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Whistle while you work….
You wouldn’t think that, with a name like Thistle Hill, we’d be making war on thistles. But this is grandson, Church, on summer break, practicing his back-swing for tennis. That’s what we tell him anyway. Actually thistles, which blanketed the farm 10 years ago, have virtually disappeared, particularly in the pastures where we practice mob grazing. This is the field where we keep young bulls and it is set-stocked. And, of course, we don’t use herbicides for weed control. Bad for the tennis game. It’s great having Church here for the summer. He’s all “growed” and can out-work me. (He carries four mineral bags at a time; I lift one, and…
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Just in case….
We’ve always been skeptical of the “global warming” scenario though our recent un-winter and early spring has moved us closer to the agnostic column. Still we’ve always managed Thistle Hill as though the environmental alarmists are right. There’s no question, based on our own observations, that clean water and chemical-free land is better for our animals and for us. And the cost savings in not spraying pesticides, not spreading fertilizer and not mowing fields is considerable. Managing your land that way not only cuts way back on energy consumption, it also keeps carbon out of the atmosphere and in the ground where it does the most good. This is why Thistle…
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Off to summer camp….
….that’s what Wooz tells our yearling heifers reassuringly as we load them on the trailer for the short trip to a neighbor’s farm. Lindsay Sagstuen and John Dibble have generously shared their grass with us for several years now. Of course, we think Ruby Red lawn mowers look a lot better than John Deere green. And now that their neighbors, Don and Sue Ferro, have also granted us “grazing rights” we can add a few more heifers to this “loan-a-cow program” and get more effective use of the grass. A side benefit we have found is that both couples love the animals so much that not only do they thrive but, with…
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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,…
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All dirt is not the same…..
Water (not oil) may be our most precious resource but dirt isn’t far behind. And with all the changes we’ve made to our pastures at Thistle Hill (and the addition of more acreage) we thought it was time for a complete analysis of our soil. So last week we brought in Tellus Consulting again for a survey. Tim Woodward (on the left) took samples in seven key and representative pastures. Not sure who the old geezer was on the right who showed up to watch. The hundreds of samples are sent off to a lab in Ohio…put through a number of tests to identify the mineral content, fertility, pH and…
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‘Tis the season….
…to start feeding hay. And at Thistle Hill, rather than put the hay in rings or feeders, we unroll it onto the ground. It’s the way cows are used to eating, of course, but just as important is the extra organic matter that finds its’ way back into the soil. And by taking a new area each time, we spread not only the nutrients but the cows do their part by spreading their manure. Saves on fertilzer costs. This is the view from the rear window of the tractor cab as the bale in the foreground is un-rolled. The lighter colored cows are Senepol; the darker are Devon. Some farmers…
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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…
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From the Soap Box….
Sometimes it seems to us that farming is a bit like the canary in the coal mine, a kind of early warning system. It’s the farmer who first saw the dangers of modern, industrial agriculture. He tried to tell us that not only was he being shoved off the land, but that the corporations replacing him were using industrial, mass production practices that were ultimately destructive to the land. But because the immediate result, as far as most consumers could tell, was lower prices, no one paid any attention to the warnings. Even when, like the canaries, millions of farmers keeled over and died. Only now are scientists beginning to worry, and…