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

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer

interesting resource, 40 years of work to painstakingly draw root structures
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GC74

Member
Looks a bit like yellow rattle? Big game changer if it is.
I just looked that up on a nz website and they reckon we don't have yellow rattle here and nor do we want it,( they didn't say why) they did say they have seen a similar plant they suspect is a broomrape. But uncle google doesn't have photos of it with a yellow flower🤷‍♂️
 

onesiedale

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Derbyshire
Yellow rattle is a favourite plant of the Wildlife Trusts round here. A parasite that holds ryegrasses back and allows other plants to get a hold in meadows

 

som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
Yellow rattle is a favourite plant of the Wildlife Trusts round here. A parasite that holds ryegrasses back and allows other plants to get a hold in meadows

wonder how long it will be before some bright spark, in defra, decides it's a must have, for herbal leys.
 

Crofter64

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Quebec, Canada
Guess it depends if you have wood available. It’s cost isn’t nice right now.

If you have access to boards, and the time, take it down and use the boards, spaced out. Save the tin for a roof.

If you don’t have access to boards, is there any way you can space the tin? I’m assuming they’re in the narrower, long, style common out here. Or maybe space the tin with gaps of boards spaced.

Of course, this is me directing your time and labour :LOL:
I took your advice @Blaithin and replaced the tin with wood. It is very cold today with a fierce wind, but the animals are happy with their windbreak:
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hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
I did the maths on selling the sequestered carbon at around £140 an acre based on some rough sequestering figures for grazing and the current market price for carbon offsets that I saw. Problem seems to be proving what you've captured. The markets for selling the sequestered carbon are already there, we just need a robust measure of what we have stored and we can sell into it.
I'd be interested to see what other people think we could get.
I quite like the idea of using a soil test whereby you dry some soil. Weight it. Then cook it in an oven for a given time before weighing again. The proposal I saw said this gave an indication of soil carbon by what was burnt off as CO2.
I think to get it recognised by the scientific community we would have to prove the accuracy of the test, develop a authorised base of laboratories to do the work and take samples that can show traceability to each field. No doubt there would be alot of room for fiddling the results which would also need to be counteracted.
I was wondering about drafting a research proposal on this subject and starting a crowdfunding page, advertised on TFF to try and get some of this done. My thinking being that big business is researching us out of the industry to line their pockets, we should fight back and focus research in line with what we are seeing on the ground and maybe this time we can profit.

Sorry for the long post...🤐
That's not enough to he worth bothering with. Unless it's every year. If it's a one off payment to keep the carbon in the soil for however many years then a one off payment is no good. You've spent it and then what? You have to keep the carbon there and there's no guarantee it will stay there despite your best efforts. Well depending on how they measure it. Needs to be an every year payment so they can 'rent' the carbon from you or not bother. If it's a one off payment then they effectively own it and you have to keep it there for a long time and pay back the money you don't have anymore. Any landowners singing up for something like that have to be very careful...
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
That's not enough to he worth bothering with. Unless it's every year. If it's a one off payment to keep the carbon in the soil for however many years then a one off payment is no good. You've spent it and then what? You have to keep the carbon there and there's no guarantee it will stay there despite your best efforts. Well depending on how they measure it. Needs to be an every year payment so they can 'rent' the carbon from you or not bother. If it's a one off payment then they effectively own it and you have to keep it there for a long time and pay back the money you don't have anymore. Any landowners singing up for something like that have to be very careful...
If you "sell" your carbon does it mean it then belongs to someone else?

Agreed, it makes my nuts ache, it's the same concept ("ownership" of natural resources and capital) that lead to the problems the world is in today... someone owns the oil, someone owns the land, someone owns the radio waves... tis the European way!
 
I just read that pasture only sequesters carbon (approx 0.5 ton/ year) for about 25 years, at which point it becomes carbon neutral, and is just storing approx 50 tons per acre in the top foot of soil. Meanwhile, ploughing can release 3 tons of carbon per acre. This implies that if carbon is monetised, it could become a bigger cost for arable farmers than it would be an income for grassland farmers. It may also explain why the headlines around ELMS are focused on arable conversion to pasture and not existing pasture.
 

hendrebc

Member
Livestock Farmer
If you "sell" your carbon does it mean it then belongs to someone else?

Agreed, it makes my nuts ache, it's the same concept ("ownership" of natural resources and capital) that lead to the problems the world is in today... someone owns the oil, someone owns the land, someone owns the radio waves... tis the European way!
Yes for the next 35 years is what I've seen.
It's a bad job however you do it.
But I've said it before and I still think it's true (but sh!t at the same time) The only way to get something looked after is to give it a monetary value. How you do that I have no idea. Credits of some sort maybe? But who works them out? Who works out the value of things? I'd say most of the natural things are near priceless... Problem is no one values it now because it's not 'worth' anything. If those hedges outside are worth say £100/metre they will likely never get ripped out. If the Amazon jungle was worth say £10,000 an acre as it is no one would cut any of it down. Now it's not worth anything and is being cut down and burnt at an alarming rate.
 

Bury the Trash

Member
Mixed Farmer
Yes. Probably driven around 2000/2001 and will see me out, Goldpine puts a 50 year guarantee on them... They're good posts for their small size IMO.
View attachment 936057
I think they grow the pines especially for fencepost use (slow grown in a slow growing area) just to get the density up, and they are a ¼ round with rounded "corners" so pretty versatile.
I drove a lot in around my creeks last year to help with the pseudo technograzing we did over winter
(somewhere to terminate the fences + a power feed) so they can come back out again as well

Far superior to the "tips" they used to foist off on us as economy posts, pine tips being about the most brittle and low density wood imaginable and even a rock underground would shatter them when you gave them a bit much 'monkey'

I will probably get a bundle of half-rounds to use as strainers for the ends of the big pulls, even though there's spring assemblies and lighter wire, these systems do a lot of "work" with bikes riding over them etc etc as opposed to the static strain of a conventional post+wire fence... (if you work on 150kg tension times 9 wires that's a lot of pull, this will maybe have 60kg on the post but lots of movement)

Basically most of the node posts (where wires cross wires) will get one of these driven in, mainly just because of the way the lanes run up and over the contour, the tension would try to pull the whole lot over if we just used fibreglass right through.

The crossing fences (the ones that make the individual paddocks) will only really need a single supporting arrowpost in the middle of the span (25 metre spans, the lanes are max 50 m across)
Interesting KP, I like fencing , of any type :cool:


and........please keep us posted, 😂:sorry: ..
 

som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
while the idea of being paid to store it, the how and why, is not yet there, perhaps a better way would be in a subsidy form, so much per metre of hedge, so much per year for long term leys etc, plus grants for tree/hedge planting, at least it would match in with the 'public good' image. But the long term aim, is either reduce carbon emissions, or find a way to extract it from the atmosphere, mechanically, and use it for 'something'. If we start selling it to industry, they will try to follow the s/mkt trend of stealing it !
 

Blaithin

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Alberta
always told a gappy hedge increased wind speed, venturii effect. But you lads have seriously cold winds, so you should know.
Depends how big the gaps are. Windbreaks do not have large gaps, you really don’t feel the wind on the other side of them. But if they were solid instead then there’s a greatly increased chance that they will blow over. You don’t need to build a kite to stop the wind.
 

som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
a question, we lost 2 animals to blackleg last night, something we rarely see, these were both out on kale, given the fact the kale is on our driest ground, and by being the driest, it would be fair to say it's had rather a lot of slurry/muck applied over the years, so, because we haven't ploughed it for several years, just tined p/h, does that mean it is a greater danger of picking up b/leg, by virtue of everything being 'on top', not turned over, and it is very muddy up there.
Just a thought really, but we will be vaccinating all stock, in the next couple of days, double dose, 70p. And how many people routinely vaccinate cattle against it. At 70p, it should really be a no brainer, but, we lose an animal, start vaccinating, and it tails off, there was some vaccine in the back of the medicine cupboard, expiry date, 2011, so the last loss would have been before that !
To be fair, when we were all year calving, and buying groups of milkers, it was 'difficult' to keep up with batches of calves, and it drifts, now block calving, should be easier. We will be 'good' for a time, and then......... hope not though.
 
a question, we lost 2 animals to blackleg last night, something we rarely see, these were both out on kale, given the fact the kale is on our driest ground, and by being the driest, it would be fair to say it's had rather a lot of slurry/muck applied over the years, so, because we haven't ploughed it for several years, just tined p/h, does that mean it is a greater danger of picking up b/leg, by virtue of everything being 'on top', not turned over, and it is very muddy up there.
Just a thought really, but we will be vaccinating all stock, in the next couple of days, double dose, 70p. And how many people routinely vaccinate cattle against it. At 70p, it should really be a no brainer, but, we lose an animal, start vaccinating, and it tails off, there was some vaccine in the back of the medicine cupboard, expiry date, 2011, so the last loss would have been before that !
To be fair, when we were all year calving, and buying groups of milkers, it was 'difficult' to keep up with batches of calves, and it drifts, now block calving, should be easier. We will be 'good' for a time, and then......... hope not though.
It is a no-brainer. Since I've started in a small way with cattle, I've made sure that they all have Bravoxin 10, which covers for blackleg. It can get expensive if you start with all different jags but I'm surprised more don't do it.

Bad luck on losing those beasts ☹️
 

holwellcourtfarm

Member
Livestock Farmer
It is a no-brainer. Since I've started in a small way with cattle, I've made sure that they all have Bravoxin 10, which covers for blackleg. It can get expensive if you start with all different jags but I'm surprised more don't do it.

Bad luck on losing those beasts ☹
We once lost a cow with acute mastitis and have had pneumonia in suckled calves 2 or 3 times in 40 years. Never had fluke. Wormed twice a year until 2017 but never since. Had several Leptospirosis Hardjo cases about 30 years ago so treated the whole herd with AB's and vaccinated for 2 years but nothing since.

Looks like we've been lucky.......

I'm expecting to be much more proactive after we move to a wetter area with more livestock neighbours.
 

som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
if you vaccinated for everything they say, it would cost a lot of money, we vaccinate for, rota corona, bvd, ibr, and up to last year, lepto, couldn't get the vaccine. The trouble is, you don't really know, that is stopping something, or not, like silage additive, used as an 'insurance'. We will vaccinate, but we no longer think it was blackleg, we have got a few red clover bales, with mainly r clover, that won't go through the mixer, son put one out yesterday, as hfrs/dry cows were in the yard, over night, bloat ? To my memory, blackleg blows them up, and the 'soft bits' go green quickly, not seeing that, but are blown, to a lesser degree.

We once lost a cow with acute mastitis and have had pneumonia in suckled calves 2 or 3 times in 40 years. Never had fluke. Wormed twice a year until 2017 but never since. Had several Leptospirosis Hardjo cases about 30 years ago so treated the whole herd with AB's and vaccinated for 2 years but nothing since.

Looks like we've been lucky.......

I'm expecting to be much more proactive after we move to a wetter area with more livestock neighbours.
moving north, or here down west ?
 

awkward

Member
Location
kerry ireland
if you vaccinated for everything they say, it would cost a lot of money, we vaccinate for, rota corona, bvd, ibr, and up to last year, lepto, couldn't get the vaccine. The trouble is, you don't really know, that is stopping something, or not, like silage additive, used as an 'insurance'. We will vaccinate, but we no longer think it was blackleg, we have got a few red clover bales, with mainly r clover, that won't go through the mixer, son put one out yesterday, as hfrs/dry cows were in the yard, over night, bloat ? To my memory, blackleg blows them up, and the 'soft bits' go green quickly, not seeing that, but are blown, to a lesser degree.


moving north, or here down west ?
With blackleg you can feel bubbles under the skin kind of like bubblerap and they swell quickly
 

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