A grazing update….

With our neighbors all feeding hay for some days now, I took a quick run through our pastures and think we’re still in pretty good shape.  Our mob grazing experiment has paid off with a better winter stockpile of grass than usual.

The main herd still has more than a month of grass left and that’s without squeezing out the last quarter of an inch as we’ve often done in the past.  We want to leave a good residual of at least 3 inches in all our paddocks so growth has a head start and can take off in the Spring.  That was our major weakness as we began our mob grazing this year.

We’ll keep moving our cows through about half the paddocks this winter once the grass runs out, and unroll bales of hay right in those paddocks.  There’s some waste feeding hay that way, rather than in hay rings, but the hay that is trampled isn’t really wasted; it becomes organic matter, further enriching our soil.

Keeping the cows moving also spreads the manure rather than concentrating it at the feed ring and water trough.  That, too, should pay off next year.

If there is a drawback, the only thing we’ve noticed so far is the greater number of weeds.  (The Southern States man came by and noticed it, too, and wants us to buy herbicide.  They just don’t get it!)  As a last resort, we’ll simply mow them down but we want to play this out awhile longer.

In the past, we’ve bushhogged (mowed) our pastures twice a year to control weeds.  This year we’ve kept the tractor down by the shed and saved about a thousand dollars.  Kinder to the environment, too.

Our advisor on this project, Ian Michael-Innes of Holistic Management International (HMI), counsels patience.  Ian insists the richer soil will soon produce thicker stands of grass and that will eventually crowd out the weeds.  We’ve already seen progress in that direction.

As you may have read elsewhere on our website, Thistle Hill was one of a handful of farms selected from Rappahannock county (Shh!  Don’t tell them we’re in Fauquier) to take part in this HMI pilot project, the first in the nation.  We’ve benefited a lot from the on-farm consultations and classroom work and are hopeful they’ll find the funding to continue another year.

If you’re a grass farmer (which is what natural cattlemen really are), there’s a wonderful sense of security looking out at the beginning of December and seeing acres of lush green grass.  Feeding grass to your cows rather than feeding hay is not only cheaper, it’s a lot more nutritious.