As you can see in this picture of Corretta and her new calf, it doesn't take much to keep the cows in their paddock. The tiny white line that you can see is the electric polywire. Boardering the corn is our perirmeter high tensile fence. In the distance you can see the other calf "creep feeding" by going under the portable fence to find grass.

Our livestock management is then focused on getting all the animals to consume as much pasture as possible. They are actually harvesting our crop for us rather than us using a combine, tractors, and trucks to harvest and haul the crop to the animals to be eaten. The most efficient way that we have found for the cattle to harvest our pasture and actually enhance the pasture rather than damage it is to move them every single day to a new paddock or piece of the pasture. We do this with a single strand of electric polywire that can be wound on a reel and set up with temporary step-in posts.

This type of grazing is called Management Intensive Grazing or MiG. Because our pasture is very new our stocking rate is not as good as it will be in the coming years. We have plenty of bare ground that is waiting for the right conditions and seed to come it’s way so that it can produce more forage. For now though we are staying pretty consistent with our paddock sizes each day. It’s working out that the cows are on about 1/8 of an acre per day. This is 4 cows, 2 yearlings, and 1 calf that is just starting to eat some grass. I’d say that this equals a little over 5 cow units or about 0.02 acres/cow/day. This isn’t much land per cow but then again this is only for one day.

I understand that this may seem a little confusing or like useless information but with these numbers we can see that over a 30 day rotation we are going to need about 3.57 acres. 30 days is the most often recommended rest period for pasture but we’re raising that to at least 60 days considering that we just planted our pasture this spring. This should give the forages plenty of time to develop root systems that will help them survive grazing and the winter freeze.

Hopefully every year our pasture space needed for each cow will decrease as our forage quality increases this should allow us to produce quite a bit of beef on our meager 10 acres.

* Keep in mind that our adult cows are only about 750lb Dexters, not 1200lb commercial cattle.

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.