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Dry Paddock next to spring grass
Dry Paddock next to spring grass
One of the hardest things to do in the spring is to stay off your pastures until the plants are close to maturity. I understand the reasoning very well because I was in that same boat for many years myself. When folks see the green grass coming, and they have been feeding hay all winter, I understand 100% why they want to turn the cows out. After months of feeding hay who wouldn’t want to turn out the cows when they see green in the spring.
This is a fatal mistake for your pastures for the entire growing season. You are effectively guaranteeing that you will be feeding hay the next winter as well. One of the questions that I get asked a lot is, “How do I buy enough time for my pastures to recover in the spring if they look like a parking lot coming out of winter?” This is a very tough spot to be in, and I do remember what it felt like to be there.
It is going to take some brainstorming on your part to come up with some strategies for buying time for your spring plants to be recovered before grazing them off. I am going to go over some of the things that you can try to get your plants fully recovered before grazing. The very first year will be the toughest to implement. If you learn to do your grazing planning right you will never have to start with a parking lot pasture in the spring again.
Strategies for Growth
The first thing we did entering late fall was to combine our cow herds into one mob. This pays huge dividends in the spring by not having 3-4 herds grazing across the entire farm during early spring growth. By having multiple herds you simply will not have the recovery period that is needed. You have to remember that your roots under your parking lot pasture are stressed due to overgrazing the previous year. These plants will be slower growing to reach maturity the following spring.
Look around your neighborhood for some idle land that is not being grazed. What if you could move your cows off your farm for 30-45 days? That would go a long ways toward building your recovered sward for the upcoming growing season. Do you have any hayfields on your farm that are off limits to grazing? Why? You must figure out how to incorporate those hayfields into your grazing operation. I have heard every excuse under the sun why people cannot graze their hayfields. Here are some of them: no fence, no water, grazing makes my field rough, grazing brings in weeds to my hayfield, lowers my hay yield, my dad said it was a hayfield, not pasture!
Brainstorm ideas to covert the hayfield into a grazed pasture and just do it. Remember that cutting hay off of land promotes single species of plants; grazing promotes diversity of plants. When the animal reaches out with its tongue and rips off the leaves on the plant, it also pulls on the roots of the plant. This tugging action actually wakes up the microbes that are living on the root hairs and they get to work immediately. The result is that the grazed plant will always grow back faster than a mechanically mowed plant.
We all know that the more varieties of plants that we have in our pastures, the stronger they are. Every plant species has a unique growing window during the season that it performs best in. The more growing windows that you have in your pastures, the better selection your animals will have. The last resort that you use on your farm to buy your pastures the recovery time needed is to feed hay longer. This is also the most costly method, but sometimes you may not have any other choice.
Feel the Fear and Don’t Mow
After talking and consulting with a fellow on how to build his recovery period on his own bare pasture farm he brainstormed some ideas and did it. In mid-July, he called me and had a tone of panic in his voice. He told me that he got scared because the grass was so tall and mature that he mowed it all off and baled it. I about dropped the phone, I was silent for a minute because no words would come out of the mouth. I was simple horrified that he had mowed off his farm and put it into hay bales. I was very direct with my reply, “You have made a grave mistake”.
Here was a guy that was moaning about having to feed hay all winter because he had no stockpile to winter his cows on and he ran out of grass every year in the summer slump. He was turning out every spring when he saw green and his pastures were weakened for the entire growing season. Now this year he had done what he needed to do to let his pastures recover in the spring before grazing them. I guess I forgot to tell him that he would get scared and be tempted to bale it. Anyway, two months later the same fellow called me up again; he was in a major dry hot spell, and he was out of the pasture.
He wanted me to tell him how to fix his pasture shortage. I told him he either had to sell some stock or feed the hay that he rolled up in July. He told me that once he mowed off all his pasture, the rains stopped. It never grew back the entire summer, and there was no fall stockpile grown for winter either. Folks, when you remove that canopy above your plants with a mower, you are in trouble when it gets hot and dry.
Do a simple test to imprint what exposing your soil surface to the sun can do. Take a thermometer and measure the temperature of the ground under a thick canopy of forage. Next, find a bare spot of ground that is reasonably close and record that temperature. It will shock you the difference in temperatures. Unprotected ground loses 90% of its moisture! This is not the way to grow lots of forage when there is minimal precipitation. Once the ground gets hot and dry, all microbial activity stops completely. Earthworms go deep into the soil to survive. There are no more earthworm castings being deposited on your pasture surface daily. I compare it to having a well-tuned engine and running it until you run out of oil; all activity stops.
Avoiding the Summer Slump
There are worse things in life than having a farm full of mature forage in July-August when all the neighboring farms are grazed or baled off short and have turned brown. Look at this mature forage that covers your farm as a savings account. The feed is still there, has not gone anywhere, and you can make a withdrawal on it anytime you need it. Just get the mindset that you are going to bank it and use it at a later date. Promise me that you will not mow it and I will make a bet that you will have more days of summer and winter grazing this coming year than you had previously.
The secret to winter stockpiling is to start out your grazing correctly in the spring. By not stressing the new plants you have a very healthy root system under your whole farm during the entire growing season. We used to encounter the summer slump on our farms every year when we were concentrating on keeping our plants vegetative by keeping our grazing rotations shorter. When we were custom grazing cattle and we encountered a drought, we could ship them back to the owner. I always wondered how folks managed that actually owned the animals and their pastures dried up during droughts. With our focus on keeping plants young and vegetative, the plants would just dry up and turn brown. The ground cracked open and the grasshoppers ate most of the remaining plants. We no longer have grasshopper plagues because we have no bare soil exposed.
We do not have summer slumps anymore; there is always something actively growing and green down in the massive pasture sward. We now have a nice layer of pasture litter that is trampled daily by the mob. If you concentrate on keeping your plants vegetative, you will never have an adequate ground litter. The cattle cannot trample the vegetative plants onto the ground as well as mature plants. Remember, all your livestock have to do is bend the blade of grass over on the ground; the earthworms take care of it after that. Our earthworms are in heaven at the litter smorgasbord every day and thank us for their food by leaving new soil made from castings every day. If you wait until August to decide what you want to stockpile for winter grazing, you are late to the game.
The Pain of Hay
I simply cannot think of anything in the livestock business that is more dreadful than having to put out hay every day during the winter to keep your animals alive. It is much easier to move a wire and let the animals feed themselves. Feeding hay is like sitting on a thorn; it hurts and it is hurting the profitability of ranchers.
I remember before I switched to holistic high density planned grazing four years ago that it was perfectly normal to feed hay for 3-4 months every winter. Over the last four years, we have averaged 8 days of hay feeding for the entire winter. Those days of hay feeding were during ice storms that had the stockpiled sward covered with thick ice. Our cattle are a lot more satisfied and actually perform better grazing stockpile than eating hay. Once you are in the hay feeding mode, your cattle are on welfare. They become lazy and wait for you to feed them.
It does not seem to matter where you live, people still feed hay. From Texas to Wisconsin, hay is destroying any chance of turning a profit on most livestock operations. I really have a bad sense of where fossil fuel prices are headed, and it is not south. If fuel hits $10 a gallon in the future, how many ranchers are going to be able to stay in business? It will be devastating to ranchers that are focused on feeding hay. If we change our grazing management practices to grazing fully recovered healthy grass swards, feeding hay will be a distant memory. Your soils, plants, microbes, earthworms, savings account and quality of life will improve as well. Raising livestock can be very profitable when you remove hay from your operation. Just make a mental note to yourself: bank those pastures, don’t hay them!
Greg Judy operates Green Pastures Farm near Rucker, Missouri. He can be reached at: gtjudyhighdensity@live.com.