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Strip grazing…
…and the main herd has settled in…changing paddocks with no more than a whistle. I’m sure you could set up an automatic gate opener and they’d move themselves. There are 33 pregnant cows in this group. The section already grazed is in the foreground. By enlarging the picture you may be able to see the single strand of polywire which is all we need to keep them together. The grass as we began was about a foot tall, and we’ve taken the top half before moving on. In recent years a technique has developed called “mob grazing”…or “high intensity grazing”…that is jamming the equivalent of 500 to 700 cows into…
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Starting second pass…
…after about 45 days rest. Grandson Church says too many weeds though that’s not apparent in the picture. We calculate we have about 54,000 pounds animal weight per acre…just about a quarter of what we really need to see the results off mob grazing. At this level the cows can still afford to be selective. And there’s only limited trampling affect. The obvious answer is to reduce the size of the paddocks but that brings up the question of water and shade. Yes, we could bring in more cows but it’s almost breeding time and again this year we’ll be testing several young bulls after ai-ing. Interesting choices for a…
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Yes, it’s true….
….Greg and Jan Judy’s Green Pastures farm certainly lives up to its name. More than 50 would-be grazers attended Greg’s three-day program near Moberly, Missouri last week to study the power of mob grazing. It’s been a cold, wet spring but the proof was there as you drove down the road. Greg’s green pastures alongside neighbors who were still feeding hay! The featured speaker was Ian Mitchell-Innes who practices a version of what might be called “Mob Grazing for Dummies”. Ian’s approach is throw you in the shallow water so you don’t have to drown. He has become something of a missionary in the battle to save the microbe. There’s…
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Grass fed workshops….
….our friend Ridge Shinn will be holding a grass fed cattle workshop this Saturday, May 11th, at Hardwick, Massachusetts. The day-long session will includes a wide range of topics including selecting, breeding and managing cattle for the grass fed beef market. Here’s the registration form: http://www.nofamass.org/events/raising-100-grass-fed-beef#.UYi-oLVwrSh Sorry we can’t attend but we’ll be in Missouri for Greg Judy’s mob grazing workship with Ian Mitchell-Innes.
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Worth waiting for….
….the second pass over the new grass and we’re still moving them quickly. The plan is to cover every pasture (but one) within 21 days. The “one” is our Italian rye pasture, intended for the steers but they didn’t get the memo. We put the steers on the “special” grass earlier this week. By the end of the next day, they had found their way through to wire fences and across a creek to re-join the main herd. I can hear Ian saying: “Of course, dummy.” Maybe there’s a book in that: Grazing for Dummies. But I’m a fast learner, the next time the rotation takes the herd to the Italian rye,…
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Spring is in the air….
…37 degree air, but nevertheless. At Thistle Hill we decided today to declare Spring has arrived. We announced the news this morning to a line-up of our young bulls. That means some new assignments. For instance, Green Field, winter home for ease of taking care of our young bulls, is now reduced to six. Their buddies have been detached for duty at satellite pastures about 5 miles away. One bull is already on the job, breeding some young heifers for a farm in South Carolina. And another will be sent to still another satellite pasture to romance another group of heifers. Despite the temperature, green has begun to show in…
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Saving the planet….
….not exactly a humble goal, but that’s what is at stake. The earth’s surface has been turning into a vast desert, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere every year than all the fossil fuel engines combined. This “browning” of the planet is the cause of all the hunger, suffering and war than we can possibly deal with. Strangely, while largely blamed for all our environmental woes, it is the lowly cow that holds the key to the problem. (I wanted to write: “our survival”) As pollyanish as it may sound, we do believe that grass fed beef is the answer. Good for your personal health, a grazing cow is good for the…
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A milestone (of sorts)….
….part of the main Thistle Hill herd making its final move of the winter. The stockpiled grass in what we call River Pasture is about 10 inches tall and we estimate this will take us to about the end of March. That could mean we have grazed the main herd through the winter for the first time in our history. For that we have to thank the lessons we learned in our sessions with Holistic Management International. The second thing that pleases us is that we had forecast to make this move on March 1st, and that was a forecast made last April. So we were off by just four…
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Nature is always right…
One of the lessons of farming is that you don’t fight nature….and it’s time for us to recognize that we ‘re in the summer dry spell. Maybe drought. Whatever. While the grass still looks good and there’s plenty of it, you can feel the dryness in the hardening ground. And you certainly see the water reduced to a trickle in our young bull pasture. In our area, the forecast is now for several days of more than 100 so we’re tanking our first steps. Not really our first. Earlier this year we did reduce the size of the herd slightly looking to future growth with our new English calves. So…
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Mob grazing…the soil report
It was a year ago that we began our experiment with mob grazing at Thistle Hill. And here, agricultural land consultants Charlie Thornton (foreground) and Tim Woodward of Tellus Consulting help us consider the results. Tellus did a complete mineral analysis of seven of our pastures using Brookfield Labs in Ohio. We tested three of our mob grazing pastures against others that were used in the usual way. Mob grazing puts more pounds of beef on a very limited area and moves the animals off quickly to the next small area. The belief is that this “pressure” will result in more fertile soil, more organic matter because of the trampling effect,…