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

[awkward]

Yeah, TBH if you're doing this type of grazing with dairy cows, you'd just make it work. You might need to shift more often and graze more often than we do,, but then it might rain more often too.
Most of the dairies here have dried off for the season (usually go into June) because whatever they thought they could do [with high frequency grazing+ making silage] the last couple of years have knocked out of them

So there's that, they're melting their cows into a vat while feeding out their winter rations, while ours is still growing and will maybe carry feed over into the spring... tortoise vs hare stuff

It will be interesting to see how @awkward gets on with it (less grazings/longer rotations) because he's one of the few dairy-farmers talking 70-80 day recoveries that I know of

Not their yet, managed to push it much further last season at this point ,but whe have been very slow this year, and of course I'm my own worst enemy as I'm over stocked again, but off loading over next few weeks slowly, we have just finished our first round , in very dry conditions regrowth have been variable with cold winds at night so we will be lite on this round, looking more like 24days as closeing extra ground , best decision was moving to 1march calving,

 

[awkward]

hopefully will in time, but docks here, are a major problem. Chickweed, fat hen, and other annuals, sheep and cutting, sort them out, thistles and docks, they don't. I would love a more sensible solution, but am still looking.

Is compaction an issue, as dock is a poor competitor,

 

[som farmer]

Is compaction an issue, as dock is a poor competitor,

we compact very easily, so no, pretty anal about soil pans.
Aerator, and sward lifter/subsoiler, well used.
hoping with more min-til and d/d, or non inversion methods, might improve things, as of yet, no.

 

[awkward]

we compact very easily, so no, pretty anal about soil pans.
Aerator, and sward lifter/subsoiler, well used.
hoping with more min-til and d/d, or non inversion methods, might improve things, as of yet, no.

I wouldn't be too hung up on it in that case, just the seed bank expressing itself, just look at it as extra forage high in iodine,

 

[som farmer]

we take our grass growing very seriously indeed, high quality grass, and silage, to us, are money generators. Been taking grass samples today, ready for a silage cut, next week. 1st cut silage will be done in 3 lots, as grass reaches 'ideal' stage, faffing around with sheets, on/off, pays well.
Specific cutting leys, are multicut, and since discovering fresh dock leaf's are 25% protein, and contain minerals, have changed my mind, a bit, and with multicut, the buggers don't get to seed.
But we are a bad farm for docks.
We are trying to separate cutting, and grazing leys, thinking the dual purpose, is not quite so good, Red clover, cut only leys, av 19% protein last yr. Those grazing leys we took a cut from, were good, and av16%p. P/P, we have, wasn't as bad as expected, around the 12/13%. And this is why we silage in 'batches'. The three types, do not reach 'best' stage, at the same time, we are exceedingly good, at taking sheets on/of, and get on, exceedingly well, with our contractor, who farms as well.
I sometimes wonder, if how we farm, 'fits' into regen type principle, but we base our grass management, on them, and concentrate on soil health, and fertility, and it appears to work, even though we are quite intensive.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Beyond grass: Bridging Feed Gaps and Alternative Crops | Please join us to listen in on a conversation between two experienced grass farmers, Dale Strickler and Chris Grotegut. The conversation will dig into... | By The Grassfed ExchangeFacebook

Please join us to listen in on a conversation between two experienced grass farmers, Dale Strickler and Chris Grotegut. The conversation will dig into...

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just sat in on this, some really good points made about not grazing when perennials are at their most vulnerable - which is about the polar opposite of what the "graze fast when it's growing fast" movement is built upon, the opposite of the "keep it neat and tidy" as well as the "take it now for winter feed" movement

I have huge interest in dryland management and there is a lot to learn and improve upon where we are, not just when it's dried out but also to maximise our photosynthesis and resilience for the next dry spell

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Ahhh, spring pasture. I was delving back through my phone gallery to see when this area was last grazed... 2 October 2021

Is it high quality pasture? No, it isn't.

Is it ⅓ of a day's grazing, when we need all we can get? Why, yes it is!

I'd need to do some digging to see just how much rain has fallen in the past 209 days, I have a feeling it will be well under 209mm though.

 

[crashbox]

Ahhh, spring pasture. I was delving back through my phone gallery to see when this area was last grazed... 2 October 2021View attachment 1032276View attachment 1032277View attachment 1032278
View attachment 1032279Is it high quality pasture? No, it isn't.

Is it ⅓ of a day's grazing, when we need all we can get? Why, yes it is!

I'd need to do some digging to see just how much rain has fallen in the past 209 days, I have a feeling it will be well under 209mm though.

Some people winge about bad grass... "belly fill" etc.
But if you are set up with sufficiently low overheads, and are achieving growth rather than going backwards, what's not to like?
Still be less financially exposed and making more £ (or losing less) than the farmer with high input-high output system in leaner times.
Which let's face it, seems to be most of the time!

 

[Kiwi Pete]

There has actually been 259mm here in that period.
In our current "rotation length" of 120 days there has been 166mm, with 64mm in the past ten days

Quite interesting taking that in, and chewing it over for ½ an hour....

if I wanted to "do one grazing pass per ten inches of rainfall" then I damn near hit it on the nose for that cell, with 209 days

That is a timeframe I would never have guessed upon or even thought was appropriate, hence 80-100 days being in the grazing plan, 83 paddocks in the technosystem layout etc

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Some people winge about bad grass... "belly fill" etc.
But if you are set up with sufficiently low overheads, and are achieving growth rather than going backwards, what's not to like?
Still be less financially exposed and making more £ (or losing less) than the farmer with high input-high output system in leaner times.
Which let's face it, seems to be most of the time!

I had to "suck it and see", I mean we all hear stories about what we can and cannot feed this and that and the next thing. They're only stories though.

The past couple of years has really shown up just how much of "reality" are simply stories about stuff, being autistic I can cut through most of them like a hot knife.
I've also gotten really present to the stories I tell myself

Probably the catalyst has been seeing all the "scary brown grass" pictures from around the world and coming to the conclusion that the only real thing stopping us doing that was me, and the infrastructure/tools we had when we started.

If you'd asked me "Pete, do you think you can get acceptable livestock performance and improve landscape function feeding youngstock mature feed" when I had 17 paddocks, 8 concrete water troughs in dumb places, and a bunch of standards and reels... nope!!

Too much like hard yakka.

but with 500 paddocks that can be turned into 800 or whatever with one gear-reel, it changes what we can do with youngstock grazing, as it changes the herd effect up quite a few gears and that means that much more rest days/recovery can be achieved, without the wheels falling off.. but you can't really hop into a 100 day round unless you have the herd effect.

Trampling some grass down only gets you "this far" as grazing from this height to that residual only gets you a way.

The bottom line I guess is that we're back to carrying the same number of livestock as the last guy did.. but he made things suffer and sweat to get there, if it didn't rain then the farm took the brunt of it
The year we took over he was on a 16-day rotation by now and he'd only cut enough silage to last 6 weeks of winter, the heifers had lost 1.5 BCS, a few months away from calving.
There were lessons to be learnt before I'd even walked the farm to survey the damage; but I do remember feeling just how "sh!t this situation is"

I do also remember trying to justify why I was topping to a certain crop farmer from over the ditch, trying to justify using "take half leave half" to a certain young lady from Canada... I remember asking @Agrispeed why he was using nonselective grazing and long recovery periods on his dairy farm when the done thing in "regen grazing" is to just take the top and move on

You really just have to suck it and see, don't ya

 

[cows sh#t me to tears]

There has actually been 259mm here in that period.
In our current "rotation length" of 120 days there has been 166mm, with 64mm in the past ten days

Quite interesting taking that in, and chewing it over for ½ an hour....

if I wanted to "do one grazing pass per ten inches of rainfall" then I damn near hit it on the nose for that cell, with 209 days

That is a timeframe I would never have guessed upon or even thought was appropriate, hence 80-100 days being in the grazing plan, 83 paddocks in the technosystem layout etc

Was reading tonight parts of the US breadbasket have had less than an inch of rain in nearly 12 months. Other spots last 6 months. Also copping 20mph winds daily. Things really are dire for many over there.

 

[cows sh#t me to tears]

Will April showers arrive in time to make the Kansas wheat crop?

Chris Tanner finished top-dressing his wheat on Tuesday in northern Kansas, pondering whether fertilizing was a fool’s errand. According to the Kansas Mesonet, the Norton substation has measured 161 days without more than a quarter inch of rain — more than five months. The area has virtually...

kswheat.com

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Was reading tonight parts of the US breadbasket have had less than an inch of rain in nearly 12 months. Other spots last 6 months. Also copping 20mph winds daily. Things really are dire for many over there.

The guys on that Grassfed Xchange webinar I posted today were saying that They're relearning how to farm with 3 inch rainfall!

One gem for me was considering warm-season annuals into cool-season pastures, I have never really bothered looking in that direction because I didn't see the summer feed gap being worth doing more than what we're doing with the grazing plan (in our climate) and just dismissed it as "we don't get the heat for that"

but it's more than a feed gap, it's a gap in the cool season, looking at things to simply help cool the soil so the cool-season plants we have can do better, then it makes me reassess that decision not to look at it as a possibility.

I guess I kinda got that this year from looking at tree shaded areas, even what's in the thistle patches, but with ½ inch or 3 inches, we aren't growing Jack

 

[cows sh#t me to tears]

Best one here for that is Lucerne. Responds well to any rainfall over summer (and any time of the year basically). But then lends itself to oversowing with either oats or annual ryegrass in the Autumn to provide extra bulk over winter /early spring when the Lucerne is slow.
You just don't get the response out of any other plant to "a rain" as you do with lucerne

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Best one here for that is Lucerne. Responds well to any rainfall over summer (and any time of the year basically). But then lends itself to oversowing with either oats or annual ryegrass in the Autumn to provide extra bulk over winter /early spring when the Lucerne is slow.
You just don't get the response out of any other plant to "a rain" as you do with lucerne

I'd quite like to give it a trial now, there is a bit

here

that probably has enough slope and lie to grow lucerne without it getting wet feet.

Certainly gets baked enough to put the brakes on short-rotation ryegrass and white clover, so I'd probably put cocksfoot with it. I think the two went quite well in @CornishTone's plots.

Then we'll get ten wet-as-wet summers in a row, so I'll be quids-in

 

[cows sh#t me to tears]

You don't need massive fall for Lucerne. Just nice free draining soil and good drainage. One of my best paddocks only has .06 fall on it (think 1 : 1800)

 

[cows sh#t me to tears]

Pre millennium drought. I had planted Lucerne, prg, and white clover for grazing by the dairy heifers. Unfortunately bugger all irrigation water put paid to that. The Lucerne did however persist. That said , it would have provided a nice "mix" if things hadn't turned to shite. Think there'd be lucky to be any white clover grown in the riverina at all now....possibly goes for northern vic too? Just not water efficient anymore.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Pre millennium drought. I had planted Lucerne, prg, and white clover for grazing by the dairy heifers. Unfortunately bugger all irrigation water put paid to that. The Lucerne did however persist. That said , it would have provided a nice "mix" if things hadn't turned to shite. Think there'd be lucky to be any white clover grown in the riverina at all now....possibly goes for northern vic too? Just not water efficient anymore.

It works alright in whatever our normal seasons were like... or at least that's what we keep telling each other...

Thinking back to that 259mm, two or 3 summers ago we had that much fall in a weekend, we were trying the "take ½" thing that year so the white clover never really had a chance to completely rip away as it would do if we had lifted some silage off or bared some paddocks down.

When rainfall is plentiful, it probably grows well and also helps work as a living mulch, so 'water efficient at keeping water there' but as you say it isn't water efficient by way of growing tonnes of feed from little water.

It seems to grow really well here as either an upright large-leaf plant or a small-leafed creeping groundcover plant,, this year it grew mainly as a crispy thing.

At least it all got time to completely do its stuff, I bet we have some seed on the ground

 

[crashbox]

It works alright in whatever our normal seasons were like... or at least that's what we keep telling each other...

Thinking back to that 259mm, two or 3 summers ago we had that much fall in a weekend, we were trying the "take ½" thing that year so the white clover never really had a chance to completely rip away as it would do if we had lifted some silage off or bared some paddocks down.

When rainfall is plentiful, it probably grows well and also helps work as a living mulch, so 'water efficient at keeping water there' but as you say it isn't water efficient by way of growing tonnes of feed from little water.

It seems to grow really well here as either an upright large-leaf plant or a small-leafed creeping groundcover plant,, this year it grew mainly as a crispy thing.

At least it all got time to completely do its stuff, I bet we have some seed on the ground

I like white clover. Small, medium and large.

I'd be on higher rainfall than you and @cows sh#t me to tears but I like the smothering effect for ground cover, esp. Between more open tillering or tap root plants (cocksfoot, chicory, festulolium, etc.).

Everywhere there's clover is somewhere a thisle/dock/annual weed isn't...

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Considering it was one of our 'mainstays' not so long ago, other things have filled in quite nicely.

I used to see it as a real carpet but now that the bare soil problem, or not enough litter problem has been looked at, it tends to be more "bunchy" and bigger and less of a continuous carpet

I reckon if we put sheep back into the mix then it would possibly revert back, just because of how they graze it and the lack of pressure you can put on sheep before they fall out of the paddocks