman's Corner Radio

July 24, 2026

Montana Producer Ted Delgana

Welcome to the Cattleman's Corner. I'm Brian Hale, sitting in for the late Howard Hale, as we continue his legacy of speaking with cattlemen and women from around the globe.    We're talking to Ted Delagana.   Ted is now from Conrad, Montana, but used to be in, was it the Central Valley in California?    "Central Coast, is what we call it."   You were involved in agriculture down there?    "Yep, all my life."   What kind of things did you do?    "We always had cattle, and then worked for different places that had cattle, and always raised our own hay for the cattle up until when we left. And then I worked for a large place that we farmed about 3,000 acres of dryland grain and hay. Hay there is all oats and barley hay, so it's all just grain hay."   On this side of the Madison line, my dad always called it green feed.   "Pretty much. We had a whole different world there, a lot of rain down there. So, why did you have the cereal grains for hay, or green feed as we call it up here, instead of like something, perennial grass? Not many, we hardly had, a lot of alfalfa hay, a lot of alfalfa, but perennial grass like they have here, almost zero. The ranch I worked for we summer followed, but where I lived, we planted winter so every year. It was just a rain thing, I think, you know, the amount of rain we get."   Could you get more tons per acre off of doing green feed?    "There was alfalfa ranches around and they would get a ton and a half per cutting or so, I'd say, and cut five, sometimes six cuttings. But with our grain hay, we'd get as much as five times the acre on grain hay. You know, we were all selling to cattlemen, feedlots, and then we got fancy stuff. We started growing what they called forage mix. It was a mix of beardless barley, beardless wheat, and a couple varieties of oats. And we'd sell those to the racetracks like Santa Anita and a lot of horse people."   Ted Dalagana from Conrad, Montana with our co-host David Woodruff.

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