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

Kiwi Pete · Feb 11, 2021

Shame my phone died or I would have got some good photos tonight

This is about where we started the "total grazing" thing, not nearly enough recovery yet but it definitely has possibilities @Fenwick

mainly because the trucks are too busy hauling lambs to haul these cattle away, and I have them close to the yards again so they're easy to draft out of the mob at short notice... this is about 40 days since grazed last (to the deck)

som farmer · Feb 11, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
Shame my phone died or I would have got some good photos tonightView attachment 940249
This is about where we started the "total grazing" thing, not nearly enough recovery yet but it definitely has possibilities @Fenwick

mainly because the trucks are too busy hauling lambs to haul these cattle away, and I have them close to the yards again so they're easy to draft out of the mob at short notice... this is about 40 days since grazed last (to the deck)

well, as a dairy farmer, looks like plenty of milk in that mix.

Kiwi Pete · Feb 11, 2021

som farmer said:
well, as a dairy farmer, looks like plenty of milk in that mix.

It will make their tails dirty though, not enough grass in it.
That's the problem with grazing too early I think... if we weren't going to be down to 30 head of cattle by the time they were due to graze it then I would put them up the back boundary where the grass is stronger. On the chart this has another month yet.

Guleesh · Feb 11, 2021

GC74 said:
I've just had i brain wave, back at the weekend I think I said we have a paddock that has had a fence taken down across one end of it in 1984 and it's still no good well that end of that paddock used to be part of a small holding paddock for my old neighbors woolshed and sheep yards bet that paddock held a lot of sheep overnight that have had "the works" given to them over the years.

In a way I suppose its the difference between seeing the whole process of raising livestock as linear-
starting with fixing your soil and ending with fixing your animals before trying to sell them for more than what they've cost you.

Or a cycle, which (although some seem to almost refuse to accept it) is what it is. It's easy to just focus on the livestock part of the cycle and neglect other parts to varying degrees. But of course If you start removing spokes out of a wheel it doesn't matter how strong the spokes are on one side if you keep removing a spoke every now and again from the far side.

The really hard bit though in my mind is allowing nature to be bountiful (as it always has been) whilst meeting all the requirements , pressures and expectations the modern world throws at us.

And that's my morning sermon finished for today....

som farmer · Feb 11, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
It will make their tails dirty though, not enough grass in it.
That's the problem with grazing too early I think... if we weren't going to be down to 30 head of cattle by the time they were due to graze it then I would put them up the back boundary where the grass is stronger. On the chart this has another month yet.

that is a problem with clover, early bite, grass with clover, as you move on,, it's clover with grass. Hard to believe now, but when i made a lot of horse hay, spent £'s to get rid of the clover, then spent £'s, putting it back in ! One step i wasn't quite brave enough to do, we occasionally get a field revert to almost pure small leaf clover, especially in very dry years, and have always wished i had d/d a grain crop into it, i am determined to try it, one day.

farmgineer · Feb 11, 2021

som farmer said:
that is a problem with clover, early bite, grass with clover, as you move on,, it's clover with grass. Hard to believe now, but when i made a lot of horse hay, spent £'s to get rid of the clover, then spent £'s, putting it back in ! One step i wasn't quite brave enough to do, we occasionally get a field revert to almost pure small leaf clover, especially in very dry years, and have always wished i had d/d a grain crop into it, i am determined to try it, one day.

That sounds like a cool experiment

Crofter64 · Feb 11, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
I have water run onto ours which I want to capture.View attachment 939830
I think a few off-contour rips away from these little basins would help shift the neighbour's runoff out across these sunny faces, and then I can maybe add weeping willows, poplar etc along those rips in the odd place near a fence

there will be lots of fences for trees to be near, I just know it needs more depth/layers than the bare grass you see there

I just ordered 200 of these at three feet. I’m hoping to improve the survival rate of the hardwoods I’ll be planting on the east side of my longest N/S diving fence.

The poplars, willows ,birches , and confers on the west side will have to fend for themselves.I also collected lots of acorns, black walnuts and other tree seeds in the autumn. I put them in a garbage bag with damp leaves and will plant them with the seedlings. Two prong approach!

Crofter64 · Feb 11, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
" A few good frosts gets them itchin' "

Temperature has a lot to do with how lice affect the sheep, as it cools down they start to "dig in" and they begin to bite.
Nearly every lamb I've caught breaking in here has had lice, but if you didn't have them over your shoulder you would never know they were lousy.

They do just fine.... and then the next week they're pulling their wool out and rubbing on everything

Between lice and flystrike it sealed the fate of "keeping sheep" on Leeside, far more benefits for us to occasionally run a flying mob and possibly mix our ragamuffins in with them for exposure.

That's why we mix things up so much; have seperate sheep + cows, have sheep+cows together, have cows + grazing cattle together, have grazing cows and sheep together.

Change/avoiding monotony is really important, again Dick Richardson is all over that where many regen gurus are really just trying to pass on a good recipe.

Recipe = problematic
Flexibility = dynamic

who is Dick Richardson?

Crofter64 · Feb 11, 2021

Kiwi Pete said:
Afterburn

Wildfires were rare in Aotearoa prior to humans. That changed, but it is climate change that will fuel the inferno of the future.

www.nzgeo.com

Access forbidden to me

Kiwi Pete · Feb 11, 2021

Crofter64 said:
who is Dick Richardson?

There was a big loooong video I posted up about a month ago. Set aside 3½ hours

The reason I remembered about it, Bowland Bob had finally found time to watch it and said he (Dick) appears to almost contradict the "recipe" promoted by various other grazing gurus.
Judy/Gerrish says "leave lots of grass behind"
Jaime says "take 90% of the grass"

Dick, says "mix it all up as much as possible"

in a nutshell

Kiwi Pete · Feb 11, 2021

som farmer said:
that is a problem with clover, early bite, grass with clover, as you move on,, it's clover with grass. Hard to believe now, but when i made a lot of horse hay, spent £'s to get rid of the clover, then spent £'s, putting it back in ! One step i wasn't quite brave enough to do, we occasionally get a field revert to almost pure small leaf clover, especially in very dry years, and have always wished i had d/d a grain crop into it, i am determined to try it, one day.

Give it a go, I think you'd be surprised at the results of drilling into clover as you describe.

It can be a holiday resort for slugs though! So whack a heap of lime on it ASAP after drilling. They don't like that.

GC74 · Feb 11, 2021

Crofter64 said:
Access forbidden to me

Short version is the climate is changing and current environment can burn. the big fire at Nelson last year the fire started by a tractor discing stopped when it got to a block of native so we need to plant native forest everywhere. And recently we must have changed New Zealand to Aotearoa because New Zealand is never mentioned

GC74 · Feb 11, 2021

@Kiwi Pete question for you how well did oversowing work with that airseeder on your aerator?

Kiwi Pete · Feb 11, 2021

Fantastic with hard seed like clover and plantain, chicory / vetch not so good as they like to be dark (ie covered) to germinate so it was patchy

GC74 · Feb 11, 2021

What about cocksfoot and Timothy?

Kiwi Pete · Feb 11, 2021

They did "show up" in time, timothy is bloody slow though. My other grass put up a bit much of a fight to get a really good establishment, remember ryegrass has quite an alleopathic effect from elongation stage onwards so you'd probably want to either keep it on the back tit via overgrazing, or give it some herbicide if you wanted good grass establishment.
I oversowed those really open paddocks that were undersowed, that topped one we walked through, really just to fill in the gaps. It was good enough to do that, but where it was groundhogged twice was miles better (more tilth)

Kiwi Pete · Feb 11, 2021

Also @GC74 you have to remember a lot of my seed is cheap to free, that changes how serious you get about it.
I don't go for particular cultivars or anything like that, just shake the dregs out of bags and sweep up the stuff beside the mixer at Advance Ag etc etc so that explains my mentality of "put it at it" as opposed to precision

GC74 · Feb 11, 2021

yip I was just thinking of some low cost oversowing methods for a silage block to avoid get a plough out.

Kiwi Pete · Feb 11, 2021

GC74 said:
yip I was just thinking of some low cost oversowing methods for a silage block to avoid get a plough out.

Personally I would drill the grass and half the small seed, spin the other half on with the fert.. and use slugbait or lime

(low cost can be low outcome)

GC74 · Feb 11, 2021

The low outcome part is the bit I want to avoid

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

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