Worm Poop

The South Center pasture is really greening up and coming on after we "nuked" it few weeks ago. There is a nice sized mat of dead grass trampled onto the ground and I've posted a few pics of worms we found when pulling back the dead grass mat. Well those worms have now covered the pasture with worm poop. Every time I pulled up the mat I found poop and I took a picture of one such pile. I could have taken hundreds of pictures of the worm poop. It was everywhere. I'm confident we've really gotten the organic life cycle going.

Two More Pics

These are 2 pictures of the same field, from the same location (at the north end of the North Rock Barn pasture). The first is from April 29, 2009, the second one is from April 9, 2010 (20 days earlier!)...a noticable improvement in just one year of mob grazing. Granted the weather has been warmer, earlier this year, and last year was a tremendous clover year (cool, wet spring) but the grass looks so much healthier this year than last.

Grazing Weeds

You will find several posts from last year regarding the 800 head mob of stockers and the way they devoured musk thistle, oak sprouts, poison hemlock and other weeds that I don't know the names of. It was incredible to see. Well, the mob of cows is a little more picky. They aren't currently touching the hemlock or thistles. I have read that younger cattle will try new things more so than older animals and this may explain what I am seeing. I am going to attempt to force the cattle (using smaller pastures) to eat the weeds and if that doesn't work, I plan on spraying some diluted molasses on various weeds to see if that will get the cows to try them. I'll keep you posted.

Mob Grazing Pictures

Here are a few pictures from the South Center Pasture. I call this "nuked". Absolutely destroyed this pasture. You can see from the pictures that there is nothing left, but that closer inspection shows a layer of tromped in grass. We're building soil! The first picture is interesting...on the left is a paddock we just moved out of, on the right across the fence, it has had 7 days of rest. It is amazing how these paddocks will green right up and explode with new growth. We will be back into this pasture in July to graze the regrowth. It has a lot of warm season grasses in it. After moving out of the South Center on April 9th, we are finished with all of the stockpiled grass and are now grazing the new growth in the North Rock Barn pasture.

2010 Mob Grazing Plan - Goat Ranch

After much consideration, I think the plan is finalized for 2010 grazing. We will be moving from the South Center to the North Rock Barn...should carry us thru the end of April. From there, we will move Across the Road...should carry us thru the middle of May. Then into the Rock Barn pasture for around 25 days. Towards the end of June, we will move into the South Center, then thru the Stocker Pasture and finally into the Cabin Pasture for September grazing. That's the plan at this point.

The mob should number around 470 head of mother cows (and hopefully close to that number of calves by July). Pasture sizes should be around 10 acres (so around 150-160 pastures), giving us a density of around 65,000 lbs per acre. We will need around 3500 lbs of dry matter per acre to accomplish this goal. I think we can do it.

Calving While Mob Grazing

As we head into our calving season beginning April 21st, I am struggling to determine how best to calve them out. Last year we had disastrous results attempting to calve while keeping the mob together. We lost around 8% of our calves to scours. It was a cool, wet year and that could have contributed to our scour problem but I am frustrated that there is nothing available online that addresses the issue of calving while mob grazing. Nothing. Zero. I will continue to post my experiences as we begin calving.

I have spoken to some of the proponents of mob grazing and they say "spread the cows out while calving"...well that's great and all but the key time for me to be mob grazing is during spring. It's when we can get the most benefit from eating the weeds and brush and knocking back the fescue. I'm hoping we can figure out a way to make this work.

Moving thru the South Center

We're about half way through the South Center pasture...we have about 5 days of grazing left. The pastures we have just grazed look incredible. There is at least a half inch of dead grass layer on top of the ground. We knelt down and pulled back the cover and found earth worms nearly every time. The pastures look like they are in perfect shape to begin their spring flush. I haven't had a chance to go through the Stocker pasture but it looks very similar from the road. I have a few pictures I will add shortly. The spring has been near perfect...weather is in the 70's each day already with lots of sun and good moisture. The forecast looks like ideal grass growing weather. I plan to buy some more cows to put at the goat ranch. I don't think there is any way we will keep up with the grass we've got.