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That didn’t take long…
What a difference five days makes. Grass is now 8 to 10 inches. We’ll have to move fast or risk falling impossibly behind. Grandson Church is erecting the stakes for one-acre paddocks and the main herd of 30 cows and their new calves will have an acre a day. Look carefully and you’ll see a healthy stand of clover. Out of curiosity Church turned over a shovel of dirt. Look carefully near the top and left of the picture and you’ll see earthworms. I count five in less than a square foot. Again note the clover…and the organic matter. Enlarge all our blog pictures by simply tapping on them. Healthy…
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So Jim Gerrish knows….
…we practice what he preaches. The experts say the cows get about two-thirds of the best hay. The rest is not wasted but trampled in creating organic matter and feeding the microbes. Add in the fertilizing the cows do as they roam around and our fertilizer bill is precisely “zero”. We do need a minimum application of lime though…if the fields ever dry out. David
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Remember, the answer lies in the soil….
When we first moved to Dallas, we had an English gardener, Patrick Butterworth, who ended every letter, birthday card, and bill with the above phrase. Over time I have come to appreciate how incredibly apt this phrase describes so many systems, from the human body and how well it heals, to the garden, to the pasture and the animals on it. Diversity has been shown to be an important part of any ecosystem, whether one is looking at the boardroom, the gut flora, or the soil. For our gut flora, we want a diverse population of bacteria, archaea, viruses, and fungi that together shape our physiology, guide our immune system,…
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A familiar scene….
….if you’ve ever tried to spray fish oil. Add in several other ingredients, and you have a recipe for a sprayer jam. We’re fortunate to have a neighbor—Ira McDowell—who is a veteran tractor mechanic as well as an all-around handyman. That’s Ira unclogging the line from the outlet of the PTO pump while I “supervise”. The material we’re spraying is a combination of fish oil and compost tea laced with microbes, calcium and phosphate. It’s an expensive mixture and we’re trying it on two test pastures. The hope is that this potent mixture…after several applications…will fix our pastures with a fertility profile they haven’t seen in hundreds of years. It’s…
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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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The secret ingredient….
….in Thistle Hill cows and beef. But it’s no secret, we’ve been saying for some time we think (next to Wooz’ care, of course) it’s our mineral program. Visitors invariably remark that they have never seen a group of healthier, more vital animals than those at Thistle Hill. We do a lot of experimenting, try various grazing plans, top-seed clover, spray with different natural fertilizer combinations. But the one thing we’ve held constant is our mineral program. It’s a cafeteria-style approach, where the cows don’t have a mixture of all the essential minerals as designed by “experts” but select from trays of the individual minerals. They do actually self-diagnose. Soils vary…
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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…