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

gadgewalker

Member
Livestock Farmer
Had some regrowth. About 6 weeks since that bit was grazed tight.

Bit of fungi coming up aswell.

Will be one "mob" on Saturday once the tup has been pulled out.
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reading things on here, about things we have done, and seen, with the old characters, which, alas, now means us, makes me think i ought to write a book, else, who will remember, today, young farmers work pretty well alone, and therefore don't hear the stories. Funny l/horns have been posted, we had an illegal gathering tonight, 7 not 6, OH birthday, and were talking about english, and texan longhorns, some of both i had bought off the mendips, from a chap that had 2 wives, and an illegal slaughterhouse.
Damm, there's some stories there!! I mean the longhorns . . . 😉
 

exmoor dave

Member
Location
exmoor, uk
Mob of ewes grazing out, what must be a total sward of creeping bent,
230 ewes, on 0.5ha for 1 day according to Feedsmart' (thanks kiwi levy payers 😜), out going covers were about my comfort level for pushing the ewes, but one day I couldn't get to moving them for various reasons, so they grazed for 12hrs past my comfort level..... wow what a difference to grazing the cover out!
Will be interesting to see how the different cells recover, long rest now til after early lambing.

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Crofter64

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Quebec, Canada
I knowade a major mistake here in towmead 1 and 2 early in the season by only giving them a short recovery because I used that field for electric fence training. Which was a mistake in hindsight.
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I know I made a major mistake here in towmead 1 and 2 early in the season by only giving them a short recovery because I used that field for electric fence training. Which was a mistake in hindsight.
I listened to a Working Cows podcast today with Jim Gerrish. He said that one animal day per acre was equivalent to 26lbs of forage which , I suppose, is the amount a 1000lb cow can eat in a day.
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
Thats right for what it would eat, but same whether its one acre or two? Am I barking, or just pedantic?
Not at all - walking takes energy, that's maybe the flaw in measuring feed as "drymatter" rather than in what energy can be metabolised from that amount.
A maintenance diet may maintain an animal at a trough but if she has to walk 8 miles to scrape lichen off a rock then it won't.
That's one of the benefits of raising your animal days/ha, you nail their feet to the floor so they don't waste energy warming their muscles but put it back into the soil via their hoof action

Likewise, if you're seriously budgeting feed then you'll need to account for terrain, distance walked, stage of pregnancy, lactation level, and weight gain/loss.

I can't link it but DairyNZ has a "facts and figures" booklet with a lot of useful info, including a whole chapter of feeding information.
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
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What they don't have as a "fact" is that your nice healthy soil is full of living creatures that also need energy. So we have to budget to feed them!

Hence the "you can't waste grass" thing, sometimes looking at a problem a different way can be revealing a flaw.

However having lower stocking density and lower covers reveals a multiple energy loss
1. Less leaf area = less energy in
2. Low cover increases bare soil= less energy in
3. Moisture loss
4. Animals expend more energy in grazing
5. Less for the soil = downward spiral
6. Respiration is the same, but between less animals
7. Transpiration is less, but less animals/ac

.. and the opposite is also true, my animals may not want to get up but it's not a lack of energy.
Their tanks are full!
 

som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
there tanks are full, exactly what fancy nutritionists attempt to achieve, only they bring in 'other' foods, at a high cost, although for the dairy, forage will not supply fuel, to produce the milk, at different times of the year, yet at other times, like spring, it over produces, shown by the loose shite, ejected from the rear end, at some speed,
Nutritionists try and keep the grass, at the same spring value, as long as possible, but, why ? Anyone will tell you, spring grass flies out the rear end of stock, making it obvious, that it is not staying inside a cow, long enough to be fully utilised, therefore, a proportion is 'wasted', and returned to the sward. One of the lessons learn't in this summers drought, is by leaving longer residuals, you get more root strength, which in turn, makes the plant stronger, and more resistant to that drought. Farming is like a wheel, it is forever turning, you solve one problem, and another one appears, and so on. It is how you solve the problems, that depends on the size of the next one, with the example of spring grass, yes, we want to produce cheap milk from it, but forget the plant is maximising growth, to reproduce itself, by seeding, all we do, is stop it seeding. Ignoring the fact, the plant has to survive as well, we are just 'draining' it, of its life blood. I have never seen any figure, as to how long a grass will live, if you just 'leave it', we usually kill it off. This summer will be different for us, as we are taking on some older pasture, which we cant plough, but can overseed, no herbs, they look like weeds, to the owner !
 

Kiwi Pete

Member
Livestock Farmer
There must be a maximum age for an individual grass plant but "grass" will survive for thousands of years in the right place with no hindrance from us
It's pretty important that we plan for/assist/let plant expression, and succession take place


I personally think that if "grass 'needs' to be kept vegetative" then maybe it's time for a talk about the birds and the bees?
Maybe it's not the grasses' needs but our own needs and wants.
Maybe we need to look at why we think that we need to control and "tidy up" and take a fresh look at what quality feed looks like?
 
I have been catching up on the Biofarm2020 recordings bit by bit as I can. Kind of cheated on my work day this morning and decided to take an hour out to watch John Kempfs presentation.

What few working brain cells left have been blown away.

The gist of it was increasing photosynthetic efficiency by applying foliar sprays to basically any green growing plant - so forages, fruits, cereals etc.

The biggest thing for my ground is poor, and poorly managed as yet, forages obviously. So he started talking about say grass with a brix level of 3. He wasn't keen on refractometers for many reasons - lack of peoples experience with the instrument, and many variables such as time of day, sunshine levels, season etc.

So a question gets asked about how often one might have to spray a foliar application to increase the photosynthetic efficiency (before I forget, all this was to kick start the soil biology by basically turbo charging root exudates). This IS variable depending on what your start situation is, but on forages he mentioned like once every eight to ten weeks which I think is great. So you apply the correctly formulated foliar spray which kicks your brix of 3 up to say a brix of 12 pretty much over night, then it may (depending on our variables) drop back over a number of weeks BUT the interesting thing is it may drop back to 5, not the original 3.

So you go again with your foliar spray and brix goes to 15, and drops back over a number of weeks to maybe 7. There's more to it than this but because of the biology your baseline will become self sustaining so it's not like there's endless foliar applications.

This sounds significantly more practical for my ground at least due to the terrain and the difficulty and dangers of applying a lot of liquid in spray form. Kempf reckoned he's working with in the region of 1000 - 1200 farmers on a few million acres, and that this is working for them.

Just to plug it again - but tickets are still available for purchase for the Biofarm2020 recordings €50 inside Ireland, €80 outside Ireland I believe.
 

Rob Garrett

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
Derbyshire UK
I have been catching up on the Biofarm2020 recordings bit by bit as I can. Kind of cheated on my work day this morning and decided to take an hour out to watch John Kempfs presentation.

What few working brain cells left have been blown away.

The gist of it was increasing photosynthetic efficiency by applying foliar sprays to basically any green growing plant - so forages, fruits, cereals etc.

The biggest thing for my ground is poor, and poorly managed as yet, forages obviously. So he started talking about say grass with a brix level of 3. He wasn't keen on refractometers for many reasons - lack of peoples experience with the instrument, and many variables such as time of day, sunshine levels, season etc.

So a question gets asked about how often one might have to spray a foliar application to increase the photosynthetic efficiency (before I forget, all this was to kick start the soil biology by basically turbo charging root exudates). This IS variable depending on what your start situation is, but on forages he mentioned like once every eight to ten weeks which I think is great. So you apply the correctly formulated foliar spray which kicks your brix of 3 up to say a brix of 12 pretty much over night, then it may (depending on our variables) drop back over a number of weeks BUT the interesting thing is it may drop back to 5, not the original 3.

So you go again with your foliar spray and brix goes to 15, and drops back over a number of weeks to maybe 7. There's more to it than this but because of the biology your baseline will become self sustaining so it's not like there's endless foliar applications.

This sounds significantly more practical for my ground at least due to the terrain and the difficulty and dangers of applying a lot of liquid in spray form. Kempf reckoned he's working with in the region of 1000 - 1200 farmers on a few million acres, and that this is working for them.

Just to plug it again - but tickets are still available for purchase for the Biofarm2020 recordings €50 inside Ireland, €80 outside Ireland I believe.
What's in the foliar spray?

Are you going to try it? (Pics. Before & after please)

Been applying a seaweed/molasses foliar spray to arable crops for the last couple of years, doing tramline trials.
 
What's in the foliar spray?

Are you going to try it? (Pics. Before & after please)

Been applying a seaweed/molasses foliar spray to arable crops for the last couple of years, doing tramline trials.

I don't know yet Rob, I think it's farm specific depending on what's needed on that farm - there's usually a catch :LOL: If I can figure it out I'll try it for sure.

Molasses is another thing I'm interested in trying as Nicole Masters said it can change the germination signals in a fungally dominated "sleepy soil", meaning soils inhabited by gorse, bracken and other woody plants. I had thought I had a succession issue with the gorse and bracken but now I figure there's more to it.


- Thanks, this has reminded me I just got his Kindle book! :oops: I'd be dangerous if I was organised.
 
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SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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