Pasture Managment

Mowing Pasture

With three cows, a horse, and more animals on the way we've got to get our pasture tuned in to help support all the critters crawling around it.  The past few weeks the weather dial has turned back to normal cold with some snow and winter rain.  We almost got fooled there with a short spell of spring like warmth that had us thinking about busting the kiddie pool out.  Having to pick up another ton of wood pellets for the stove to keep the house warm, and some more hay for the animals to chew on a couple more months snapped us back into reality.  It's also got us thinking about improving the pasture drainage and general pasture management.  As we're thinking about the future of having more grazing animals to care for, we'll need to maximize our lands ability to sustain good grass growth and hay production for winter feeding.

Cows Doing What They Do

Unfortunately, when we bought the place the pasture wasn't in great shape with three sides of outer fencing in poor aged condition, weeds, poor drainage, and only a small section cross-fenced.  It was used for grazing by the neighboring farmer, but never really cared for because they rotated their large cow herd through to improve their own pastures.  Currently the 21 acres of pasture is fenced off into two pastures, one large pasture that's about 15 acres and a small pasture that's about 3.5 acres.  It's a start, and gives us plenty to work with...and a lot of work at that.

We've been planning since we moved in, and have made some improvements already.  Our overall plan is simple and includes: improving the drainage; repair and/or replace fencing as needed; split the 15 acre pasture into a 10 acre and 5 acre pastures; control weeds; sow new grass seed mix; fertilize; and maintain.

We've been busy with fence patching, mowing/weeding, and some drainage improvements.  Now that we have some animals on the ground the big thing we need to focus on is moving them around, so we're working on splitting the big pasture.  With three pastures we'll be able to rotate our small herd to improve forage and grass growth.  Once we get rotation down we'll begin sowing seed and fertilizing with a goal of maintaining enough growth to keep four horses and a half dozen cows happy and healthy.  Oh, the chickens will play their part, a mobile coop will be in the rotation to help with spreading the manure and keeping the fly population down.     

700' of Fencing

T-posts Going In

That's our pasture management in the works.