actually thinking about it its quite easy really
"Improving Our Lot" - Planned Holistic Grazing, for starters..
- Thread starter Kiwi Pete
- Start date
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Had a bit of a play about with the designs tonight @exmoor dave, @NZDan and anyone else who's interested.
All these blue blocks are 4ha/10 acres in area, the ones with ponds are slightly larger to make 4 grazeable hectares.
Maximum of 50 metres across the lanes by 810 m long. The block "at the back" is 100x400
They run with the prevailing weather and over the contours as opposed to with them, as was my original plan.
Working on the 0.1ha cell size, means each lane is 40 paddocks long for easy maths; after having a play this year I'm comfortable with the idea of 40, 80, and 120 day rest periods depending on severity of graze, time of year etc etc.
What's your thoughts?
Key points are we must provide easy access to the town's water tanks, so will need to break the lanes to form an open track from the cattleyards up to there, this might make loading cattle into the system a tad easier as well.
Also, I want to run wide rows of trees along the run of the lanes to help with the summer shade dilemma, 50 metres along the ground represents about a 4 metre contour (roughly) so this gives options regarding the trees and shrubbery we use .
Don't be shy to criticise this as I need to test out weaknesses before we set to .
All these blue blocks are 4ha/10 acres in area, the ones with ponds are slightly larger to make 4 grazeable hectares.
Maximum of 50 metres across the lanes by 810 m long. The block "at the back" is 100x400
They run with the prevailing weather and over the contours as opposed to with them, as was my original plan.
Working on the 0.1ha cell size, means each lane is 40 paddocks long for easy maths; after having a play this year I'm comfortable with the idea of 40, 80, and 120 day rest periods depending on severity of graze, time of year etc etc.
What's your thoughts?
Key points are we must provide easy access to the town's water tanks, so will need to break the lanes to form an open track from the cattleyards up to there, this might make loading cattle into the system a tad easier as well.
Also, I want to run wide rows of trees along the run of the lanes to help with the summer shade dilemma, 50 metres along the ground represents about a 4 metre contour (roughly) so this gives options regarding the trees and shrubbery we use .
Don't be shy to criticise this as I need to test out weaknesses before we set to .
Last edited:
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
It's a little resin hub that contains a metal disc, almost like a rotary switch. It makes the top 4 arms electric and kills power to the bottom 2 arms, so it doesn't kill the fence. Gotta be careful if you pick them up that you don't put pressure on the switch or you get a boot
Thats the sort of thing I came up withIt's a little resin hub that contains a metal disc, almost like a rotary switch. It makes the top 4 arms electric and kills power to the bottom 2 arms, so it doesn't kill the fence. Gotta be careful if you pick them up that you don't put pressure on the switch or you get a boot
Have you got a link that shows it
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Well , perhaps I didnt enlarge on the more complex parts of my simple but very clever design .
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Stand there with a mallet . 
that'll learn them .
that'll learn them .
That reminds me of the guy who used to row up hay at home, he would carry on following the last bout when there was an obstacle, got bigger and bigger till he realised that cutting straight through saved a lot of weaving about.
He’d forgotten by the next time he came across an obstacle.
NZDan
Member
- Location
- Broomfield, New Zealand
Are all the lanes the same width at the same point? What made you chose forty 0.1ha cells instead of sixty cells? Sixty is more flexible?
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Roughly exactly the same - will have to measure it off properly. Really I went for 80 cells per racetrack to be more flexible than 60
exmoor dave
Member
- Location
- exmoor, uk
That bit of mapping looks great! What software or app are you using to do it?
Love the idea of planting trees along the lanes.... can see why you defo want to get the fences right first time.
0.1ha cells would appeal to me because it just makes the maths easy..... like you said afew posts back.... "can a 10yr old do it?"
NZDan
Member
- Location
- Broomfield, New Zealand
My understanding is that 60 is more dividable or multipliable.
NZDan
Member
- Location
- Broomfield, New Zealand
NZDan
Member
- Location
- Broomfield, New Zealand
Woolless
Member
- Location
- Berwickshire, Scottish Borders
That's interesting Pete. I mentioned some time ago about the Johan Zietsman book and he really advocates non-selective grazing. His basic method is as tight as you can, as many moves as you can and keep going until first paddock is ready to graze again and go back there, locking up the rest of the ground which is then your drought/winter reserve and gets the benefit of an extended growth period between grazings. Make sure that a different area benefits each year. I'm paraphrasing but I like that basic simplicity of that.Merry Christmas!
We get reasonably good rainfall here, and good pasture growth.
That's the reason for my "acceleration" comment, the grass is ready to graze a month behind the mob (in fact a few weeks, barely even a month) and "thing" is that we stress the system every time we graze.
I know it's not what people want to hear, but
Stress isn't all bad, I mean if we didn't have "Christmas Day" then would y'all have gone and done any shopping yet? If we didn't have financial stress then we mightn't try so hard to produce stuff. Stress isn't all bad.
Plants don't mind occasional stress either, say your cow comes thundering along and wraps that big wet tongue around a bunch of grass and rips it off, it stimulates the system and it stresses the system. It's not a bad thing!
But there's the factor of time.... I think Blaithin mentioned that she may graze an area 5 times in two years? Or something similar.
That gives the plants full rest but it also gives the soil "spare time" to just absorb energy from the plants and get better. The worms literally have months to just be worms, doing wormy stuff. All these processes need time.
Take this back to our context, if I keep leaving a fair bit of grass behind the mob just because I can, and the grass is almost always fog and dogstail that they leave behind - then we're really not managing well.
Firstly, what we are really managing "for" is thistles, fog, and dogstail. Just like worming is selecting for wormer resistant worms, using glypho is selecting for glypho resistant plants... selective grazing all the time is selecting for plants that the stock don't like so much.
But secondly, we're also denying our system "time" to recover. The grass is looking alright, but is that enough?
About 1900 pages ago, @Global ovine mentioned about "severe grazing with long recovery periods" or words to effect as being the best way to increase humus production and it's still dead right. It was dead right in 1986 and it still is.
What's happened here is that we've actually changed what our main concern is - it used to be that our water cycle was crap.
The soil was hungry (because it was farmed well, maybe too well?) and it wasn't getting enough litter, the soil surface was mostly bare and this = runoff, evaporation, things we don't want.
Now, we've been addressing this concern for a while, and it's meant that maybe other things are going to be limiting (resource concerns) as we go forward. Things like having a whole heap of grasses that nothing bar a 4yo beef cow will do well on.
We might have to graze youngstock here, or sheep, we aren't 100% in control of what we can get. So there's a big benefit in maintaining species diversity in the pasture.
But, above all else our main, overarching goal here is to be regenerative, to actually heal and build soil, and I don't think the best way to do that is via photosynthetic recovery all the time (leaving heaps of plant matter behind) but to change it up.
Reserve driven recovery (actually wax it off, high utilisation so it can have 100 or more days to regrow) probably isn't going to mean instant drought/flood.
If we did it 3 years ago, sure it probably would have, but we've laid down an inch of soil since then. We can go back to that at any time, it's just monitoring has suggested we shift the goalposts.
Say we now try to graze in spring (leave some grass behind) and then again in summer (lay it flat) and then graze again in the wintertime after a decent rest, it should be a dramatic improvement over grazing every month because the grass is sufficient to do so?
Adapting this to my situation, I may struggle with more than daily moves for much of the week. I think I would ideally like to get round everything quickly once, then do that shutting up on the second round as I think the feed quality of that reserve would be that much better. But maybe doing this I will be prioritising stock performance at the expense of the soil? As the OM in my soils has recently been measured at 6-9%, I don't think we are in desperate need of laying down a lot of litter, so best to put as much as possible through a beast?
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Cheers Dan. We were originally leaning for 30+30 cells and jamming an extra system in that area - but the shorter rotation is maybe just as easily accomplished with 40+40?
If we were definitely going to be running several smaller mobs as per "pure techno" then we would, but even 3 ½ systems would facilitate this.
Going with the one big mob (most of the time) it's still the same 280 cells
As per that thread on the grazing group with Jaime you're on, the short recovery thing isn't as interesting now as what we could do with the longer recovery/ higher utilisation style grazing, if we're aiming to trim the number of rotations.
Slow-grown grass has never really been the envelope I wanted to push, but it makes more sense than racing around selecting for weeds and yorkshire fog, perhaps?
If we were definitely going to be running several smaller mobs as per "pure techno" then we would, but even 3 ½ systems would facilitate this.
Going with the one big mob (most of the time) it's still the same 280 cells
As per that thread on the grazing group with Jaime you're on, the short recovery thing isn't as interesting now as what we could do with the longer recovery/ higher utilisation style grazing, if we're aiming to trim the number of rotations.
Slow-grown grass has never really been the envelope I wanted to push, but it makes more sense than racing around selecting for weeds and yorkshire fog, perhaps?
NZDan
Member
- Location
- Broomfield, New Zealand
We're going to lock some ground up for deferred grazing this summer, mostly likely dryer sunny faces and two small paddocks that are always poor. It'll be interesting to see how they respond.
NZDan
Member
- Location
- Broomfield, New Zealand
I did forget you were on one mob, that makes sense now.
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
It's still just "time and space". This option just allows more time.
You can still leave some residue with non-selective grazing, I'd aim for roughly the same level of utilisation as our winter grazing experiment, it's just a reserve-led recovery .
Most of the talk so far has been about leaving a green leaf to facilitate faster recovery, works well on the spring round but it begins to fail after that.
On the OM point, root exudates are more of a driver in a non-brittle environment than litter; litter is more and more necessary as you travel along the brittleness scale, because you need water first, or you don't have biological processes.
Obviously you don't want to drive animal performance too low, but whatever keeps profit/hectare up?
Woolless
Member
- Location
- Berwickshire, Scottish Borders
Would you mind re-posting a photo of your winter grazing residual to refresh our memories?