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

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
I had the same experience as you- at first I used the chart to record what had happened but then realised that it was much more valuable as a tool to plan for what needs to happen and where. If I have any outside commitments and need to be away for any lenghth of time, I plan for the animals to be in an easy to reach, not-much-chance-of-an-escape location and leave instructions for moving them. But I plan this long in advance , factoring in these requirements, and structure my rotation accordingly , to arrive where and when I need them to be. Also, if an area has been abused for whatever reason, I can block off that paddock on my chart, so that when I am planning my next move I know to stay away, while if I was just looking at it I might say to myself , ‘well its probably been a long enough rest, it looks pretty good, I think I’ll let the stock in’.
Looking at your charts Pete I see that the months are broken down into weeks, not days. On my chart I have a box for each day and I have room to mark down that I have had one or two moves that day. I find it is a much more detailed document than yours. What do you think are the advantages of your charts ?
No real advantage in less detail. I guess it would be difficult to use more detail in our situation as the paddocks are in my head until I create them.
This creates its own problem but it is only "an academic difference" as our farm is such a part of me that the plan is more of a reference
 

Treg

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Cornwall
Who was that run by?
I have a lad here on placement a day a week (wants to go into ecology). There is a small budget for training (around £500 I think) which was intended to be based on soils/ soil testing, but not sure where to look for such training.

Which also begs the wider question - are there any simple soil tests we can do on farm for him to monitor progress?
I think it was the Rural Business school / duchy college they got EU funding to deliver it.
Duchy college have a couple of Regenerative focus groups, not sure what they do up Bicton end.
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Who was that run by?
I have a lad here on placement a day a week (wants to go into ecology). There is a small budget for training (around £500 I think) which was intended to be based on soils/ soil testing, but not sure where to look for such training.

Which also begs the wider question - are there any simple soil tests we can do on farm for him to monitor progress?
Yes, heaps of DIY soil assessments and tests you can do. Mostly to test the physical integrity of it and function of it; like slake tests, visual soil assessments, infiltration, diversity, compaction/bulk density

These are the drivers of soil health - air is 78%N, if you have air in the soil you'll have water and you have nitrogen.
 

Yup, for 40 hours of recorded lectures, I'm sure there's more to it than that to be fair. Recently I showed a friend of mine a course I'm to start in January, he had the right idea that there's certainly money to be made in farm consulting. Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge anyone a living at all, but my curiosity has limits my wallet can't reach :ROFLMAO:
 

Rob Garrett

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Derbyshire UK
Well, you know which order works for you, so there's a good start. Basically we just have a small grazing chart so that I have a visual on the recovery periods my fields are getting, (we've a good lane system if we need to get stock from here to there but I try to avoid that where possible) so in effect we're still "rotationally grazing" but to a plan.
We do mix things up because our various fields are quite unique, and because the grazing is always a bit different.
Sometimes we pick on a field and give it a good hard hit and let it rest; other times we skim the top and get back in there faster - but when it's on a chart you can see it, so that's less to think about.

There's more commitment to choice when you are choosing an area to graze well/properly as opposed to finding some grass to feed your stock, that's the benefit that I see now I have come to terms with the fact that grazing is a stress.
When I was under the illusion that I was doing plants a favour by grazing them all the time, it was a different consideration. Now I have eyes that tell me that low-density grazing hurts the paddock, I put a lot more thought to where we go next.
For example we have about 10ha ready to graze with cattle, the "but, where" is very important as we want to be on the right grazing speed, running high density it means we are moving slowly.
Those 10ha will take 40 days to graze so we are thinking 40-80 days ahead, this is where the plan sets us free
At the risk of sounding like "I have not fully wrapped my head round the concept" again!

If the grazing chart plans where stock will be at a given date & how long they will take to move round, does that mean I need to measure a target kg DM/ha entry/exit? Put it another way, how did you know your 10ha would take 40 days to graze when you were putting your plan together? Or are you flexing your stock numbers to match your grazing plan/available grass?
 
At the risk of sounding like "I have not fully wrapped my head round the concept" again!

If the grazing chart plans where stock will be at a given date & how long they will take to move round, does that mean I need to measure a target kg DM/ha entry/exit? Put it another way, how did you know your 10ha would take 40 days to graze when you were putting your plan together? Or are you flexing your stock numbers to match your grazing plan/available grass?

In the beginning, think what would your animal eat in a day. Take say 4 temp posts out with you and make a square or rectangle of x meters by x meters. Do you figure that would be enough forage for that animal for one day. Remember also in that area to leave 50% behind or whatever figure you want to work off. You might get away with doing it once per field if paddocks are very, very uniform, but I think it's better to test multiple areas.

Once you know a square meter area that will satisfy the nutritional need of your animal plus what you want to leave, you can measure the entire area of that field/paddock and divide the paddock sq meter area by your animal day area square meter, now you have a rough guesstimate of how many animal days are in that paddock, or more simply how many animals can I put in this paddock for one day.

Do that for the farm.

Next step is refining this eyeball method, that means monitoring your guesstimate. After day 1 are your stock hungry, have they grazed harder than you wanted, have they left more than you wanted and monitor and refine as you go. In Winter or a wet Summer stock might dirty grass faster than in drier conditions so there are a few little surprises like that knocking around too.
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
At the risk of sounding like "I have not fully wrapped my head round the concept" again!

If the grazing chart plans where stock will be at a given date & how long they will take to move round, does that mean I need to measure a target kg DM/ha entry/exit? Put it another way, how did you know your 10ha would take 40 days to graze when you were putting your plan together? Or are you flexing your stock numbers to match your grazing plan/available grass?
You can do whatever monitoring you see fit, your example of budgeting grass is still a good one despite what I may say about it.

All I'm getting at is that we're needing ¼ha/day for the moo mob, they have about 15ha that they're in charge of maintaining. So you could measure grass or routinely weigh and go off your DLWG, or go by litter cover, leaf stage or a combination of these.

Monitoring is your feedback loop to prove that you aren't getting it wrong, it's important to assume that everything you do is "wrong" and prove the opposite.
The sheep mob is on the other bit of the farm with some cattle and because they're staying the same I have them on a fairly set rotation of a few easily-subdivided paddocks and the block we had the cattle on - so I can change their cell size or the time

we need more flexibility for the moo mob because that mob size is less predictable, we had 5 steers leave on Tuesday morning and know the others will be here to January so I might nip to the saleyards next week and buy a few animals.
Grazing may come up and it may not but I need a higher stocking rate "now" because various things indicate that - namely our cattle are putting on too much weight so we need to get more of them or we're missing an efficiency on a per hectare basis.

We have 40 head gaining 2.48kg/day so we really need 80 head gaining 2.28/day, incredible when you think that a hectare of "old weedy grasses" is growing 400kg of meat and fat and we're still leaving some of it there 😳

Hence the longer recovery and longer grass "doesn't matter" but it's important to check to tweak your grazing plan. I would keep the feed budget/wedge and grazing plan in different hands all the same.

One is really only to do with where the stock have been and are and go to; the other is to do with how many animals and haybales you should have
 

Poorbuthappy

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Devon
1 thing I can't get my head round with a grazing plan is if its meant to be flexible and revisited as the season progresses, and you've planned certain paddocks to fit with specific dates - holiday or whatever - surely if it has to be adjusted, due to poor or exceptional growing conditions, or just not feed budgeted accurately, then those dates will no longer fit with those paddocks?
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
1 thing I can't get my head round with a grazing plan is if its meant to be flexible and revisited as the season progresses, and you've planned certain paddocks to fit with specific dates - holiday or whatever - surely if it has to be adjusted, due to poor or exceptional growing conditions, or just not feed budgeted accurately, then those dates will no longer fit with those paddocks?
I would swap the paddocks around and then go back to the plan, the social/economic considerations of doing that would be minor compared to changing the date of my holiday to suit the grass in paddock 23.
Then just go back to the original plan, bit difficult if you are on a ten day round with 5 paddocks but as you get more cover it doesn't really matter because everything is less critical.

Every week we discuss what other commitments we have and base what we do (where) around those.
If it's looking a busy week then I make the breaks bigger and shift less, if there isn't much else on then we ramp it up and it gives us the results we want.
 
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som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
In the beginning, think what would your animal eat in a day. Take say 4 temp posts out with you and make a square or rectangle of x meters by x meters. Do you figure that would be enough forage for that animal for one day. Remember also in that area to leave 50% behind or whatever figure you want to work off. You might get away with doing it once per field if paddocks are very, very uniform, but I think it's better to test multiple areas.

Once you know a square meter area that will satisfy the nutritional need of your animal plus what you want to leave, you can measure the entire area of that field/paddock and divide the paddock sq meter area by your animal day area square meter, now you have a rough guesstimate of how many animal days are in that paddock, or more simply how many animals can I put in this paddock for one day.

Do that for the farm.

Next step is refining this eyeball method, that means monitoring your guesstimate. After day 1 are your stock hungry, have they grazed harder than you wanted, have they left more than you wanted and monitor and refine as you go. In Winter or a wet Summer stock might dirty grass faster than in drier conditions so there are a few little surprises like that knocking around too.
sounds like a plate meter needed ! The one thing a plate meter does, that is excellent, it gets you actually measuring what you have, once you get to 'know' what an area of grass has, that gives you the confidence to get on a system of grazing, how much is there etc. Once you are confident, you can stop using it. The important bit, is giving you the confidence, to judge actual grass, ours gradually became redundant, the eyeball, and wellie measure works fine with us, we have temp electric fences, running off a mains hot wire, we can easily adjust grazing area to suit the amount of grass the dairy needs. If you hate moving electric fences, this system is not for you, at peak, we will be moving up to 10 a day, with back fencing.
 
sounds like a plate meter needed ! The one thing a plate meter does, that is excellent, it gets you actually measuring what you have, once you get to 'know' what an area of grass has, that gives you the confidence to get on a system of grazing, how much is there etc. Once you are confident, you can stop using it. The important bit, is giving you the confidence, to judge actual grass, ours gradually became redundant, the eyeball, and wellie measure works fine with us, we have temp electric fences, running off a mains hot wire, we can easily adjust grazing area to suit the amount of grass the dairy needs. If you hate moving electric fences, this system is not for you, at peak, we will be moving up to 10 a day, with back fencing.

Depends, plate meter useless for my ground with different species of different lengths. Not keen on another bill either ;)
 
1 thing I can't get my head round with a grazing plan is if its meant to be flexible and revisited as the season progresses, and you've planned certain paddocks to fit with specific dates - holiday or whatever - surely if it has to be adjusted, due to poor or exceptional growing conditions, or just not feed budgeted accurately, then those dates will no longer fit with those paddocks?
That's why pencil is used in planning, and pen for what's been done.
 

Treg

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Cornwall
1 thing I can't get my head round with a grazing plan is if its meant to be flexible and revisited as the season progresses, and you've planned certain paddocks to fit with specific dates - holiday or whatever - surely if it has to be adjusted, due to poor or exceptional growing conditions, or just not feed budgeted accurately, then those dates will no longer fit with those paddocks?
Think of it as a flexible plan , it is what you want to do but can be adjusted for various reasons.
My dad use to say he had the cleanest mind in the district.........

Because he kept changing it 😀 :rolleyes:
 

Poorbuthappy

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Devon
Think of it as a flexible plan , it is what you want to do but can be adjusted for various reasons.
My dad use to say he had the cleanest mind in the district.........

Because he kept changing it 😀 :rolleyes:
I get the flexibility bit, just think that's not overly compatible with the idea of allocating specific paddocks with specific jobs/ dates.
 

Crofter64

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Quebec, Canada
I get the flexibility bit, just think that's not overly compatible with the idea of allocating specific paddocks with specific jobs/ dates.
It sounds unlikely but somehow you make do.As JohnGalway said you plan in pencil and record in pen. I write all over my plan with arrows etc. and then adjust if we are going faster or slower than predicted, and erase the pencil marks With the chart on front of you you can see at a glance where you can adjust pther paddock entries i.e get in earlier or later than planned to still arrive at the paddock you chose to be in at a specific time. Without the plan you would go to the most convenient spot or make hasty decisions.
This summer I was in a jam with nowhere to go as I had done my rotation faster than I thought because we had no rain.( how did I know I had to go faster- the complaints department told me)Looking at my plan I chose to sacrifice a well fenced paddock, close to the barn for shade and hay , moving them forward little by little , to allow the other pastures to recover. Worked perfectly and the sacrifice field rebounded after the rain came mid August.
 
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10th of December 2020, 8:00 PM London

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Read his recent blog to get a flavour of the wisdom he will pack in to this webinar.

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som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
we have become increasingly interested in this thread, trying this and that, getting some good results. But have sort of thought it's not quite 'main stream' ag, not that i care about that, so, i was quite surprised to open the farm consultancy briefing notes, out today, has an unusually large article, on regenerative ag, which has been put together, in an interesting and informative way. I presume anybody can download it, but it's worth reading, and settled a few doubts on somethings. Covers a few points, i posted, just above this, before i read theirs !!! Perhaps, instead of being slightly of mainstream, we will now be leading the way !!!!!
 

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