"Improving Our Lot" - Planned Holistic Grazing, for starters..

Has anyone who doesn't want to get rid of ruminants ever done the figures on ruminant agriculture if it weren't using it's current system with a reliance on chemicals and grain inputs. If it had better adapted ruminants to suit their environments, would there be a change in the number of over all ruminants up or down globally. Given, it's so often said particularly in arid climates that changes in management actually results in increases in stock numbers?
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
From memory, those lanes will be east/west? and will face the sun?
So trees in the longer term could be a reel benefit!

Does the access to the water tanks run in a neat line at a right angles to the proposed fences? Or across at a angles?

What sort of water infrastructure are you thinking of? Pipe sizes?
One system we visited was on 50mm pipe, to the system, then 32mm across the lane heads, then 25mm down the lanes. ....... £££££££££
Yes, east-west.
We'll just use 25mm for the runs down the lanes, and 40mm down the guts to the track - because we'll just extend it out next year. But we have plenty of head and won't have huge numbers, tanks are 28 metres higher than the house and they're only a couple of hundred metres away.
Plus the header tank will add a bit of push. If it was a bigger system I'd use 50 or 63 for a 'manifold' but I don't think we'll need it here.
How are you going to get the tension right with the wire on the bottom lane? There will be a fair bit of strain on the posts.
Davieh 3350 is thinking like me, it's like roeing up id start at the straight fence at the top and work down, they they would all be straight lines exept for the last lane.

My kiwitec fencing is arriving next week, i think for now im just going to set up lanes and vary the size of the cells.
Exiting times pete, i can't wait to get them up, should save a lot of time.
What we're thinking is wooden strainers will be used at the sharp "corners" and we'll use tension assemblies at those, and at the far ends, as those runs are straight.
Around the more gentle bends won't be too bad, regular "decent" posts will suffice and we have plenty of them.
The main thing for us is to have all the lanes the same width as the one next to it, so the subdivisions will be parallel and can eventually be put up and left in place. That saves "thinking" and helps management remain simple.
 

Crofter64

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Quebec, Canada
Has anyone who doesn't want to get rid of ruminants ever done the figures on ruminant agriculture if it weren't using it's current system with a reliance on chemicals and grain inputs. If it had better adapted ruminants to suit their environments, would there be a change in the number of over all ruminants up or down globally. Given, it's so often said particularly in arid climates that changes in management actually results in increases in stock numbers?
When I started farming 25 years ago ,I didn’t really know what I was doing ( still don’t) . I bought all my cattle and sheep&from neighbours who fed grain and had lots of inputs. I only fed grass and hay ( and a bit of grain to the house cow for a year or two) and didn’t even know that you had to give animals salt( I now feed salt, minerals, kelp ACV and home grown garlic seeds ,j ust for the record )They have all adjusted and thrived .I sell my meat directly to customers, and am constantly getting calls and emails about how tender, delicious etc it is. I still buy day old calves to nurse on my mother cows -they come from confinement dairies and go directly into my system without much fuss.I wonder if they do well in my system because it naturally suits them better than what’s conventional .
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
When I started farming 25 years ago ,I didn’t really know what I was doing ( still don’t) . I bought all my cattle and sheep&from neighbours who fed grain and had lots of inputs. I only fed grass and hay ( and a bit of grain to the house cow for a year or two) and didn’t even know that you had to give animals salt( I now feed salt, minerals, kelp ACV and home grown garlic seeds ,j ust for the record )They have all adjusted and thrived .I sell my meat directly to customers, and am constantly getting calls and emails about how tender, delicious etc it is. I still buy day old calves to nurse on my mother cows -they come from confinement dairies and go directly into my system without much fuss.I wonder if they do well in my system because it naturally suits them better than what’s conventional .
Stock are incredibly adaptable, they have to be, or otherwise they wouldn't "work" in many farming situations/systems.
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
@Samcowman - you were asking about our creeks and what we want to do?
20201231_142615.jpg

Basically, keep "the sponge" alive; knock down the grass when it needs knocked down, keep stock out when they need kept out (363 days a year!)
 

Henarar

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Somerset
Has anyone who doesn't want to get rid of ruminants ever done the figures on ruminant agriculture if it weren't using it's current system with a reliance on chemicals and grain inputs. If it had better adapted ruminants to suit their environments, would there be a change in the number of over all ruminants up or down globally. Given, it's so often said particularly in arid climates that changes in management actually results in increases in stock numbers?
Perhaps numbers would stay much the same just be in different places?
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Perhaps numbers would stay much the same just be in different places?
Numbers would increase, I reckon.
The main barriers to using livestock as listed on TFF, where the brightest minds in agriculture congregate:

takes too much time
costs too much money
wreck the land
no infrastructure

in most cases these are all due to stock that no longer fit the environment, because of the grain option it's "possible" to keep them, but if you didn't have that option then they would need to review specifications or they wouldn't have animals to cut up and sell.
Smaller and "better adapted" stock would be the norm, instead of being something you might keep.

Then the infrastructure requirement would be reduced because they wouldn't have cut down all the trees to "plough for wheat" and animals would have more options as far as wet-day-activities go

If you get outside Europe and the US, actually bugger all stock are housed and fed grain and urea and cake and everything else that John mentioned might have an impact on various pollution levels
 

Henarar

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Somerset
Numbers would increase, I reckon.
The main barriers to using livestock as listed on TFF, where the brightest minds in agriculture congregate:

takes too much time
costs too much money
wreck the land
no infrastructure

in most cases these are all due to stock that no longer fit the environment, because of the grain option it's "possible" to keep them, but if you didn't have that option then they would need to review specifications or they wouldn't have animals to cut up and sell.
Smaller and "better adapted" stock would be the norm, instead of being something you might keep.

Then the infrastructure requirement would be reduced because they wouldn't have cut down all the trees to "plough for wheat" and animals would have more options as far as wet-day-activities go

If you get outside Europe and the US, actually bugger all stock are housed and fed grain and urea and cake and everything else that John mentioned might have an impact on various pollution levels
humm, do they not house cattle in NZ
even if they don't there is more than one type of pollution, stock that are housed are not always fed anything except grass and are housed to stop pollution of one sort with the knock on that pollution of another sort is increased
I am coming to the conclusion that they are kept in the wrong place though for at least part of the year
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
humm, do they not house cattle in NZ
even if they don't there is more than one type of pollution, stock that are housed are not always fed anything except grass and are housed to stop pollution of one sort with the knock on that pollution of another sort is increased
I am coming to the conclusion that they are kept in the wrong place though for at least part of the year
Dairy cattle, there is a drive to do that (because of the grazing regime, and the "more not better") but I've never seen beefies inside other than at ours and one other farm many many miles away.

I've come to the conclusion that you're better to stock according to the type of cover you have, than try to mould the cover to suit the type of stock you decided would be the most profitable

it all just changes so fast

the folk who were here in the 90's maintain it is a sheep-only farm because cattle don't work here, the paddocks are too small and it's too wet for cattle 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
 

Henarar

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Somerset
I've come to the conclusion that you're better to stock according to the type of cover you have, than try to mould the cover to suit the type of stock you decided would be the most profitable
Yep, I do think that here it is more problematic to vary numbers/type over the year like you do particularly with breeding stock but there are other ways around that.
odd but we have far more here for part of the winter than the summer because the ones we use in the summer are not suitable
 

som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
No no no, often get told that some breeds will not do of grass and need feeding grain, you must be mistaken
we actually have a couple of holstiens left, that happily graze with our mongrels, and milk with good constituents, 1 is i/c no, 10, and av 9500litres ! Animals will adapt, to a degree, some of the 'specialised' ones have been bred to need more than forage alone, they may survive on grazing, but they don't thrive. It's bred into farmers, bigger and better, is best, all the tough old natural breeds, outed in favour of grain required stock, in dairy, big heavy holstiens, that many keep, and yet grass rats, 1/2 their weight, producing milk off grass, are replacing them, to some extent. One point i cannot quite understand, is cont sucklers put to AA, always think it should be the other way round. All things considered, farming needs a reset button.
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Yep, I do think that here it is more problematic to vary numbers/type over the year like you do particularly with breeding stock but there are other ways around that.
odd but we have far more here for part of the winter than the summer because the ones we use in the summer are not suitable
If you can winter stock "cheaply" then it makes sense to do it that way. That's our main earner as well, short and simple reason is most people have to do something costly for winter feed and we don't.

Taking area out for forage crops and silage isn't that expensive, but when you don't do it you notice it in the bank account!

This year the only real "cost" involved is forgoing a bit of cashflow through the summer (when everyone is battling too much grass in expensive ways), then we effectively 'sell it back to them' when their hard work battling their surplus worked.

That's why I didn't worry about the multispecies thing this year, I enjoyed trying it but it was the rest that grew the feed. Rest is quite cheap!
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
we actually have a couple of holstiens left, that happily graze with our mongrels, and milk with good constituents, 1 is i/c no, 10, and av 9500litres ! Animals will adapt, to a degree, some of the 'specialised' ones have been bred to need more than forage alone, they may survive on grazing, but they don't thrive. It's bred into farmers, bigger and better, is best, all the tough old natural breeds, outed in favour of grain required stock, in dairy, big heavy holstiens, that many keep, and yet grass rats, 1/2 their weight, producing milk off grass, are replacing them, to some extent. One point i cannot quite understand, is cont sucklers put to AA, always think it should be the other way round. All things considered, farming needs a reset button.
Bigger isn't necessarily better.
Bigger often just means more cost to keep them going!

Inputs are more valuable per joule of energy than outputs in raw form fetch, and a bigger body simply needs more joules to get up and go to work.
 

holwellcourtfarm

Member
Livestock Farmer
Had a bit of a play about with the designs tonight @exmoor dave, @NZDan and anyone else who's interested. View attachment 929829
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 .
How do you intend to divide that extra wide lane at the back? It looks like it would make 2 of similar width to the others?

How will using (mostly) straight lane fences work with moving nutrients back up onto the higher slopes?
 

Walwyn

Member
Location
West Wales
Hi All, Been watching this thread on and off for a while (was almost up to date before calving in the spring, dropped back in afterwards and was 150 pages behind :banghead:).
I gather a few of the regular contributors to the thread have done some holistic management training, and wanted to ask if they found it worthwhile and would they recommend it to a dairy farmer like myself? I have corresponded with Sheila Cooke and looking to take the online course in 2021.

I am spring calving, following standard platemeter grazing (if thats the best way to describe it). I have spent the last 12-18 months reading more into soil health and reducing synthetic inputs. I have moved to Foliar N and using humates and molasses in the fertiliser program which has helped me cut N from 240 - 160 KgN/ Ha and aiming towards 120 kg next season, also keen to be using microbes/brews through the tow and fert as well. Started sowing more diverse swards but haven't really changed our grazing management, I remember reading a post @Kiwi Pete put up about how he managed a dairy herd that made a lot of sense to me but cant for the life of me find it again.

Also feel at a bit of an impasse, in that ive always had a 5 year plan and knew where i was heading but having achieved the last plan have spent the last couple of years with plenty of ideas but no clarity of direction. Feel i've waffled on a bit but would be grateful to hear from anyone that has done the HM training.
 
When I started farming 25 years ago ,I didn’t really know what I was doing ( still don’t) . I bought all my cattle and sheep&from neighbours who fed grain and had lots of inputs. I only fed grass and hay ( and a bit of grain to the house cow for a year or two) and didn’t even know that you had to give animals salt( I now feed salt, minerals, kelp ACV and home grown garlic seeds ,j ust for the record )They have all adjusted and thrived .I sell my meat directly to customers, and am constantly getting calls and emails about how tender, delicious etc it is. I still buy day old calves to nurse on my mother cows -they come from confinement dairies and go directly into my system without much fuss.I wonder if they do well in my system because it naturally suits them better than what’s conventional .

They've evolved to eat and process grass so I suppose that's what suits them best.

Perhaps numbers would stay much the same just be in different places?

I figure there's room for much expansion in areas that are overgrazed, but understocked, wherever that may be across the world. I have this niggling suspicion that ruminant numbers could increase quite a bit - if managed differently. Could that happen in this part of the world, in places maybe but I think our climate has it's advantages and disadvantages and that may limit big expansion here compared to more brittle environs.

Numbers would increase, I reckon.
The main barriers to using livestock as listed on TFF, where the brightest minds in agriculture congregate:

takes too much time
costs too much money
wreck the land
no infrastructure

in most cases these are all due to stock that no longer fit the environment, because of the grain option it's "possible" to keep them, but if you didn't have that option then they would need to review specifications or they wouldn't have animals to cut up and sell.
Smaller and "better adapted" stock would be the norm, instead of being something you might keep.

Then the infrastructure requirement would be reduced because they wouldn't have cut down all the trees to "plough for wheat" and animals would have more options as far as wet-day-activities go

If you get outside Europe and the US, actually bugger all stock are housed and fed grain and urea and cake and everything else that John mentioned might have an impact on various pollution levels

I always think of our wild deer and goat herds here. No one is doctoring them or feeding them. How on earth do they remain so healthy without mans wise intervention? We all know that answer here.

humm, do they not house cattle in NZ
even if they don't there is more than one type of pollution, stock that are housed are not always fed anything except grass and are housed to stop pollution of one sort with the knock on that pollution of another sort is increased
I am coming to the conclusion that they are kept in the wrong place though for at least part of the year

Big problem with pollution management here in the EU is stock numbers. At least for my sector I'm required to have a stocking level that I must maintain over 12 months. I can have a different stock number for 7 months but it's 1.8 times the 12 month level. Our betters do not like poaching, even if it recovers, it's the condition on the day of the visit that's all important. Maybe a lot of that can be figured by increased moved through Winter and soil armour above and below, I could be contradicting myself from my earlier Zeitsman vs Savory grazing post :unsure: Wet here is very wet, sodden, water logged. It's certainly a challenge, the biggest one we have I figure.

Dairy cattle, there is a drive to do that (because of the grazing regime, and the "more not better") but I've never seen beefies inside other than at ours and one other farm many many miles away.

I've come to the conclusion that you're better to stock according to the type of cover you have, than try to mould the cover to suit the type of stock you decided would be the most profitable

it all just changes so fast

the folk who were here in the 90's maintain it is a sheep-only farm because cattle don't work here, the paddocks are too small and it's too wet for cattle 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I've often read the seeding posts on here, I've decided I'm better off to graze what I have and see what happens to it. While I'm doing that, work on animal adaptation. I could spend a lot of coin on messing around, which isn't my original purpose when I started down this road. So yeah, stock to your conditions and environment and calve/lamb much later than your neighbours.
 
Hi All, Been watching this thread on and off for a while (was almost up to date before calving in the spring, dropped back in afterwards and was 150 pages behind :banghead:).
I gather a few of the regular contributors to the thread have done some holistic management training, and wanted to ask if they found it worthwhile and would they recommend it to a dairy farmer like myself? I have corresponded with Sheila Cooke and looking to take the online course in 2021.

Done it.

Do it.

Best advice I can offer, there's a reason the Fundamentals module comes first and is mandatory. It is beyond important. Setting your Holistic Context is what every other aspect will rest on. Financial, grazing, ecological monitoring, whatever, they'll ALL refer back to your context, which is individual to your own situation. So, take that bit very seriously.

Add in this bit... I had my own ideas before I did the course, I just wanted to do the grazing module and the financial module. I didn't need those other bits! I didn't understand at first that HM is about making decisions, any decision, every decision, based on................ yeah, your context. It's about getting to where you want to go, socially, financially, environmentally, but to YOUR destination. Not just a way of eating grass or adding up figures, it's totally the reverse of isolating out parts of life/business.
 
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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

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