March 29, 2024

From the Pastures: Grazing lessons

The wheat stubble and red clover regrowth gave me 11 days of grazing for 250 head of ewes and lambs on those 16 acres. Then I mowed the regrown clover with a Woods mower, lightly disked it, because the clover was still too thick, drilled in the eight-way cover crop for my lamb feeding after the first frost and then rolled it with a cultimulcher. I did all of this in six hours to conserve the moisture because I’d only had two rains in the month of August. Now, 23 days later, the red clover is taller than most of the seedlings. I think I should have disked it a second time at a different angle to really set back the red clover.

That cultimulcher is coming in really handy this year. I think it helped establish the cover crop. I have used it to roll down my tall residual in my pastures because the sheep just don’t get the trampling effect of a cow. The roller lays the tall residual on the ground to shade the dirt, conserve moisture and I think it’s thickening up the stand. I’m doing a mowing versus rolling comparison on several different fields to see what happens.

Well, I just got back from Greg Judy’s Grazing School and it was well worth it. In the 266 miles from my ranch to Greg’s, I saw a lot of “pool table pastures,” as Trevor Toland wrote about last week in From the Barns. I could have easily spotted golf balls from the road in them and some cows had some rib showing. Read his article for more information. Greg’s residual height is taller than most guys turn-in height. Some of that residual was at least 10 inches tall and his cows were slick, shinny hided and grass fat.

I went to Greg’s first Grazing School 14 years ago when there were over 250 people there from four countries, but COVID-19 has spoiled this, too. He had just under 100 people there from Del Rio, Texas, to Alberta, Canada, one lady there from Sweden to a couple from California and everywhere in between. From a 12 year-old girl with her mom from Canada to a 70+ married couple. We had real ranchers with large numbers of cows, think Texas, to the man that was married to the Swedish lady and he was a flood control engineer in Arizona.

The questions were as varied as the people. Some highlights were: grass has to have a full recovery from the previous grazing. Look at the leaf tip. If it’s blunt, rest it more; but if it’s boat shaped, then it can be grazed. Hay removes 40 to 60 pounds N, 13 pounds of P2O2 and 48 pounds of K2O per ton of hay removed. So, if you don’t feed the hay back onto the ground it came from, you’re losing those nutrients and will need to be replaced with fertilizer. But if you buy hay you are getting those nutrients added to the soil. Never store hay on the ground. Put the hay on pallets or poles. Balance your soil’s P, K, and pH by getting a soil test done and follow their recommendations. Your forages will grow a lot better.

Greg holds his sheep and guard dogs in with one electrified wire about 10 to 12 inches off the ground and has been doing it for 1 1/2 years. This does require you to train your sheep to stay inside the wire, never let the sheep or dogs get hungry and keep about 6 KV on the fence. As with all things in life, there are many little nuances that you have to learn to make this work, so sign up for a Grazing School at GreenPastureFarms.net or you can come to the Heart of America Grazing Conference in February to hear Greg speak.

Arrowsmith, Ill.