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.