DAPNET Forums Archive › Forums › Sustainable Living and Land use › Sustainable Farming › Grow grass and graze
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Matthew.
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- February 3, 2008 at 4:10 pm #39442
Donn Hewes
KeymasterHere is a thread just for grazing. My wife and I raise 100% grass fed dairy sheep and lamb. There are many things that go into doing that successfully, not the least of which is keeping your animals on the best pastures you can and feeding the best possible hay when they are not grazing. We have been using our horses and mules as followers of the lamb and dairy flock for several years and believe it is an important part of our parasite control program.
I think horses and mules can be excellent grazers. You need to accept certain limitations in order for them to be successful. Most of the time these animals are on maintenance diets and only need 10 – 12 hours to get there fill. We graze them at night. We are able to put them out without water in the paddock as there is enough water in the night grass. This is the first step toward being able to move them often. These are also the factors that keep them from damaging pastures, which is what they are known for. During the day they are in the barn, which keeps them away from flies, they have there own water bowls, and they are available for work (they get a bite of hay at lunch time). That is important if they are in competition with a tractor. You must be flexible, if they have been moving great for two weeks and now it starts to rain for a week they may need a few days on a different pasture, a couple days in the orchard, or a day in the barn yard. Then when they get back to grazing no damage done.
I put a picture of our house in the photo gallery, but what I hope to do is take a series of 6 photos every sunday that I call Pasture Cam, it will help me tell the story of how we graze here at the Northland sheep Dairy. Still trying to figure out how to reduce the file size. I better go outside. DonnFebruary 3, 2008 at 4:31 pm #45578Carl Russell
ModeratorAt present Earthwise Farm and Forest is a lot more forest than farm. When my grandfather bought this place there were fields all around the house and barn, but being post-depression they had fallen into neglect. As he was of failing health and knew that he would not be able to rebuild the farm, he planted thirty acres to white and red pine, and norway spruce.
So, as of now we move our cattle and horses around to fields in the neighborhood. Beside the moving time, this is not the most efficient way to manage animals, nor pasture.
The plantations are 60 years old now, and I have been improving them over the last twenty years to where there is a large concentration of high quality trees throughout. We have just started the planning process to return the entire area back to agricultural use.
We intend to clearcut sections 5-10 acres at a time. We will then follow with a livestock rotation including pigs, poultry, cattle and horses, to create pasture and hay land, that will be one large centrally located area on our own farm.
This will have to be another pasture-cam project. Carl
February 3, 2008 at 6:49 pm #45601KeymasterCarl, exciting and hard work, just how we like it. I have a couple of other pasture projects that involve trees. I am trying to return trees to the pastures to improve the cycling of minerals. In on case, we are planting Locust, Oak, and other nuts that will produce high shade(forces the animals to move rather than lie under it. Than we have to learn to graze around them, (and make hay) while they grow. In another area I am thinning poles for fire wood, and clearing some rough ground to create treed pasture. I have done an acre a year, but if I did any more, I would have too much fire wood. I started my Pasture Cam there today too, but I didn’t post all the pictures. You can see them here. Donn
February 3, 2008 at 8:51 pm #45596Kristin
ParticipantGreat thread! Here’s a question. We have an ongoing “discussion” at our house about shade in summer for the grazing animals, especially the beef herd. Obviously they want it. Do they need it? What’s healthiest for them, and for the pasture? There’s the issue of concentration of manure in shady areas, and I know Salatin solved that one by building his shade-mobile, but our herd is too big for that. What do you all do?
-KristinFebruary 3, 2008 at 9:39 pm #45602KeymasterI have found (with a couple of beef cows but also with years of commercial dairy cow experience) that the animals benefit from shade. I’m a firm believer in reducing stress to improve productivity and heat = stress. If the herd is too big for a portable shade shelter, you could use a shade paddock for a few hours during the day when the heat is most intense. Once the herd learns that they are being moved to an area that makes them more comfortable, they will move willingly. They can browse for a few hours, then they will be glad to go back to their paddock and high quality feed. Maryrose (Donn’s wife)
February 3, 2008 at 9:44 pm #45588Rod
ParticipantAre your cattle black? That makes somewhat of a diffrence. Also remember Satalin is in Virgina and if I remember right you are in NY. I have black Angus cows and am in southern Vermont. My cows like shade if I happen to have it available but if not I have never seen them really stressed by the lack of it. The number of warm days we get in given year are not that many and not that hot.
As for nutrient transfer I again think it may be more of a problem in the hotter climates. Mine graze in the sun if they are hungry and bunch up more because of flys than anything else.
February 5, 2008 at 2:31 pm #45597ParticipantThanks for the ammo, Maryrose. 🙂 Rod, we are in NY and they cattle are not black but they are very furry (scottish highland cattle) and so the worst season for them is spring, when we’re into hot weather but they haven’t fully shedded out yet. I like the idea of a shade paddock. We have woods adjoining most of our pastures. But as usual it’s a balancing act — can the farm afford the time in the busy spring to move animals two extra times per day? Or can you simply fence the shade paddock into your rotation and let the animals come and go at will?
all best,
KristinFebruary 5, 2008 at 2:39 pm #45589ParticipantHi Kristin
We have paddocks like that with some woods included in them, they are nice and the cows certainly do enjoy the in the heat of the day. I have never noticed any significant nutrient transfer evidence in them and the cows keep these areas looking very neat as they eat the low branches and brush. I wish I could have parts of all my paddocks with a wooded portion in them.
February 7, 2008 at 11:19 am #45603KeymasterI think planting trees will become one of my lifes works. There is a lot to learn about what species, how to start them, how to work around them when they are young, and where to plant them. Right now I have a forty acre field with a long term lease, and no trees. I could plant 1,000 trees out there and only divide it six 6 acre paddocks, and at that the trees will twenty feet apart. that is my goal for the next five years. this year I will plant 200+ in a tree nursery.
February 7, 2008 at 4:09 pm #45595Does’ Leap
ParticipantWe have thinned out a lot of trees and created pastures in the shade, and they are a great resource for us in hot weather, our dairy goats will do very little grazing if sitting in a hot paddock all day. I like the system and the grass doesn’t seem to head out as readily as our open fields, but I am wondering about sugar content in the grass -am I exacerbating the energy imbalance on pasture as we continue develop these comfortable shady pastures? Donn, you must have this problem if you aren’t supplementing your dairy sheep?
KristanFebruary 7, 2008 at 8:39 pm #45591J-L
ParticipantI’ve been following your thread on this and find it interesting. I have a question or two about the dairy sheep. To be honest I’d never heard of dairy sheep. Lot’s of sheep in this part of the country but none that are milked. I was wondering why you milk sheep? I suppose you wouldn’t bother if there weren’t a market for it. Why do people drink sheeps milk? And last but not least how much does a mature ewe give when she’s lactating at her best? I suppose that their are dairy breeds of sheep. I hope these questions aren’t too stupid to bother with.
The only sheep I’m familiar with are the columbia and columbia crosses that we call the western whiteface. Also the suffolk meat breed.
Very interesting subject to hear about.Oh, I almost forgot to ask if you milk by hand or machine, and how many ewes you milked daily?
Thanks.
February 9, 2008 at 6:33 pm #45604KeymasterYou pose an interesting question about ensuring that our forage maintains a high sugar content in order to feed lactating animals. There are a couple of pieces of our silviculture strategy to speaks to this. One is that these trees are very young and won’t provide shade for many years. The other main point is that we are choosing tall trees that will provide high shade that will move throughout the day. All of our pastures get rotated into hay production so we want to be able to have sufficient sun to dry the mowed hay. Another point for those of us with a slightly apocalyptic bent is that by the time these trees mature we may well be living in a significantly different climate than we now experience. I have to give credit to Donn for his long term thinking — I mostly want to provide some shade and browse for my milking flock, but Donn is a much bigger thinker than I am. Maryrose (Donn’s wife)
February 9, 2008 at 6:39 pm #45605KeymasterI suppose there aren’t very many sheep dairies in the west. We milk sheep so we can make really good cheese. There is a long tradition in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe of milking sheep for cheesemaking. Sheep milk is much higher in fat and protein than cow milk Our top producing ewes will give just over 2 quarts of milk at the peak of their lactation (which is shorter and much more seasonal than a cow’s). I milked (and loved) cows for years, but I am a total convert to sheep. I just love ’em. They are tons of fun, easy to handle, have an intact flock mentality, and their milk just can’t be beat. We milk, by the way, by machine. We have a parlor that holds six animals at a time and we run two claws into a bucket. We milk about 40 ewes, which is a tiny flock, but there is a sheep dairy in New York that milks over 800, plus buys in (frozen) sheep milk from other producers across the country. I hope this helps shed some light on us quirky sheep milkers. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it! Maryrose (Donn’s wife)
February 10, 2008 at 2:59 am #45592ParticipantThanks Maryrose. I was just interested and curious. That sounds like a fun enterprise. By the way, we had a small farm flock all the years I grew up on this ranch. They paid the bills when the cattle market was down many times. When the money went out of the wool and the market dropped out of lambs for a while we sold them. Sheep did well here in places marginal for cattle. We had 250 ewes for a while. I’ve tasted sheeps milk, and its not bad, just never thought of milking them. 2 quarts is quite a bit of milk. One day I’d like to try some of that cheese but have never seen it.
February 10, 2008 at 2:19 pm #45598ParticipantWe are experimenting with stockpiled forage this year for our beef herd. I think we’ve reached our limit now. We got six or eight inches of snow this week and they are not pawing through it very well. It might be because we’re at the end of a rotation and the forage is not worth the energy it takes to get to it. They’re starting to eat brush and for the first time they look a little hungry. We considered rotating them onto our last stockpiled pasture, which has a lot of fescue, but decided with cold weather expected this week we ought not to push it. So we are loading up the wagon for the first time today to take them some hay. It’s the second week in February and we’re in northern New York. Last year we started feeding hay in November and I figure we’ve saved roughly $4000 in hay plus a lot of labor, but we’ll have to see how the calves look in the spring before we decide to do this again. Would love to hear from others who are stockpiling winter forage since we’re new to it.
all best,
Kristin - AuthorPosts
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