Northern Farmer

Winter is not moving along here in Virginia. Tuesday afternoon it started raining and then slowly changed over to sleet and freezing rain. I woke up this Wednesday to find that there is about 2 inches of sleet and rain that has made a sheet on everything in sight. Here in Virginia everything shuts down when there is forecasted bad weather. The schools closed Tuesday even though none of the roads started freezing at all until about 5:30 pm. Back in Minnesota it would have been just another winter day. So far our power and the phone lines are all still working here at the farm, for which I am very thankful because pumping water from the ponds for the cows didn’t sound like fun. With 2 inches of ice on the ground the 250 cows that are still out on pasture are not able to eat anything so we had to drive the tractor over to the rental farm where the cows are and will feed hay for the next few days at least. The forecast is calling for it to stay below freezing for the next few days with more snow on the way Saturday and Sunday. I am enjoying the ’’cold’’ while it last because I know that in about three weeks the grass will start growing again and all the cows will go back out onto the pasture. I’m not sure that I am ready for winter to be over yet but spring is coming,(at least for us here in Virginia).
whether or not I’m ready.

Joel has been speaking allot lately and after go gets back from his trips he updates everyone on all the new and interesting news. One of the most interesting pieces of information that Joel has relayed to use is that most of the people at the leading edge of the grazing movement are now going to long grass grazing, the idea being that instead of grazing a paddock every 28 days or so you graze a paddock three maybe four times a year. The reason for letting the grass grow long is that as the grass matures it becomes more starchy and has less protein and more carbohydrates. If you remember the reason that cows fatten so well on corn is because it is starchy and has a lot of carbs. The grass as it matures also becomes more highly mineralized resulting in healthier cows. The one down side of grazing longer grass is that the grass is slightly less palatable when it is older. The cows still seem to do very well on it and there are reports of weight gains in the 4-5 pound a day range and milk yields in the 70 pounds a day all off of long grass. I have seen it working here at Polyface, last summer on some of our rental properties we let the grass grow to about 2-½ feet tall. We then turn the cows in and because there is so much grass the density of the cow is about 250000 pounds an acre. The hooves of that many cows chip the ground up and grind’s the seeds from the headed out grass into the ground. The cows also lay down a lot of fertilizer in as heavy concentration. One of the paddocks that we did this to early last year later on that year had a marked thickening of the sod and very stimulated grass growth. I am excited to see how my milk cow does on the long grass this summer because with a milk cow you know right away the quality of feed that they are consuming.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.