From the Pastures: See for yourself

For not getting much rain my forage has been growing. The sheep have been keeping up with it, but I really do need a good soaking rain. The rains keep watering the concrete in Bloomington, but they just don’t go very far east before they stop.

I went to Leo Arnolds’ pasture walk over by Beardstown on June 28. There were about 30 people there with good questions. Leo’s ground was very sandy and rolling, but he had plenty of grass to graze his steers on. He showed us his solar-powered fence charger trailer, the way his fields lay out and his corral system. After the pasture walk, his mom fed us a very good home-cooked meal, something you usually do not get after a pasture walk. Thank you again for a great meal.

This was put on by the Illinois Grazing Lands Coalition and there will be at least three more pasture walks coming up. July 26, from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. by St. Anne, will be an “Annual Forage & Winter Feed” pasture walk. The next one will be Aug. 15 from 5 to 7 p.m. by Tremont and will be a “Dairy Grazing Pasture Walk.”

The last one will be a cool one, a “Virtual Fence Pasture Walk” on Aug. 27 by Cambridge. This is kind of like the shock collars they have for dogs with the buried sensors in the ground to keep the dog in your yard, except for the cattle collars you set up “boundaries” on your laptop, iPhone or iPad. The boundaries can be moved whenever or wherever you want them to be.

This technology is very new, like only a couple of years old at the most, but it is very promising. Pricey, but over time it might come down. It works better on cattle than sheep because there is no wool around the neck and they get a better skin contact for the probes. But the salesman for one of the companies — there are only two companies right now — told me last winter that they are working on a sheep version. To learn more, go to: ilgrazinglands.org/events.

With the help of a couple of high school boys, we have been putting up temporary fence to put the flock into for two to three days and then move the flock to a new lot at the end of that time. So, we have been putting up and taking down a lot of temporary fence and I have noticed an abundance of Canadian and bull thistles. Another local cattle grazer told me he had a lot of bull thistles. I was wondering if anyone else was having this problem? Today, I mowed down some seven-foot-tall bull thistles with two-inch-long needles on the leaves. They go right through my blue jeans. I’m hoping that by mowing them down they won’t come back. In 90 days, we’ll have a frost to kill them anyway.

Enjoy the summer and the local fairs!