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

Kiwi Pete · Jan 7, 2021

Andy Heenan said:
Just wondered how effective this spray mix was and also for mob stocking densities such as those, what sort of stock numbere would be needed ?

It works alright, I just wanted to see if it did .
If you noted our rainfall, it was applied about exactly the wrong time, as was the drilling - we don't "usually" try to harm plants, as we don't usually record 670mm in two summer months

Density is just space, you could do it with a million animals or 10 animals. The million would be a lot happier than the ten though

Kiwi Pete · Jan 7, 2021

bendigeidfran said:
Thank's for that, very interesting, is this your thinking for changing your grazing?
The main thing i want to know is why haven't you posted this before

I was always a fan of this type of approach, but I wanted to test what he calls "the dominant" approach, hence no topping for a couple of years.

Let's hop on the Judy/Gerrish train, see if it improves our cycling... and then hop back off it and test what else can be done with animal impact..

For convenience, we'll try it with cattle for a few years, then we might need sheep to push it further.
I don't think it matters if your 200 tonnes/ha is sheep, cattle, or alpaca but cattle make your time go further with the infrastructure we have at present. We'll have to test that one as well.

Kiwi Pete · Jan 7, 2021

Samcowman said:
Thanks for posting the Graeme Hand video up @Kiwi Pete. About half way through it and some of the stuff he is saying resonates with things I have noticed the last couple of years.
I think the approach to grazing needs to be diverse as some of you guys have said with if you choose to not shorter rotations where you are aiming for growth, where the animals will be more selective you probably need to follow with rounds of high utilisation to help level the sward and stop your preferentially grazed plants getting worn out.

Yes, it does need to be changing, probably more than we realise. Most farms probably do a bit of both "by accident" over the course of a year but fear stops them pushing it too far in either direction?

Graeme told me they're grazing at 9 - 15 months so it's easy to see why/how this approach can effectively gloss over short-term weather and climatic changes. Market changes. Life events.

If you're leaving ⅓ for this and ⅓ for that then you simply don't have that time luxury because you're not that far away from simple rotational grazing. You'll still be running out of grass at the end of the season and making mud because you don't have a whole heap of wiggle-room.
I could see us speeding up quite considerably just to prevent soil damage over winter, so we need to either slow the grazing right down or run silly low stocking rates to make up for the lack of cover, or put them in a shed .
Slowing down is the obvious thing to do, so we need to make more of the paddock we're in..

It should eventually get our stocking rate up quite a bit higher than if we think to leave grass behind for all the giraffes we don't have.

Samcowman · Jan 7, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
Yes, it does need to be changing, probably more than we realise. Most farms probably do a bit of both "by accident" over the course of a year but fear stops them pushing it too far in either direction?

Graeme told me they're grazing at 9 - 15 months so it's easy to see why/how this approach can effectively gloss over short-term weather and climatic changes. Market changes. Life events.

If you're leaving ⅓ for this and ⅓ for that then you simply don't have that time luxury because you're not that far away from simple rotational grazing. You'll still be running out of grass at the end of the season and making mud because you don't have a whole heap of wiggle-room.
I could see us speeding up quite considerably just to prevent soil damage over winter, so we need to either slow the grazing right down or run silly low stocking rates to make up for the lack of cover, or put them in a shed .
Slowing down is the obvious thing to do, so we need to make more of the paddock we're in..

It should eventually get our stocking rate up quite a bit higher than if we think to leave grass behind for all the giraffes we don't have.

As ever diversity is key. This time it’s diversity of management for diverse goals.
I’m pretty sure in our types of climate his approach will give you better results when it’s wet in the winter because all that biomass above ground is being supported by a lot more biomass below ground which will help support the cattle better and make the soil more resilient to having stock on there in wet times.
This can be seen by @hendres pictures of his cows still out of grass, imagine that with a shorter pasture and the mess it would be in.
My problem at the moment is I have less time available to shift cattle when I need to be bunching them up and making them work harder. So I either need more infrastructure or more time!!

Kiwi Pete · Jan 7, 2021

Not only the biomass part Sam, but that extra time in between. If you only graze every 120 days or something, it gives the soil a lot longer to sort itself out than every 25 days can give.
So you can be a lot "harder" on things, in that case, and still be kinder "overall".
Density actually protects, which is really counterintuitive to many graziers.

here's 24 hour shifts
I've been laid up for 36 hours with some virus thing (think, bad bad gin hangover then get in a fistfight, and lose that fistfight

) but the show kept rolling.
You just have to be prepared to adjust things to suit the situation. The long round means less adjustments are needed.

This would (based on area and time) mean a 66 day grazing round, with the number of stock on hand. We won't be chasing our tails this year.

Think if we had made 30 acres of silage, and decreased our recovery time by 30% to compensate, would "it" be better or worse by wintertime?

holwellcourtfarm · Jan 7, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
Not only the biomass part Sam, but that extra time in between. If you only graze every 120 days or something, it gives the soil a lot longer to sort itself out than every 25 days can give.
So you can be a lot "harder" on things, in that case, and still be kinder "overall".
Density actually protects, which is really counterintuitive to many graziers.
View attachment 931921
here's 24 hour shifts
I've been laid up for 36 hours with some virus thing (think, bad bad gin hangover then get in a fistfight, and lose that fistfight ) but the show kept rolling.
You just have to be prepared to adjust things to suit the situation. The long round means less adjustments are needed.

This would (based on area and time) mean a 66 day grazing round, with the number of stock on hand. We won't be chasing our tails this year.

Think if we had made 30 acres of silage, and decreased our recovery time by 30% to compensate, would "it" be better or worse by wintertime?

I hope you bounce back quickly mate.

Woolless · Jan 7, 2021

holwellcourtfarm said:
I hope you bounce back quickly mate.

Here Here! Could be worse @Kiwi Pete, could be like a port hangover rather than a gin one

Kiwi Pete · Jan 7, 2021

holwellcourtfarm said:
I hope you bounce back quickly mate.

Thanks, yeah it was a bloody awful couple of days actually! But feel a lot better now.
Commented to the nurse that a year off man-flu makes it a lot worse! Finally got my sinus to let go tonight and wow, what a relief.
About half a ton of pollen and lime

and no C-19

Samcowman · Jan 7, 2021

Felt I needed to get some reading done before planning for the spring so ordered this a couple of days ago.
At nearly 500 pages it could take a while. Good job the text is big

som farmer · Jan 7, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
Thanks, yeah it was a bloody awful couple of days actually! But feel a lot better now.
Commented to the nurse that a year off man-flu makes it a lot worse! Finally got my sinus to let go tonight and wow, what a relief.
About half a ton of pollen and lime and no C-19

still spirits, gingerbread gin, look it up, great cure !

Kiwi Pete · Jan 8, 2021

Much better today

thanks everybody for the healing vibes and good wishes

Nice of the cattle to take all the buds of the thistles for us. Saves them letting seed go everywhere in a month or 2 .

Also notice there's quite a nice bounce from the roots; 2 days this side, and 4 days the other side of fence. The joy of rainfall, that soaks away.

Did the usual daily infiltration check.. About 160 litres in this trough.

Tip out and time until the surface is making the suck sound and how far it spreads across the surface.. about 4m²?

...and 120 seconds neat til "the popping candy noise"

160 ÷ 4m² is roughly 40litres per m², or the equivalent to an instant 40mm of rain in 2 minutes
That's what we always find here so it's comforting as we go to a different level of grazing that we are not overimpacting it.
Because it looks nude to me!!

As it's the most trafficked area, I kinda think it makes it more repeatable than picking a random place and tapping in a cylinder.

as with the pasture observations, if we look at the "most grazed" plants then it's more repeatable in terms of figuring a recovery time than guessing averages or admiring the clumps.
We want to "be better than average" at what we do.

Kiwi Pete · Jan 8, 2021

@Farmer Roy reminded me of another good check - what are the roots doing? Are we keeping our roots on our plants or grazing too fast?

Because we're only getting 70cm or so, I think that we are definitely grazing too fast.
Big improvement over how it used to be, but there's soil down there we should be into.

som farmer · Jan 8, 2021

now i know we are doing something wrong, no way our cattle will eat any part of a thistle ! Yet on our tight grazing, they will happily eat the docks right down, which then quite happily grow back again. On that subject of tight grazing, cattle will take it right down, and with a back fence, it has a long rest, and strongly comes back, the easiest to see benefit to see, is how you can massively increase stocking rate, without the cattle losing condition, 4ac lasted 38 i/c hfrs 5 weeks, then started on the regrowth, again, not bad.
Going back to your 'hand' video, if you work on the principle that cattle are selective grazers, and will only eat what they want to, going to greg judy, by leaving in a paddock, longer to 'clear' up, all they do is overgraze the grasses they like, which then leads to the residual left, being the grasses they don't like, which means they take over, this is what we see in new leys, which is why we reseed ! So, is it better to take everything down, and give it a long break for all the grass types to recover, from 'zero base', rather than the not 'bad' grasses having a head start, rather than leaving higher residuals, which could lead to the wrong grasses taking over. The basic fact is that we have to make a profit, and if you work on the theory that leaving higher residuals, is allowing 'bad' grasses to dominate a ley. On the opposite side, we found leaving higher residuals behind the dairy, led to quicker and better regrowth, during our drought this summer, high quality grass, makes high quality silage, and quality grass, makes more milk, both of which, are highly desirable.
It's the 'bad' grasses taking over a ley, by selective grazing, that is making me think.

Farmer Roy · Jan 8, 2021

Not directly related to grazing, but some may find this pic interesting.

I will explain later

It’s all about “impact”

Kiwi Pete · Jan 8, 2021

som farmer said:
now i know we are doing something wrong, no way our cattle will eat any part of a thistle ! Yet on our tight grazing, they will happily eat the docks right down, which then quite happily grow back again. On that subject of tight grazing, cattle will take it right down, and with a back fence, it has a long rest, and strongly comes back, the easiest to see benefit to see, is how you can massively increase stocking rate, without the cattle losing condition, 4ac lasted 38 i/c hfrs 5 weeks, then started on the regrowth, again, not bad.
Going back to your 'hand' video, if you work on the principle that cattle are selective grazers, and will only eat what they want to, going to greg judy, by leaving in a paddock, longer to 'clear' up, all they do is overgraze the grasses they like, which then leads to the residual left, being the grasses they don't like, which means they take over, this is what we see in new leys, which is why we reseed ! So, is it better to take everything down, and give it a long break for all the grass types to recover, from 'zero base', rather than the not 'bad' grasses having a head start, rather than leaving higher residuals, which could lead to the wrong grasses taking over. The basic fact is that we have to make a profit, and if you work on the theory that leaving higher residuals, is allowing 'bad' grasses to dominate a ley. On the opposite side, we found leaving higher residuals behind the dairy, led to quicker and better regrowth, during our drought this summer, high quality grass, makes high quality silage, and quality grass, makes more milk, both of which, are highly desirable.
It's the 'bad' grasses taking over a ley, by selective grazing, that is making me think.

100%

One way gives you more grass - less stress because the root-chop only happens maybe 3 times a season...... but the root-chop never happens on the weeds and foggy shite. So they get 3x the rest ie total rest

The other way gives you less animal performance but may raise per acre performance because you put more animals at each acre... leading to more "better grass production" because you are smoking all the plants the same all the time... the care then switches from maintaining the plants to regenerating them with appropriate rest..

if we are going to give 90 days rest now, then we need to graze close to 90% of the plant away, but because of our destocking we can graze at 70-day speed and have a 30-day holiday and get another 10 days while it's growing well

That holiday represents about a $85/ac cost in lost earnings to our business, similar to the cost of baling up a surplus and feeding it out again if we cut 3 bales/ac

except without the tractor time, the wheelings and the loss of energy out of the ecosystem/landscape because the carbohydrates are out of the system for 6-12 months instead of ½-1 week

...and compaction, punctures, breakdowns and all the other stressors that come with machinery.

Kiwi Pete · Jan 8, 2021

Maybe you need more blues in your herd
@som farmer?

funny how this came about, we used to feed the heifers our spare veg in a bucket ... so I thought I'd be clever and get them eating weeds from the bucket ... and then they taught their calves to eat the thistles and docks and even the nettles (but they squash them all down first and bruise off the sting).
And now the calves are yearlings and teaching the grazers to eat weeds, so make of that what you will

Our ones just tend to pull them out and eat the plant, whereas the new ones just pick the flowers off. Just a matter of training and they'll soon get the idea.

Kiwi Pete · Jan 8, 2021

I was going to put this on the suckler cow ration thread for @hendrebc to consider

farmgineer · Jan 8, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
Maybe you need more blues in your herd
@som farmer? View attachment 932256
funny how this came about, we used to feed the heifers our spare veg in a bucket ... so I thought I'd be clever and get them eating weeds from the bucket ... and then they taught their calves to eat the thistles and docks and even the nettles (but they squash them all down first and bruise off the sting).
And now the calves are yearlings and teaching the grazers to eat weeds, so make of that what you will
Our ones just tend to pull them out and eat the plant, whereas the new ones just pick the flowers off. Just a matter of training and they'll soon get the idea.

Love this, great idea

Kiwi Pete · Jan 8, 2021

farmgineer said:
Love this, great idea

It's very cheap, and cows get onto the idea in about a week.
We had to catch most of the heifers last year to put more calves onto them, (for about a week) so it was really no extra work! Yoke them, trot off to get another bucket of weeds while they have a munch

yoke next heifer, feed her weeds, get calves sucking and fill the first bucket for the next girl

..and that was that, the thing is most people spoil the hell out of their stock with minerals and minerals and high-octane grass so they never really bother to investigate them too much.

JohnGalway · Jan 8, 2021

Has anyone here done any of the Soil Food Web courses from Dr Elaine Ingham?

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

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