Soil Health in Pastures - Natural Systems Need Variety

by Dan Allgyer, Amish farmer

In the last blog, we explored the six principles of soil health. This time, I will write about the grazing side of soil health, and will explore more details of how we have, on our farm, created a healthy & “disruptive” system for soil health. I also want to talk about a few common mistakes we have made, mistakes which I still see a lot of other graziers making.

Most farmers, and many non-farmers, know that it doesn't work well to grow just one crop in a field, year after year. We know that the soil will get worn out very quickly if it is not rotated with a different crop from time to time.

Most graziers (i.e. farmers who graze animals around their fields) don't realize that their soil will also get worn out quickly if they graze their cows in the same manner each year.

Even if a grazier rotates his cows in a different pattern each year, or starts grazing at a different place in the pasture each spring, he is still having the same impact each year — unless he is changing his recovery period and his stock density.

It can be very easy to get stuck in a simple rotation of 30-40 days, and to just graze the cows around the farm in this way all summer. This is especially destructive if the grazier is also overgrazing his cows.

This is the biggest mistake I have made, and is the #1 mistake which I see other graziers making. Unfortunately, this grazing practice is not much different to the fields than having the same crops grown in them, year after year.

A lot of us graziers tend to think we are saving the world with our grass farming. Sadly, we may have the most depleted soils of all. For the record, I am a huge fan of grazing, and would always rather see a farm in grass than in crops. And, I think we might as well face the facts.

If we're not actively and purposely disrupting our soils and mixing things up in our grazing practices, then farmer down the road (who is using cover crops and is doing a good job of rotating crops, even if he's using herbicides), is likely doing a better job of building soils, and probably has healthier soils than we do.

Now I want to be careful how I come across with this proclamation, as mixing up the rotation is only one part of fostering soil health in our fields.

I know of graziers who are on a mostly set rotation, who are in fact doing a good job of building soil, but they have long recover periods (45 days or more), and their herd is tramping a lot of grass every time they move. While this might be better for the soil than growing crops, it’s still not ideal.

Over-grazing will happen every once in a while, and can actually be good for the soil. However, most graziers who are on a set rotation of 30-40 days are over grazing every time they're on the field. This pattern of over-grazing is also why weeds become a big problem, and why the fields need to be clipped a few times a year. All of this just adds to the problem.

The best thing we did so far on our land was to simply lengthen our recovery period. The cows will graze a lot more evenly, and not over-graze nearly as soon, on a 45-60 day recovery. This is a big improvement over a 30-40 day recovery period. In addition, the cows will trample a lot more grass if the grass is first allowed to mature more. This trample after long rest period really helps build soil. Once the soil begins to function and become more alive, the older, more mature grasses will have much higher Brix levels (a measure of the carbohydrate level in plant juices, signifying plant health), and will be much more nutritionally dense. Over time, this grass will be a better feed (even if it’s “past mature”) than your 30 day grass from those depleted soils.

You may be thinking that old, mature grass and depleted soils don't help cows produce any milk, and that it’s even more difficult to get much gain on beef with this kind of feed. What I want you to realize is that old, mature grass on depleted soils is NOT the same as old, mature grass on healthy soils.

So back to being disruptive. This is the system which we have implemented on our farm to overcome old grass and bad feed, and also to overcome a set rotation:

In the spring, when the grass is growing like crazy, growing into seed heads, and becoming bad feed, we just let it go. We don't even try to stay ahead of it. Much of the time, about half of our farm will grow up and go to seed. We just let it grow, and we focus instead on keeping half of the farm in a vegetative stage. We might be on a 20-day rotation at this point, but we're only grazing half of our farm. We might make hay off of some of our grass. We try to let no less than 25% of our farm turn old and brown.

As the summer slump hits and we want to lengthen our recovery period to a 60 day recovery, we start to add those acres of brown grass back into the rotation. We do this by putting the cows on a small area overnight, usually at a very high stock density. And since cows don't eat that much at night anyway, they pick out the best and just trample and poop on the rest. We will then put them back on a good vegetative field during the day, so they can fill up on good grass and not get burned on production.

This has proved to be a very effective way of disrupting both the soil and the rotation, while still having a system that's easy to keep track of. Since we let a different part of our pastures grow up every year, we are truly on a 20 up to sometimes 100+ day disruptive recovery period. Stock density will also get alternated this way - even if we only move the cows twice a day, since we are parking them in a tight group at night.

We still do focus on stock density during the day, and will mob the cows at a million pounds per acre at times. Other times, we might move them every few hours. If we're on vacation, we might give them a few days worth of grass.

What we have found is that, by altering our recovery period, it becomes less important to alter stock density so much.

This has allowed us to spend more time on marketing and other important tasks.

The other important thing I have learned is to monitor and to disrupt grazing heights. Most of the time, we only graze the tops of the grass, but at times it does become necessary to graze harder and even to over-graze. This disruption in grazing heights will give different species of grass a chance to express themselves.

This is what we have found to work for us. We encourage every farmer to find what works on his farm, with his schedule.