- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Hi Dan, this paddock was originally planned to have the beet harvested by the vendor of the property but..... plans didn't work for him, couldn't get the beet lifted due to a penchant for not settling accounts, bought a root bucket and auger bucket, which didn't work out either, and then a health scare meant he had another guy run the farm over winter - the stock would spend a day on the beet and then a day inside eating silage while the other mob had a day on the beet.
Cumbersome and VERY destructive, the soil structure in here when we took over was like Colby.
After the beet, it was wholecrop triticale undersown with 6 different clovers and a hybrid ryegrass (the peas were all eaten by pigeons, was meant to be a pea/triticale wholecrop) - unfortunately the end result was quite an open pasture with bare patches, which has allowed quite a few thistles to grow.
The clovers, especially the reds and the arrowleaf have really turned it around, as far as structure goes, 18 months ago you couldn't get a spade in to full depth and now it is softer through the profile.
Deep compaction is still there, but continued mob-stocking will help I'm sure.
Biodiversity is crucial - it's no accident that weedy beet crops don't harm the soil the way clean crops do, and this is true in the successive crops I think.
Personally I would grow something like daikon radish after the beet just to do the hard yards, with relieving the worst of the compaction, although gravelly substrates usually handle beet outwintering well.
The main thing is to do all you can to encourage the soil biology, use backfencing and even throw seed on behind the back fence - growing weeds is preferable to growing nowt.
That's my thoughts on it, anyway, most of the destruction of outwintering cattle isn't the poaching necessarily, but the 3 months of sitting there afterwards with nothing growing and in an anaerobic state
After seeing how my pea experiment worked, I'd be keen to sprinkle cereals or something on in front of the cattle and let them punch it in if the seed was cheap enough
All totally unendorsed by the experts of course!!
We would struggle to get a good of rainfall in a month of winter here, but cows still make a mess if you let them.
An extra fence behind them is so beneficial, in wet conditions the less time you have them ploughing the better.
Better to just wreck a strip of paddock than three quarters of it.
Soils here are red clay and quite heavy - cultivation is to be avoided as much as possible.
