Grazing Archives - Page 3 of 8 - Ninja Cow Farm LLC

May 23, 2015

Grazing update

On May 16th, we grazed our monitored paddock on the South side of the farm closest to the golf course. With our 32 acres of grazing pastures, and our neighbors addition of 13 acres we have a total of 45 acres of grazing. On that 45 acres, we have about 750 pounds per acre of cattle. That means total we have 33,750 pounds of cattle grazing currently. That’s based on a weight estimate I did back in late February. Since then we’ve lost a cow to death, had some births, and overall changed the ratio somewhat but for now that is our grazing pressure per acre. The grass is standing up very well to this setup, in fact I think we could use some management to increase the pressure but we’ve been so busy with other things we haven’t played with the management much this season. Once we catch up, we’ll try moving the cows every few hours vs. once per day and see what that does to our grazing.

Grazing measurement stick and grass — Before grazing, the grass is a bit thin still coming out of winter but where it’s there it’s doing well.

Here is how the grass looked before grazing. The seed heads of the grass were off the top of the measuring stick which makes them about 35″ tall. That makes sense because they are coming over the hood of the Gator as we drive through the fields. Underneath the seed heads, the actual grass was about 15″ tall.

It looks like in this picture that the grass is significantly shorter. However it is a deception. In reality there is still a lot of grass in this picture.

Here is a pre and post grazing comparison. Grazed on the left, not grazed on the right.

With the rain and mild weather, the fescue is doing well. We don’t have any thatch to speak of as what was there decomposed over the winter. However post grazing we have clipped all the pastures putting all this material on the ground. We need to get that organic material on the ground and build the thatch in preparation for the summer to come so we can hold moisture in the ground and give the warm season grasses a chance to thrive. Plus we’re supposed to be building topsoil, something that needs to start again in earnest. I hate winter when the soil is muddy and unprotected.

April 18, 2015April 18, 2015

Grass update

The grass is coming along nicely. This is a shot from today of the grass on the hill closest to the golf course. The grass is about 8-9″ tall at this point. We had to flash graze this paddock about two weeks ago so this is grass that has recovered.

The cows have about another week over at the new place, David and Mr. McKoy’s farm, giving this grass more time to fill out and get the maturity we like to see in it before we graze. Hopefully we will get some warm weather and continued rain here or there to help the grass grow. A week of good growth and this grass will be looking for some cows to do their work.

February 21, 2015December 20, 2016

What all this soil health stuff I talk about looks like in the soil

I was forwarded a great video (Thanks Dale!) on soil health that I thought I’d share. We do a lot here to manage and improve our soil health. I show pictures of topsoil being built, poop on the ground, grass and thatch, all that stuff. But for many of our readers, that stuff doesn’t really translate into something that’s meaningful.

In this video, they do a visual side by side comparison of no-till soil and conventional till soil. To see the test, go to 12:31 in the video. The test is only a few minutes long.

Our soil would compare much better than the no till since we are actively adding back organic matter and not disturbing the soil in any way. Plus we have a dense crop of grass and forbes growing all season long. Hopefully this video will give you an idea of why what we are doing is important.

November 3, 2014

Snow at the farm?

It’s more like a heavy frost but it didn’t stop the girls from geeking out. I’m excited for the girls, but I am not ready for winter.

First and foremost, growing grass and collecting produce are summer activities. And we have gotten pretty good at both. Although the work is hard, the bounty of food that flows from April to October allows us to have more food than we need every day for all of our animals. Knowing you can feed everyone all the time takes a huge weight off of a farmers shoulders. We don’t have a silo of corn to feed from should we run short. We have to produce food through our efforts and our farmers every day.

With the grass, we have a better and better product every time I look. Last year I was amazed and excited that we had built 3/4″ of topsoil in addition to our wildly improved grass. We were still suffering through weeds we didn’t want in the pasture but things were improving. This year we have built at least another 3/4″ of topsoil and our mowing program has made the weeds almost a non-event. The grass this year has been phenomenal, all the while allowing our stocking density to increase to levels we could not sustain with traditional methods.

When I learned about our grazing techniques, I was dismayed to learn that you shouldn’t expect truly representative results until the third year of the program. Next summer will be our third year. I can’t imagine things getting any better.

Normally this is the time we like to slow down, put the cows out for hay instead of grazing, and get into the shop to get some projects done.

However this year I am still wearing short sleeves, and I am so busy at work I don’t have time for my normal winter fun activities. Maybe by Thanksgiving things will settle down and I will be in a winter mood, but for now I’m looking at those white pastures with trepidation and longing for summer days.

October 25, 2014October 25, 2014

New grazing measurement program in conjunction with NRCS

This year we have started a new program in concert with NRCS to measure our pasture management. We were given a choice of many programs we could adopt, but this pasture management one fit what we do very well and really was a best practice we should have been doing anyway.

Pre-grazing in field 2, Thursday October 23rd.

What we have done is to place permanent measurement markers in three different pastures on our farm. The markers have inch graduations from the ground on up to a couple of feet. Before we put our cows into a paddock for the day, we measure the grass by taking picture like the ones below.

This is field #2, which is the one closest to the golf course. As you can see pre-grazing, the grass is about 9-10″ high and the tips are around 16″.This is post grazing. You may have to zoom in a bit to see that the grass is now 4-5″ tall. We have grazed this grass heavier than normal because the cows won’t make it back around to this pasture before it’s time to go onto hay for the winter. We still left plenty of grass for ground cover.

This grazing took place on Thursday, October 23rd, 2014.

It’s actually making me kind of sad to see the last of the grass in the before pictures. We have had a tremendous increase in grass production in our second year of daily paddock moves. The topsoil creation has been very good. I haven’t actually measured it, but we have to be over a few inches based on the one spot I looked. You have to compare that against the 1/8″ or less of topsoil we had when we started this program. I was told that when we started this program, we really shouldn’t except much till about the third year. So far we’ve had wonderful results and that makes me really look forward to next year to see what these “real results” will look like. The grass could be thicker, the weeds could be less. Things can continue to improve, but it’s come so far so fast it’s hard to imagine it getting a lot better. One thing I haven’t done in a while is to test soil PH. I’m looking forward to testing it next year and then comparing it against where we were when we started. I was talking with Themis from NRCS this week and she was saying what I understood to be the case. By building so much organic material on the surface, we should see the soil PH come up from 5.1-5.3 to more in the 7.0 range which would be perfect. Even if we are making progress, maybe in the high 5s, it’s an indication that what we are doing is working and we can continue forward with our current practices, knowing we will get where we are going in the future.

September 18, 2014

Another grass in our pastures identified; dallisgrass

When we had the NC Cattleman’s Association come to visit, we had an unexpected bonus. Along with the cattlemen, we had some grazing experts who joined the group and did some instruction with our pasture as the model. I not only finally learned how my grazing stick works, I also found out what another one of our grasses is in our pasture. We know we have Bermuda grass, crab grass, fescue, and Johnson grass. What I didn’t know was we also have a lot of dallisgrass. I’d never even heard of dallisgrass so I did some searching on Google. What I found didn’t make me feel good at all. The first 10 or so links on Google were all about how to kill dallisgrass. It sounded like it took 2-4-D, napalm, or pigs to get rid of it. It also sounded like everyone was trying to kill it and it was just behind kudzu on the lovability scale of flora and fauna.

Then I was lucky enough to come across this forum. Looks like some people love dallisgrass, namely cattlemen. That’s a relief to me because a key part of our management strategy is to support what grows naturally vs. trying to seed or cultivate certain types of grasses. What grows naturally is pretty hard to kill with drought or pressure. Cultivated stands are a different story. If we had the kudzu of grass we’d have a problem but I should have known it was ok, as looking at the grazing and looking at the cows performance is all that I need to know about our management system. Our cows are fat and happy, dallisgrass or no.

August 29, 2014

A good article on soil health and grazing

This isn’t all that we do, but its a good article on the basics of how we manage our pastures.

August 5, 2014August 13, 2014

Morning milking in the dark and walking from the back pasture

This post is a bit of a time warp. I accidentally never posted it. It’s actually from a few weeks ago. I was testing out posting to Instagram rather than posting directly to our website. Then I link the picture from Instagram inline with the post. Extra steps but I’m hoping some of the odd formatting that WordPress does to our pictures will go away.

Today we had our cows in the back pasture. This pasture is at the far corner of our farm, and at its lowest elevation. Normally our milking routine has close and closer pastures so each morning is not so much of an adventure. Walking completely across the farm, up the road, past the houses makes for a long trip. We don’t normally put the cows in the back pasture but there was grass galore and the cows needed some grassy fun after being in the woods for a week.

http://instagram.com/p/rUD2VUDgmd/

So this morning everyone got to enjoy hiking through the waist-high grass looking for the cows. Of course they were sitting in the woods, snickering at us as we went the wrong direction. Finally we found them and walked Dottie out and up to the barn. It was a long walk, and up hill the entire way. Of course we will tell the kids it was uphill both ways but that’s another story.

It was a long trek in the dark but everything worked out fine and milking went smoothly.

Tomorrow should be easier as Dottie will know where to meet us. The first day in a new area is always a bit confusing.

August 2, 2014August 3, 2014

Cleaning up the woods with beef power

I went to a silvopasture school put on by the extension service a few months ago. While there the property owner showed us a small area they were working on for a silvopasture test. She apologized that her prepared area wasn’t big enough but “it took so much work clearing” that she wasn’t able to do more with her available labor. Since she had cattle on her farm, I suggested that she bring her cows into her areas she wanted to clear. It would give them a day out of the sun, give them something to eat, and get all the undergrowth cleared out. Then she could simply do the chainsaw work on the trees she wanted to remove which wasn’t bad for her since her trees were pretty young and small.

Overgrown wooded area. — Here is a panoramic view of the area directly behind our wood boiler.

Behind our house we have about 5 acres of woods. Its one of the areas of the farm where we do not run our cows and the woods show it. Brambles, undergrowth, etc. clog up all the edges. A few weeks ago I was looking at this area and thinking I need to get this cleared. Boy, that sure is going to take a lot of work. Then my own advice hit me, let the cows do it.

Wooded area, overgrown. — This is further down the wooded area, behind the playground.

The above pictures are the before pictures, taken just minutes before we turned the cows in.

Cleared area in woods. — And the after pictures. The area directly behind the playground.

Cleared wooded area — You can see the wood boiler on the left.

The picture above is where the cows entered the woods when we moved them. You can see the before shot in the video below.

We left the cows in the woods for about 4 days. They lost some body condition because we left them in an extra day to get them to clear all that they could. Leaving them that extra day didn’t do them any favors but did result in some additional small areas being better cleaned.

The cows really like being in the woods. The crash around, rub on trees, and generally behave like kindergarteners turned loose on the play ground as you can see in the video. We watered via water hoses dragged from individual houses and wired the electric fence with our normal temporary electric wiring. The only escapes we had were the normal escapes of young calves which walk right under the wire and go explore. We received a few distressed calls from neighbors that “we had cows out!” Once we determined that is was just calves, everything calmed down and no action was needed.

We are going to run another paddock of woods, then hit our back pasture for a few days. The back pasture isn’t part of our normal rotation and it’s a decent hike from the main pastures to the back pasture. Running the cows through the woods cleans things up plus it means that we have a short walk to the back pasture. After the back pasture, we’ll likely run one more paddock of woods and then move the cows back to their normal rotation in the main pasture. Next summer I’ll definitely do this again as the cows enjoyed it, the kids enjoyed having the cows behind their houses, and the woods look much better now.

July 24, 2014

Look what is growing in our pasture

As I’ve said before, we feed a lot of fresh produce to our cows every day. One of the side effects of feeding all this produce is that some of the seeds end up germinating and growing new plants. Here we have a cantaloupe plant that has found itself a very nice spot and is going gang busters. It has set two fruits so far but there are dozens and dozens of flowers and we should have more cantaloupe than we can use in a month.

Here is a shot of the entire plant. It just keeps growing. The reason this is amazing is that before we started our current practices, it would have taken a pick axe to dig through the hard clay soil in this pasture. Now this cantaloupe is growing on a patch of black dirt with lots of organic material and with no assistance from us. Because its novel and because we like cantaloupe we will let it grow and mow it once it’s done. However, if the soil will grow a high value tender plant, it will surely grow some nice grass. This is just a sign that what we are doing is working.