Given the warm weather, and the lack of a forecast for cold weather anytime soon, it looks like we are in spring. The grass agrees. I am seeing good grass growth all around my field. In the stockpile (the northern 1/3 of my field) the grass is growing quite rapidly.
Now that we have some grass growing again, it’s time to make plans for the spring rotations. I like to break it up into two phases: Early Spring and Late Spring.
Early Spring is the conditions we are in now. The grass is just starting to grow but hasn’t really taken off like a rocket yet. There is lots of it, but it is young and thin. In a month of so, we should be seeing a positive jungle out there.
The Early Spring rotation is focused on trying to keep the cattle from eating too much young grass. It starts off in the stockpile because there is plenty of standing hay there to balance their diet. If the cows eat young grass with nothing to balance it, it will just run through them and come out the other end like a firehose. This is neither good for the cow or the grass.
I originally planned to rapidly work through the early spring rotation doing everything in 3 weeks. The idea was that it would “wake up” the grass without putting too much impact on it, but seeing the early grass as it is, I decided to do a 6 week rotation instead. Since I spend half a week in a row, that’s 12 rows.
I moved the bulls down to the northernmost row on Tuesday 2/13/2024. I want to move the sheep with the bulls, but I doubt I can move them at all. They really like it in the southern half of the field. Each row is about 215′ wide. I won’t move the bulls and sheep daily, since it is so hard to set up the wire for them — 4 strands from 2 reels. I won’t be giving them the full row either, as I just don’t have enough reels and wire to do that. Instead, I’ll run each reel back and forth forming an L shape,
The cows will finish off the winter rotation on hay, moving through the sacrificial area. Then, in three weeks on 3/5/2024, they will follow the bulls and sheep herd, which by that time should halfway down the pasture.
If there isn’t enough grass, I should have plenty of hay to feed them, to help balance the new grass with the old hay and keep their manure thicker than water. I’ll probably use the hay in the southern half of my field where there wasn’t as much standing hay.
After one rotation with the cows, I’ll be at 4/16/2024. The grass should really be growing at that point. Hopefully it will be knee-deep. The second rotation will end on 5/28/2024 which should take us to the late spring rotation. I plan on setting aside 1/3 of my field for summer grazing, probably the western 1/3. This should also put some distance between my cows and my neighbor’s bull, who is able to jump fences. I’ll start the stockpile on the second early spring rotation.
The primary goal is to not overgraze. If I feel like the cows will eat too much grass and not leave plenty behind, then I will stop rotation and feed them hay. As I am doing now, I’ll probably reserve the western 1/7th as the sacrificial area where I feed hay and wait for the grass to grow more.
My neighbor’s back 20 is my emergency grass. If things get bad I might move them there to buy some time, but I can’t expect to get more than a week out of it.