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 we have that benefit of a reduced stocking rate and not yet all the new calves.

We also have stopped the dehorning and castrating of our current crop.  That’s just too stressful for them at the current temperatures.  We also get a serious fly problem at high temperatures and a wound is an inviting place for a mama fly to lay her eggs.

Late yesterday, Church and I boosted the big tank into the back of the pickup…ready to haul water to the bulls.

But the major, and difficult move, is to fight your instincts and actually slow up your grazing rotation.  That’s one of the lessons of holistic management.  Until now we’ve been taking about 21 to 25 days of rest before grazing.  We’ll increase that to 40 days and slow it even more if there’s no break in the weather.

That was a lesson we learned in the Holistic Management class but hard to bring yourself to put it into practice.  At least it was last year but after the results we had….grass long after everyone was feeding hay….we have no hesitation in executing our drought plan now.

What gets really hard to think about is truly de-stocking…selling animals at the auction barn.  Even pure bred Devon breeders have been forced to do that in some parts of the country.  Heart-breaking.  It’s a necessary technique and one that we’ve never been forced to contemplate.