Rain, finally!  As most of you know, it has been a dry spring and summer but with all the latest rain, the ponds will be refilled and the grass recharged.  We received 3.5″ from Thursday through Monday!  For reference we received only 0.4″ in the previous 34 days.  The rainfall amount has been the biggest unknown variable with the greatest impact for our fields and cattle herd.  Given its importance, I thought now would be a good opportunity to discuss how we balance our cattle herd with our grass.  Let’s start in the spring at the beginning of the growing year.

Spring - All spring we try to minimize the effect our herd has on the first shoots of tender grass.  The cows are ravenous for the stuff! We manage the animals by feeding some hay and giving them large paddocks in which we move them through quickly.  This is a great compromise as ideally for the grass we would have no animal impact and ideally for the cows they could eat as much as they wanted! We balance and watch the regrowth behind the herd until that joyous point when the grass is deemed to be “ahead of the herd”, meaning that the grass is growing faster than the cattle are eating it.  This point generally occurs around mid-May to the first of June, depending on the weather.

Summer – If all goes well, the “ahead of the herd point” coincides with the middle of our calving season so that the mothers are on great grass and we are adding mouths to the herd at the same time that the food supply is plentiful.  This is also when we add stockers.  Stockers are animals that we buy in the spring and sell in the fall.  We try to balance the number of stockers that we buy with the amount of grass that we will grow over the summer, it’s always a guessing game dependent upon the summer rainfall.  Our goal would be for the cattle to eat all of the grass between June and September and our herd to go to sleep every night completely full.   The grass and soil are the healthiest when we can provide a period of intense grazing with a long period of rest.  We accomplish this by grazing a different paddock each day with the largest herd possible.   In practice we err on the side of caution, as we know that the summer droughts are unpredictable and nobody wants hungry cattle.

Fall – Autumn is a time for evaluating the herd and stockpiling forages for the winter.  We generally want to sell our stockers and any animals that are not a good fit for our herd.  We try to winter our best breeding herd and the best steers for the direct sale beef next year. This process of culling the herd is the main method of ensuring the quality and health of the herd.  It is very important that we continually cull to improve the herd’s health and composition. As fall progresses, there will be less mouths to feed and the cool season grasses will begin to flourish with the drop in temperature.  Our goal by the end of fall is to have a healthy herd of choice animals and grasses that are long and ready for winter grazing.

Winter - The primary feed source during the winter is the standing grass that we grew during the fall.  We will supplement hay during cold snaps, deep snow and when forages run low but the animals still get most of their calories by grazing.  We are scaling back our hay and scaling up our standing forages for this year.  Hopefully we will not have another winter like last year where we had to purchase extra hay because the snow cover lasted so long.  If we get a typical winter season, we expect our fields and balance sheet to emerge in the spring healthier.

As with most things in life, herd management is an educated guessing game.  We guess how much rainfall we will get, how many animals we will sell direct, how much grass we will need to get the animals through the winter, and how many animals the grass can support.  We experiment and adjust all throughout the year.  So far this rotation method has increased the fertility of the land which is the main barometer of our grazing success.  We will be experimenting with some woodland grazing this summer and we will let you know what we learn!