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

[hendrebc]

National Cover Crop Summit Homepage

Cover Crop Strategies

www.covercropstrategies.com

Hopefully this works, let me know if it doesn't and I can try something else.
Covercropping is a really amazing chapter all on its own, I think most stock-farmers tend to just look at "feeding the cows" when it comes to what they plant - but CCing can be so much more than that, as I hope to demonstrate with ours.

People think outwintering and see 'a sea of mud' but that's largely because they didn't plant species specifically for "bedding" and other species to provide the correct C:N ratio for their expected winter conditions, stubble turnips grazed bare hardly provide soil armour or anything else besides "food for the cows"

What we're attempting to recreate with our mix is a bigger copy of what already works well here, that is: 'permanent pasture'

I'm really not liking my turnips this year. Mud
It's always been like that I just wasn't seeing it the same way I am now.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

I'm really not liking my turnips this year. Mud
It's always been like that I just wasn't seeing it the same way I am now.

It's easy to assume "that's just the way things are" as per Babe the Pig but if we keep doing the same old things..... then how are we going to get different outcomes??

Looking at what we do:
Cut all the 'surplus grass' off
Cart it off the land, pickle it at great cost
Start a tractor twice a day to feed it out in rations
Clean out all the sh!t and pie it up
Buy in bedding
Spread it all back out on the land again

WHY can't I do all of this in a field, the ONLY difference is that my field doesn't have a plastic roof and cattle never needed a roof to evolve; as Roy said about why drills are so heavy we just accept that things are "needing to be that way" because our soil isn't compatible with what we do to it. So it's time to do something different here

 

[Treg]

I'm really not liking my turnips this year. Mud
It's always been like that I just wasn't seeing it the same way I am now.

Up until this year I've never seen wild ducks on the farm, see them most mornings now
Conditions seem to be suiting them at the moment.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

 

[Poorbuthappy]

Up until this year I've never seen wild ducks on the farm, see them most mornings now
Conditions seem to be suiting them at the moment.

Tis a tad damp!

Or perhaps it's your better farming methods. But I agree, it's nice to see them.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Up until this year I've never seen wild ducks on the farm, see them most mornings now
Conditions seem to be suiting them at the moment.

What type of ducks do you get? Mallards?

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Nice spraying rig.
It was a really heavy dew this morning, then turned out a proper scorcher later on, so we sprayed out the paddocks as planned..... now to see if it works as planned. His GPS said he sprayed 14.9ha which is quite a bit more than the 2D mapping app showed - mainly due to contour.
His spray boom is 15m and has 5 section control, so not too much overlap. But I'll mix enough seed for 16ha.

What I will try to do is take a weekly picture record from one spot, so we can see things (hopefully) progress from tired old pastures into covercrops, and back into regenerated pastures.

You'll also hopefully see me get these waterways fenced off before too long, using recycled materials from the fences I pulled out.

 

[Treg]

Tis a tad damp!

Or perhaps it's your better farming methods. But I agree, it's nice to see them.

Very unusual to see them here as normally a dry farm but yes it's great seeing & hearing them.

 

[Treg]

What type of ducks do you get? Mallards?

Yes Mallards , group of about 15 seem to be around most mornings.

 

[Woolless]

Yes Mallards , group of about 15 seem to be around most mornings.

I have two or three pairs knocking about regularly where there's water lying. We're a dry farm normally too!

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

Very unusual to see them here as normally a dry farm but yes it's great seeing & hearing them.

They'll also be good for sucking up slugs and snails.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Nice, I like having ducks about, we tend to get a resident pair of parries (Paradise Shelducks) breed on our larger pond and a couple of pairs of mallards based on the other smaller pond, and creek below it.
They must do a great job of cleaning up any spare invertebrates bopping about as they range all over the show; I think this year we have about 20 various ducklings between the 3 breeding pairs, and also a pair of Canada geese with 4 young, but they are mostly eating the neighbour's rape crop at the moment

 

[Treg]

The British farmers producing top quality food and taking on intensive farming – and veganism

Meet the new generation of farmers who are switching from commercial farming to Regenerative Agriculture. In this system meat and dairy is often a by-product of their efforts to save the planet...

www.independent.co.uk

 

[Crofter64]

View attachment 853964
Nice spraying rig.
It was a really heavy dew this morning, then turned out a proper scorcher later on, so we sprayed out the paddocks as planned..... now to see if it works as planned. His GPS said he sprayed 14.9ha which is quite a bit more than the 2D mapping app showed - mainly due to contour.
His spray boom is 15m and has 5 section control, so not too much overlap. But I'll mix enough seed for 16ha.

What I will try to do is take a weekly picture record from one spot, so we can see things (hopefully) progress from tired old pastures into covercrops, and back into regenerated pastures.View attachment 853967View attachment 853968
You'll also hopefully see me get these waterways fenced off before too long, using recycled materials from the fences I pulled out.

I’m bookmarking each of your posts on this project so I can follow them easily.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

National Cover Crop Summit Homepage

Cover Crop Strategies

www.covercropstrategies.com

Hopefully this works, let me know if it doesn't and I can try something else.
Covercropping is a really amazing chapter all on its own, I think most stock-farmers tend to just look at "feeding the cows" when it comes to what they plant - but CCing can be so much more than that, as I hope to demonstrate with ours.

People think outwintering and see 'a sea of mud' but that's largely because they didn't plant species specifically for "bedding" and other species to provide the correct C:N ratio for their expected winter conditions, stubble turnips grazed bare hardly provide soil armour or anything else besides "food for the cows"

What we're attempting to recreate with our mix is a bigger copy of what already works well here, that is: 'permanent pasture'

Registered

Thanks

 

[Rob Garrett]

No idea, but you wouldn't dunk your chips in it, smells pretty similar to the product you describe

Funny how we both got to roughly the same bit of the puzzle from different ends, isn't it?

I woyld def. recommend using some humate/fulvic acid in your brew as well as the molasses. Only need half a litre of fulvic per ha or so.

Where are you getting your humate/fluvic acid from KP? I read a bit about humates in Gary Zimmers book "The Biological Farmer" and wanted to include some in a trial molasses/seaweed spray mix on arable crops, trouble was the financial cost was pushing up so I dropped the humate.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

I’m bookmarking each of your posts on this project so I can follow them easily.

I wish I'd made far better use of bookmarking things early on - you think you'll have some things "forever" and then bust your smartphone

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Where are you getting your humate/fluvic acid from KP? I read a bit about humates in Gary Zimmers book "The Biological Farmer" and wanted to include some in a trial molasses/seaweed spray mix on arable crops, trouble was the financial cost was pushing up so I dropped the humate.

There is a relatively local contracting business who have recently branched out into reopening the old lignite seam at Kapuka (which, ironically, is right where I used to winter a dairy herd )
Normally, I think the 20 can of liquid humate would be around $99 but because it hasn't been trialled, tested etc YET, Andrew just gave it me on the proviso that we ran a decent trial and gave Southern Humates the odd free plug - he'd been to our place once when we had an open-day and has since been breathing all things to do with HPG and soil health.

So, even at $5/litre, it didn't really add much to the cost - I think Alan will bill me about $40/ha for spraying it on.
My rough budget will be around $50/ha for the spraying and around $150/ha for seed, an arbitrary figure but that's about what I'm prepared to to gamble on "the occult"

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

The British farmers producing top quality food and taking on intensive farming – and veganism

Meet the new generation of farmers who are switching from commercial farming to Regenerative Agriculture. In this system meat and dairy is often a by-product of their efforts to save the planet...

www.independent.co.uk

Hmmmm. All may not be quite as it seems. Apparently some farms are already claiming to be Regenerative with no clue what it ACTUALLY means.

Do we call them out and risk putting farmer against farmer or stay quiet and undermine the meaning of Regenerative? If we stay quiet then we can't really criticise the likes of Nestlé when THEY use the phrase. ?

 

[Farmer Roy]

Hmmmm. All may not be quite as it seems. Apparently some farms are already claiming to be Regenerative with no clue what it ACTUALLY means.

Do we call them out and risk putting farmer against farmer or stay quiet and undermine the meaning of Regenerative? If we stay quiet then we can't really criticise the likes of Nestlé when THEY use the phrase. ?

call the girls out

don’t let Regen Ag go the way of organics . . .