Green-up
There are signs of life appearing in the pastures here. Just 10 days ago the majority of our fields were still a tannish brown. Now all of a sudden after a week or relatively mild, if not warm, weather and a couple of days of soaking rain it seems the grass in our pastures is finally coming out of its dormancy. I suppose the tons of composted manure and bedding that we spread on them last fall might be playing some role too!
At the Arena and the Stud Barn, where we keep the vast majority of the pastures off-limits during the winter months, we are really starting to see actual visible growth for the first time time this spring. We are probably still 2 to 3 weeks from coming off of our semi-dry lot setup and out onto the paddocks that radiate from the buildings themselves. Our outer paddocks (they account for roughly 15 acres of our 35 +/- acre total) which don’t connect to any of the barns directly won’t see any grazing activity at all until the herd gets shorn around the 5th of May and the weather turns consistently warmer. At that time there will be at least 2 to 3 large groups of animals (mostly juveniles and yearlings not yet ready to breed) that will go and live beneath the sun and moon with nothing more than a water tub and an outdoor mineral feeder.
Even at the Main Barn, where animals are given 24/7/365 access to their respective paddocks and have been therefore furtively eating at even the tiniest bit of growth, the perceptible change in color from just a week ago is quite stark. You can’t keep a good shoot down I suppose? That barn (which serves as our transient/quarantine barn) is currently setup with 6 different feed groups (2 groups of weaner girls, 1 group of weaner boys, 1 of yearling boys, 1 of yearling girls, and the visiting females) that can be served by 9 possible paddocks out in the surrounding pasture. The trick this time of year is to choose the paddocks that will tolerate the beat-down the best while we allow the others to establish 3 to 4″ of growth before shifting animals over to graze for real on those. Even the paddocks that are getting hammered right now though will — all things being equal (read: no drought) — bounce back pretty quickly given a few weeks of rest later in May.
In any case it always seems to be a feast or famine type of situation with spring grazing here. We will shift quickly from asking ourselves whether there is enough grass for a given paddock to be grazed to having to rotate feed groups around attempting to keep the grass down and even bringing the mowers out of mothballs. It seems anecdotally that the sweet spot in terms of temperature for maximum grass growth here is right around 55 to 60 degrees. A combined run of those temperatures with nice steady rain every 3 to 5 days and our pastures will take off like a shot. It’s hard to believe looking out there right now that that period of explosive growth is really just around the corner. Though we have learned the hard way after 14 years on this mountainside that looks can be deceiving. We at least like to think that we’re ready this time around.
