A Forward Thinking Approach to Grazing (Little 1/6)

In the late 80s my brother and I started doing ridge-till which was the newest thing at that time with a lot of cultivation of row crops and then we hit some really dry years and in the early 90s we started doing no- till farming and we did no-till farming separate from our livestock operation. Our crop ground was crop ground and our pasture ground was pasture ground and over the years that didn’t really change too much until probably what maybe six, seven years ago? We really wanted to get cattle integrated into our cropland putting more into the soil you know will give back to us even more so so our goal is to get to the point where we’re not feeding any stored feeds over the winter time and last year we got I think probably we fed 450 days and last year was a tough winter we had about 250 acres of cover crop in those five quarters and I would say half of it we wind rowed we hired a guy to come out with his self-propelled disc line and he wind rowed it and we wish would have done all of it like that. We found that the quality kept in that row and the cows were able to find it through the snow up to a certain point and we actually had to go out there with a loader tractor and show them where it was at one point but once they found it they went right up the row but this year we’re doing that again but we’d like to to bail some of it up and leave the bails out there because then they’d be able to get to everything, you know,, bale grazing is what they call it. We’ve been trying to add more enterprises as they call it ‘stacked systems’ and you don’t want to add a new enterprise too quickly because there’s a real learning curve to something you’ve never done before. .