I’ll start off by making a loop around the cemetery hill then we’ll head North.  Looking toward the cemetery I’m standing in grass that won’t be grazed for about 2 weeks…but what a difference two weeks makes.  Compare this picture with this one taken two weeks later with this one taken another two weeks later.  What a difference two weeks makes.  Closest to the cemetery is ground that was grazed two weeks ago.  Recovery is happening but it really didn’t get trampled as well as the pasture in the foreground.

The fescue is tall but the other grasses have a lot of growing ahead of them before I can graze them again.

Maybe this is a better picture.  The cows ate whatever this was right down to the ground.  That’s my fault, not the cow’s fault.

We grazed across the remaining bottom ground South of the branch then crossed the branch and grazed it out.  You can see the line where we put electric fence 2-3′ inside of the perimeter fence.  I really didn’t want my cousin’s Angus bull to get any opportunity with my Shorthorns.

Also notice the abundance of honey locust trees.  I’ll be busy next winter.

Cows grazed the best out of this, trampled quite a bit but we still didn’t have enough pressure on the land.  Too much fescue was left standing.  But there was a section in the middle that got missed in the grazing rotation.  The diversity of species there is amazing and shows where the above picture started.  A good stand of red clover and a mix of weeds including goldenrod, burdock and multi-flora rose but there was a total lack of chicory and dandelion.  Maybe because it’s wet, sandy bottom ground.  Who knows.

Notice none of the fescue heads were nibbled off.  Yup.  We messed up.  Oh well, we’ll trample it hard when we come through again in June.

The next area was grazed a little over two weeks ago.  Portions of it are recovering well, other portions are totally dominated by white clover and the recovery is slow.

Back to the South the bottom ground is recovering well.  A fair portion of the growing green stuff is goldenrod but this has been a weedy mess for years.  Two years ago (maybe three?) the 6 of us spent an evening with a tractor pulling hundreds of saplings our of the bottom then I mowed it (I mowed because I didn’t have cows).  Now I’m hoping to continue improving the stand by way of cows.  Check in again in a couple of years to see.

The stand is recovering well but there are a lot of hoof prints.  We got more than a foot of rain toward the end of April, several more inches at the beginning of May.  I would guess we have had 16-20″ of rain in the last 6 weeks.  Anyway, hoofprints…

Follow this link to see the flood water standing in the bottom.  This is the same area (side view) today (…well, Sunday).

Up the hill, my fallen tree is getting lost in the grass.  I thought the grass was tall last time we grazed here.  I have never seen this much grass here before and am anxious to see what it looks like in another month when the cows return to it.

Now we have made the loop and we’re back to the cows.  They have nothing to say to me and are clearly unafraid.  None of them want to snuggle with me but the dairy cows are nearly pets.  The others know I’m the guy who can move the fence forward, I mean nothing else to them.  Look carefully at the picture and you can see the next division we’ll open up the next morning.  Two fences behind the cows.  We just roll those two cross fences backwards then push the water and the back fence forwards leaving 2-3 days of grazing area under the cows at any given time.

A little further South, looking South I can see the few acres I have set aside for drought.  By my measurements I am actively grazing less than 10 acres with 8 heifers and two calves.  I have 4 acres set aside as a reserve along with odd patches of hilly, wooded areas I don’t care to pasture heavily.  Add to that 3 or 4 acres of alfalfa (well, mostly alfalfa….well, mostly alfalfa and orchardgrass…well, mostly alfalfa and orchardgrass and a few bare spots where the chickens killed the plants standing in mud during days of heavy rainstorms) that we’ll use for hay.  I hope to graze this pretty hard starting in July and again in November or December.  The plan is to set aside a portion of the farm each year for stockpile.  This gives my main pastures additional recovery time just when they need it and builds standing forage for winter grazing.  I’m not exactly making this up as I go along but I am playing by ear.  Stay with me as I learn.  Anyway, straight ahead of the brush pile is an old bridge.  The stream flows from right to left under the bridge.  Everything across is set aside for July.

Now moving West we come to the place the pigs were in March.  It’s hard to hurt fescue…

…but there are some spots where the pigs managed to set it back.  Those spots are dominated by chicory and dandelion.  I’ll need to work to get more clover growing here going forward.  There is always more to do.

We’ll just have to wait and see what the cows eat here in a few weeks.  Hopefully it’s not too stale.  I may follow Gabe Brown’s advice and sew in cowpeas, sunflowers and millet as the cows stomp through, then winter annuals when they go through again in the fall.  Who knows.  Again, playing by ear here.

In spite of my best efforts to build big grazing areas early and cover the farm quickly I fell behind.  It all got away from me.  Now I’m slowing down a little, trampling more grass with narrow grazing strips and just hanging on.  The plan is to double our herd size next year as our farm triples in size.  Yeah, I know…but you have to work within your budget.

How is your grass growing?

The pictures in this post are about a week old and are already out of date.  This week we have highs in the 70’s and good chances for rain each evening.  You can almost watch the grass grow right now.

I am grazing my cows on remaining stockpile.  Mostly though, I’m packing them into a small area and feeding them hay.  I’m pushing carbon into the soil mostly on countour to the hill slope.  Will it work?  Well…it should.  We’ll see.  Maybe you’ll see the difference in the pasture over the next few years.

Normally I start taking pictures as I leave the house.  I’ll start todays’ walk by the horse barn instead.  Last month I took a picture of a down locust tree in a sea of fescue nubbins.  We burned the tree then overseeded with clover, orchardgrass, timothy and two kinds of rye grass and here’s what it looks like now (though the camera is pointed more to the right).

The horses ate it down to the nubbins but it’s coming back well and it’s coming back with additional diversity.  The real miracle here was that the horses showed me around 20 or so honey locust saplings.  BTW, the picture above is almost the same shot as the one in this picture.  I’ve cut a lot of hedge in the last year.  There is a lot more to cut…and this is just one of my hedge forests.  Many of the stumps are sprouting so I’ll have an ongoing supply of thorns and firewood in 5-10 years.  Also, a pair of rabbits are living in the brush pile we built last year, though I only see them when I am out walking at night.

The plan is to allow this to sit idle until July or so.  Once the drought hits I’ll have a stockpile of grass for the cows to tromp and eat through.  There are about 2 acres here.  With luck, that will be just the bridge I need to allow my main pastures to recover fully.  Then we’ll graze this again over the winter.  Next year we’ll allow a different patch of land to go.  This builds up carbon over time, allows ground-nesting birds to have a home and helps us keep our cows fat.

The top of the hill was also grazed by the horses but not as intensively.  It’s still a thick mass of fescue but was well pounded by running, playing horses and heavily manured.  Good enough.

But there are still clumps of moss growing on the North face of the hill.  Where there is moss there is not grass.  Where there are hooves there is no moss.  I need more hooves…more pressure…to allow the grass to compete.

On the topic of hedge, below the cemetery I cut out a single hedge tree that fell over and continued growing.  One tree, laying on its side, killing grass over a 40′ circle.  This tree was the source of the pile of wood featured in a recent Facebook post.  There is still an equal amount of wood waiting for me to cut now.  I have opened up more area for grazing and rid myself of a sick tree but cost myself small game habitat.  That’s why I build brush piles.  Quail and rabbits need shelter.  If I won’t allow dead and dying trees to create that shelter naturally I have to do it myself.  I also can’t continue cutting out undesirable trees without replacing them with something else or planning for their regrowth .  More on that in a future post.

The cows grazed their way through the bottom in January.  There wasn’t much out there for them to eat as it was a serious weed patch, as was most of the pasture before we began.  We spent an afternoon pulling sprouts out with a tractor last winter.  This year it was just graze and let it grow.  It’s growing.  But I’ll need some pressure to keep the weeds at bay and give the grasses a competitive advantage.  To be honest, I’m a little worried.  Goldenrod, ragweed and burrdock are clearly dominant down here.  I don’t want it to look like this:

There’s a little wedge of pasture West of our house by the road.  When you come to our farm, this is what you see.  Looks great, doesn’t it?  I need to get a tractor in there to pull out the snags and rip out the sprouts but the whole thing is a thorny mess.  Just like the bottom used to be.  It’s an awful lot like work.  I try to let the cows do as much of it as I can.

The pigs are in their final pasture position before shipping on Tuesday.  You can see the kind of disturbance they create.  That’s what we hire them to do.  Right now I’m not grinding their feed.  Among other things, they get cracked corn, roasted soybeans and whole oats.  The oats are still whole when they come back out.  In a few weeks I’ll have a rich, strong stand of oats on my slope for the cows to graze through…thanks to the pigs plowing, manuring and seeding.

The layer flock is in the same fence with the broilers on the alfalfa field.  You can see an outline in the picture above showing where the chicken tractor had been moments before.  The layers rush in to scratch through the manure and to gobble up any feed the broilers wasted.  Both this and the neighbor’s alfalfa fields look purple right now from all the henbit blooms (and buzzing with bees).  The hens bit the henbit here.  None of it is left within the fenced area.  The alfalfa is nibbled back but recovers quickly.  Doing this may be risky in terms of the lifetime of the alfalfa stand but we not only get 4 cuttings of alfalfa here, we also get 500 chickens per acre and …I don’t even know how many dozen eggs, not to mention the fertility the birds put back into the soil.  Am I hurting my alfalfa stand?  I really don’t think so.

Back to the cows.  Molly is chewing here cud in the sunlight.  Life is good.  You can see the distant hillside still recovering from the pigs who were there until October or November.  I see this less as a problem and more as a matter of time.  There is manure, carbon, seeds and living plant roots out there.  With help from cow hooves I’m sure the scars will heal quickly.  I present the grass in the foreground as evidence.  Those same pigs were there in August.  The cows aren’t scheduled to return to the cemetery hill until late May or even June.

Mostly fescue but it’s growing.  There is a fair amount of clover mixed in as well.  We’ll get there.

These pictures were taken on March 11th though I was delayed in posting them.  These pictures were taken early in the evening the day after a heavy rain storm.

A sea of oxidizing fescue.  I mowed a small portion of this hill in December for sledding.  I wish I hadn’t.  The cows grazed the hill to the left in November and again in February.  They won’t see it again till May.

There are a few clumps of henbit emerging on the hillside.  The grasses the cows prefer are starting to sprout away from the clumps of fescue.  Not much else happening.

This is the primary sledding hill by the cemetery.  The grass was pretty thin when we left the drought last Fall.  Pigweed stood in tall masses at the top of the hill, honey locust sprouts dotted the slope.  It was pretty nasty.  Hopefully we’ll use the cows correctly to push succession forward.

8-10″ tall fescue.  The cows aren’t interested.

I invited dad’s horses to graze about 1/4th of an acre down to the nubbins.  This area is always a thick carpet of fescue.  The horses carpeted it with manure and pounded it with hooves.  It was awesome!  When they got to the bottom I could see a the bones of a honey locust I cut down a few years ago.  The tree (and most of its thorns) are now burned up and I have seeded the area with clovers and a variety of grasses.  Wait till you see the recovery picture!

Nearer to the house the pigs have really made a mess of the pasture.  3 pigs above 250 pounds have to be moved frequently.  I want disturbance not destruction.  Where they dig I kick the clods back into place and overseed with grasses and clovers.  Please notice the pigs are clean and dry.  Trust me when I say they are happy.  They have room to run, work to do, fresh air to breathe, they can see the sun where most pigs are bored, confined, smelly and indoors.  The pasture will heal quickly.  The pork will be delicious.

The alfalfa was just starting to emerge.  I do some crazy stuff…some of it out of ignorance, some of it because I just don’t have the time to get everything done.  I continued to move my layer flock across the dormant alfalfa field all winter.  If that damaged the alfalfa I can’t see it.  The emerging plant population does not appear to be diminished.  That said, I don’t care for the empty spaces between the alfalfa plants.  Nature will fill those spaces, probably with fescue.  I think I should beat her to the punch.

I’ll post my April stroll soon and will try to show the recovery that follows the pigs.