Our two acres of Bermuda border the highway and were especially embarrassing because from the road you couldn’t hardly tell that there were any desirable grasses in the pasture. So, the mowing was a must! It was an interesting day. Bill was the guy with the tractor. He’s the same Bill that raises shrimp near by. The said tractor doesn’t have a working alternator so we spent the first 15 minutes jumping the tractor then hooked up the bush hog, a King Kutter. I was surprised how difficult it was to hook up as I’ve never used one before. It gave the impression that it wasn’t meant to be put on and off very often. None the less, I was very greatful to have the chance to borrow it. Bill sent me on my way and after driving a few miles to our farm I spent the next 2 or 3 hours mowing the worst of our weeds and seeded out grass. Just before I headed back to The Storks farm to return the tractor I let it die on me and had to try and jump it, remember, the alternator doesn’t work. Well, my 1500 truck wasn’t getting the job done so I ended up hooking it up to a battery charger over night and taking it back in the morning.

I couldn’t believe how it changed the look of our Bermuda pasture to have them cut down. There is actually a solid sod forming and by cutting it all off even it made it look so much better. Where I wondered if we even had any Bermuda, we’ve actually got tons of it!

I also mowed down one edge of a pasture that is mostly volunteer Foxtail grasses. They looked pretty, all seeded out but when you walked through it you could see that there was actually alot of bare ground at the ground level. I’m hoping that it will now be encouraged to fill in with the alfalfa, clovers and other grass seeds that we sowed more recently. I’m happy to report that we do have some new grasses germinating. They are either the MaxQ Fescue or more Orchard grass. There is also alot of oats that are reseeding from the oats that we planted in the spring as a nurse crop.

Now that we have a few more cows I’m looking forward to seeing how much better the pasture will look with faster rotations but the true magic will happen in a few years when we get closer to our total capacity.

-Once again, I wish I had pictures for you but I keep forgeting my camera.

Well, to get this Salad Bar Beef we must have pasture and cattle. We chose a small breed of old Irish cattle called Dexters, more on that later, and had to plant our pasture from scratch. The 10 acres that we fenced were producing soybeans and wheat last year and corn the year before. This year the “pasture” would have been planted in corn again but we decided to plant a “perennial polyculture”, as Joel Salatin would say. This simply means that we didn’t plant a monoculture of only one type of grass so that there would be a whole salad bar of choices for the grazing animals. We settled on planting Orchard Grass, MaxQ Fescue, Ladino Clover, Alfalfa, and a nurse crop of Oats on the main 8 acres. We also wanted to plant 2 acres of Bermuda because it is a warm weather grass and we could move to it in the summer if the pasture slowed too much in growth.

If you didn’t notice, this spring was very wet! So, our schedule for drilling seed in the pasture was put off longer and longer. We ended up drilling seed on April 17th and being so late, we left out the most expensive seed, the MaxQ Fescue, because it isn’t said to do very well in the spring.

We ended up with a very good stand of oats that we started grazing at about 6 or 8 inches tall. The other grasses and legumes were just at the first stages of growth when we put the 6 Dexters on it. Now, when I say that we started grazing I don’t mean that we just turned the cows loose in the field. We are using a MiG or Management Intensive Grazing model to try and get the most out of our pasture and keep our cows healthy. The basic idea of MiG is that cows are confined to a relatively small area of pasture (a paddock) and moved often. The benefits are two-fold. Number one is that it benefits the grasses by grazing them evenly, evenly spreading manure and urea, and giving a long rest period before that paddock is grazed again. The second benefit is to the cattle. Moving the cows to clean pasture in three days or less helps keep the cows healthier by keeping them away from yesterdays manure. This cuts down on worms, flies, and other problems. Keeping all the manure in a small area and then moving away from that area also helps the dung beetles to do their job more efficiently! This way they don’t have to travel half their lives trying to find a pile of manure.

We put the cows in an area that allowed them to eat the oats down to an inch or two in one day and then moved them to the next paddock each day. We’ve been very impressed at how the grasses and oats have recovered from the initial grazing and are now grazing those original paddocks for a second time.

Check back later to hear more about how our pasture is currently doing and what happened with those two acres of Burmuda Grass.