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

[Rob Garrett]

Worms a go go! For little fellas with no arms or legs they sure can shift some stuff! Walked over the oat/white clover stubble the other day and wondered what all these small clumps of straw were.

A hand full of worm cast and hole under each clump.

Some activity in the winter wheat next door, but with no soil armour (slug cover or surface trash, depending on how you see it!) they have only got stones to move around. I would say around three times more activity and significantly more worm cast on the oat stubble ground, which would normally be a sacrificial filed for overwintering ewe lambs with ring feeders, too wet this year.

 

[Treg]

Worms a go go! For little fellas with no arms or legs they sure can shift some stuff! Walked over the oat/white clover stubble the other day and wondered what all these small clumps of straw were.
View attachment 858428
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A hand full of worm cast and hole under each clump.
View attachment 858431
Some activity in the winter wheat next door, but with no soil armour (slug cover or surface trash, depending on how you see it!) they have only got stones to move around. I would say around three times more activity and significantly more worm cast on the oat stubble ground, which would normally be a sacrificial filed for overwintering ewe lambs with ring feeders, too wet this year.

CAREFUL!! One of thems got a knife

 

[CornishTone]

Worms a go go! For little fellas with no arms or legs they sure can shift some stuff! Walked over the oat/white clover stubble the other day and wondered what all these small clumps of straw were.
View attachment 858428
View attachment 858429
A hand full of worm cast and hole under each clump.
View attachment 858431
Some activity in the winter wheat next door, but with no soil armour (slug cover or surface trash, depending on how you see it!) they have only got stones to move around. I would say around three times more activity and significantly more worm cast on the oat stubble ground, which would normally be a sacrificial filed for overwintering ewe lambs with ring feeders, too wet this year.

Snap...

Anecic worms are the cairn builders. They’re the ones that burrow the deep, vertical burrows. Shift material at night to protect their burrows during the day.

(That £1,000 for my advanced BASIS Quality of Soils course was worth every penny![emoji57])

 

[Kiwi Pete]

What would the reason be to plough some of it ?
Why would you kill it ? is there something there you don't like ?

Yes, it's mostly just blue pug that's been cleaned out of the creek and bulldozed around until semi flat, it was then left to grow gorse because it wouldnt grow much else.
I reckon if I were to plough it, there may actually be topsoil under the clay layer, but to be realistic I'd be better off just putting it into jumps for motorbikes

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Sheep went home yesterday, it feels like the start of the holidays without 'em.

They got off the truck at the far end and went straight into the shearing-shed to get their 14 months of wool off. 14 weeks they were here, so about $12.5k in the kitty.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Got a spare half-hour to go happy-snapping

There actually doesn't seem to be much variance between "doubly sprayed" and unsprayed areas, mown and unmown areas, in terms of what's poked through.... but what you 'can actually see', varies quite a bit, yet.
A lot of it is still poking through the residue.

It's weird, riding around on the quad and seeing mushrooms everywhere in February, we've only had two "hot" days since this was drilled.
Today is one of them!

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Free-range Frosty
He's decided that an electric fence without electric, isn't a fence either. Little punk.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

View attachment 858507
Free-range Frosty
He's decided that an electric fence without electric, isn't a fence either. Little punk.

Suckled calf reality

 

[Henarar]

Suckled calf reality

Quite
we soon learnt when we went from dairy cows that couldn't be bothered to get out to suck cows with calve that we would have to invest in some fencing

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

The new Cotswold Seeds catalogue came with the latest NFU magazine today. Here's some seed prices for comparison...

 

[Rob Garrett]

The new Cotswold Seeds catalogue came with the latest NFU magazine today. Here's some seed prices for comparison...

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£87/acre for a drought resistant 4 year herbal ley! Newman Turner will be rolling in his grave! Do you think these Stewardship Grants are inflating seed prices? There seems to be too many people putting on a percentage, tried Germinal (UK seed importer/packer) the other day but was told they only sell through agents?

 

[Rob Garrett]

Snap...

View attachment 858459
View attachment 858460

Anecic worms are the cairn builders. They’re the ones that burrow the deep, vertical burrows. Shift material at night to protect their burrows during the day.

(That £1,000 for my advanced BASIS Quality of Soils course was worth every penny![emoji57])

Yours look bigger than mine!

Contemplating what to do next on that oat stubble/spring cropping ground, normally would be; blather it with box muck then plough to get air into soil, take out shallow sheep compaction, bury weed seeds and help dry out/warm up, then get on drilling Pea/Barley mix 2nd week March. Cons are; killing up to 7% of my worms, destroying Mycroizol (how ever you spell it!) fungi and having no living root in the ground to capture carbon. But I know with the plough and a bit of luck with the weather I can get 2.75 to 3t/acre yield using the plough.

 

[Rob Garrett]

Sheep went home yesterday, it feels like the start of the holidays without 'em.View attachment 858481
They got off the truck at the far end and went straight into the shearing-shed to get their 14 months of wool off. 14 weeks they were here, so about $12.5k in the kitty.

Roughly how many head were there KP?

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Roughly how many head were there KP?

595 came, 593 left, had one electrocute and then drown itself last week and one just died with froth out its gob...
I got a text from the owner yesterday, he seems pretty happy (read, he's stoked with how they look)

... so that's great. Done a smashing job here.

We'll regroup for a few weeks and then get some winter passengers, I'm thinking 260 shorn hoggs will fit on a truck so that may be how many we ask for.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

The new Cotswold Seeds catalogue came with the latest NFU magazine today. Here's some seed prices for comparison...

View attachment 858543

View attachment 858546
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View attachment 858548

It's the perfect storm for seed suppliers.

Firstly, all seed must be certified, so there's a price jump

Secondly, all the grants and environmental schemes push up the demand and the ability to pay

Thirdly, farmers worldwide are addicted to spending money; someone who spends 50k p.a. on soluble fertiliser "for the yield" can easily redirect some to the seed merchant and adopt the nice warm glow that comes from "being a regenerative farmer".

Looking at the Aussie regen groups discussed seed rates, 9kg/ha is common enough for covercropping - just imagine how expensive your seed would be if that was the case?

Step out of that rut at any opportunity, if I had access to any grain-harvesting kit at all (other than someone's cows) then it would be 100% farm saved seed going in the ground; uncleaned, untreated, untested.

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

It's the perfect storm for seed suppliers.

Firstly, all seed must be certified, so there's a price jump

Secondly, all the grants and environmental schemes push up the demand and the ability to pay

Thirdly, farmers worldwide are addicted to spending money; someone who spends 50k p.a. on soluble fertiliser "for the yield" can easily redirect some to the seed merchant and adopt the nice warm glow that comes from "being a regenerative farmer".

Looking at the Aussie regen groups discussed seed rates, 9kg/ha is common enough for covercropping - just imagine how expensive your seed would be if that was the case?

Step out of that rut at any opportunity, if I had access to any grain-harvesting kit at all (other than someone's cows) then it would be 100% farm saved seed going in the ground; uncleaned, untreated, untested.

And all the reading I've done from Newman-Turner onwards says if you get the management right then the plants will come naturally (from the seed bank in the ground).

 

[Kiwi Pete]

And all the reading I've done from Newman-Turner onwards says if you get the management right then the plants will come naturally (from the seed bank in the ground).

Some plants will.
I'd be very surprised if any/many of the species I drilled would be present in the seedbank here - that's not to say there wouldn't be better ones for "the job" than what's been planted, either.

This mix is more "the best I can do within timeframe and budget" because the right management for the landscape would probably result in bracken, broom, gorse, and thistles - with persistent grasses and trefoil underneath those.
I cannot repay my mortgage with those particular species, so we're substituting like with like

Gorse + broom = kowhai and tagasaste trees, annual legumes
Thistles = sunflowers, chicory
Bracken = lots of carboniferous biomass

 

[Rob Garrett]

595 came, 593 left, had one electrocute and then drown itself last week and one just died with froth out its gob...
I got a text from the owner yesterday, he seems pretty happy (read, he's stoked with how they look)View attachment 858680
... so that's great. Done a smashing job here.

We'll regroup for a few weeks and then get some winter passengers, I'm thinking 260 shorn hoggs will fit on a truck so that may be how many we ask for.

Great to get positive customer feedback like that, a win win for both parties involved. Roughly, give or take a bit that works around GBP £0.75/head /week for fully shepherded keep. I have heard of some NZ guys working on a $/Kg liveweight gain for ewe lamb (hoggs) rearing contracts, could do with a bit more detail as would like to set something up similar here, have you had any experience/encounters?

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Great to get positive customer feedback like that, a win win for both parties involved. Roughly, give or take a bit that works around GBP £0.75/head /week for fully shepherded keep. I have heard of some NZ guys working on a $/Kg liveweight gain for ewe lamb (hoggs) rearing contracts, could do with a bit more detail as would like to set something up similar here, have you had any experience/encounters?

Not heard of anything down here for sheep, dairy heifers can be - the agent who works for the company doing that advised me against it

 

[bitwrx]

Question for the assembled company v
Just reading my ag textbook, from 1979, and it said this:

The stocking rate they're talking about is the average stock equivalents per hectare of grass on the farm, rather than the stocking density (no. of animals per ha on a particular patch on a particular day). I kinda get why high SR = more recirculated N, because more forage per ha will be consumed and turned into urine/dung.

Do we have any idea how N recirculation changes with very high stocking densities, like the several hundred thousand kilos of liveweight per hectare all the extreme mob graziers are doing? Does it have a measurable effect on regrowth rates?