more on stockpiling forage

Our last post on stockpile generated some interesting questions. This from one farmer:

Thanks for the article. It helps clarify a few things. However, one of my big problems is the early grazing season. The herd cannot keep up with the spring and early summer growth but later there is too little good (vegetative) grass for them in the hotter, drier, slower-growing summer months. Removing some of the pasture from circulation for stockpiling at that time is difficult. Do you make hay with your excess and run fewer animals? Reduce the size of your herd once the spring flush is done? Perhaps I have too many animals, but with fewer ruminants the excess growth problem becomes even worse. How do you handle it?

Hi, Carl,

Where are you located? What are your weather/growth patterns during the year?

Yes, there is always that feeling that if we could double or triple the herd for May and June, or even the whole summer, it would really match our grass availability better. Sheep would do it, but we don't want to replace the cows with more sheep. Bought-in cows would do it, but that's even less feasible, financially and practically -- logistics, imported pathogens, cows not trained to our methods, undesirable genetics. With calving, of course, the numbers go up every spring, but that doesn't make as big a difference in impact as sheep would -- calves grow a lot slower. And, yes, we destock in the late summer, a little, when we sell bred dairy cows, and butcher steers. But the numbers don't change that much. Our actual rate -- animals to acres -- is generally around two acres per animal. If we fed hay in the winter we could probably double it, maybe more.

In May and June we are awash in lush green grass. There's no way to actually graze it all -- that is, run it through the gut of an animal -- but it's still going to do the farm a world of good. We run the animals in long, narrow paddocks and let them trample what they don't eat. Other folks around here who don't have an adversarial relationship with the iron horse make hay at this time. Both are good options. We're just trying to get all the way around the farm. The trampled forage is doing at least three good things that I can see -- adding organic matter; shading the soil; and hedging our bets, because if we get a dry year -- and this year we did -- that standing grass, while not perfect forage, is still going to be grazeable.

A basic rule of grazing is that when the grass is growing fast, you move fast; when it slows down, so do you. This rule is more about recovery than it is about impact. When the grass is taking it's time growing, you need to give it plenty of time to grow -- and regrow. So when the heat and dry of summer slows the grass down, we make smaller paddocks -- consequently hitting them harder. Not too hard -- we need enough coverage that the ground is going to stay shaded, cool, and in active growth. If it heats up
everything will go dormant -- no regrowth. Smaller paddocks means more paddocks, consequently, a much slower passage over the farm.

This year, with the drought, it took us four months to make a full circuit of the pastures -- June through September, inclusive. Usually we stockpile in July and August -- this year, we started in June, perforce. We didn't plan it that way, but there it is. And it looks like good grass. Are there plenty of forbs? Yes, and they are helping hold the grass up and protecting it from the weather. I'm not sure I've ever seen a more promising stockpile. And we didn't really get rain until October -- and not much then -- but that taller growth kept the ground shaded and we never saw dormancy. And moving that slowly, there was always plenty of forage, both for grazing and for residual. Was it lignous? -- you bet, but the cows throve.

This may not be your problem, but for a lot of folks -- us, at one time -- part of the tension in grazing is that we tend to think in dollars. 'This is working because I can see how it generates money in the short term.' So we look at pasture and we think 'this is good grass if a forage analysis says it's really high in total digestible nutrients'. Lots of graziers are out there trying to get their pastures to look like spring pastures all the time. It's expensive, and it's doesn't really work. It's a crap shoot.

Even more, though, it's not natural. I'm not saying 'Natural' like that's a magic word and if everybody just thought green thoughts we'd all be happy and holy; I mean 'it's not natural' -- it's not how things work. And this seems to us to be what good farming -- good anything -- comes down to. We have limited power, limited knowledge, limited vision. So in our relationships with the universe in all its diversity we can either behave respectfully, with humility, honoring the nature of each being and trying to fit ourselves into the scheme to make everything, if possible, work a little better and feed and clothe us into the bargain; or we can see what we want and grab for it, treating all things as means to our desired ends, and the universe as a whole as a machine which can be manipulated in any way without moral implications. The second way looks really clever when we're doing it: 'look at that, we split the atom' -- but the long-term results are less promising.

When it comes to cows, our limited experience is that the wide range of maturities and nutritional profiles in a whole season's worth of pastures is all good. Of course, we're not fattening a bunch of stockers for the market, we're running a multi-generational herd; there's a whole lot going on out there besides weight gain. Spring growth is wonderful, especially when it's buffered with some leftover stockpile. Summer grass is wonderful, belly-deep, all stages of growth. Late summer grass looks less palatable to us, so we always marvel at the great condition of our whole herd on what is sometimes technically (to us) 'overgrown'. And winter stockpile keeps the herd in great condition, thick-coated and good body scores, for as long as it lasts. Hay, when we have to feed it, is a blessing from God, getting us through ice storms and extended winters, but not to be compared to standing grass.

We're infants at this. Twelve years or whatever it is of conscious grass management (rather than the oblivious pasture-pounding of our earlier conventional grazing days) is the blink of an eye. But what is needed is experience, not 'education', and every day we have more of it. Now, at least faintly, we can hear the voice of the grass, the cows, the wildlife, the weather. It does speak to us. We're learning the language.

Wes Jackson, we remember, said that it takes fifty years to make a pasture. Fifty years to establish a relationship between grass, forbs, livestock, wildlife, humans, weather. Fifty years to see a balance established between the cool season and warm season forages. Fifty years, maybe, to grow a herd that fits the land. Fifty years to make a farm.

We're looking forward to every one of them.