Beef Tips
Bale Grazing
For eight of the last ten years, we have always fed hay in a sacrificial area up by the barn in a hay ring starting in late fall and ending in spring. Every spring I always felt blessed and cursed by the manure pack that had built up over the winter around the hay ring. On the upside, I loved that I had this concentrated mass of hay and manure pack to mix into my compost piles and then spread on the fields and gardens. This stuff really gets the compost pile going. On the downside, I had a muddy, wet mess around the rings and the area where the ring was is sacrificed as the manure pack created an unnatural nutrient imbalance that slowed grass recovery and the growth of green cover. Further, it created an area for disease to develop. Wet is never good on a farm. By late March and early April, the cattle were ankle to knee deep in mud around the rings. We would move the ring to manage this, but we didn’t do it frequently enough and the sacrificial area grew.
Last fall I was listening to a book by Gabe Brown, a Rancher in North Dakota, who discussed the topic of Bale Grazing to feed his cattle in the winter. Gabe places his hay stockpiles strategically around his fields and moved his cattle to them over the winter. This strategy has the cattle come to the bale, eat the bale and deposit manure and urine along with some residual hay in an area. Then the cows move to the next bale 50 feet away. Using this method, he distributes the manure, does not have to burn the energy to cost and spread the manure or compost it, and his cattle always have a clean pasture area to bed in. The residual hay returns as nutrients to the soil and is naturally mixed with the manure and urine in the right proportions. It decomposes readily into nutrients that are ready for consumption in the field. Below is picture of this process being used on our farm this winter. This method has reduced my costs through the reduction in spreading and composting machine expense and time. It has the cattle doing more of the work rather than me. Don’t forget, cattle have four legs.
Pasture after bale grazing in earling Spring 2020.
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MEET THE BOARD
Jamie Wilkerson owns and operates K&E Wilkerson Farmstead with his wife Lisa and children Kyle and Emily. The Belted Galloway farm is in Adel, Iowa a small town just west of Des Moines. The farm was established in 2009 resulting from Kyle and Emily’s interest in the breed for a 4-H project. Both joined as Junior Members as well a the regional, and national associations. Our goal now and into the future is to focus primarily on freezer beef production and continued breed development. Jamie currently serves as Director of the Great Lakes Belted Galloway Association.
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