A New Perspective on Weeds (Little 4/6)

I know of one little paddock that was all goldenrod weeds and they didn’t really have any good grass in it at all and after we did mob grazing for two years now we’ve got a lot of sweet clover coming out there and there’s even some some of the warm season grasses that have shown up that we never knew were there so that basically native warm-season grasses we started to seed off. We’ve heard that the seed is there you know and with the right practices you will get that seed to grow that’s what we’re looking for. You see a lot of things out there that we didn’t we’ve never seen and cattle need that that diversified plant they don’t want to just eat that one that one plant type. I don’t want to eat whole wheat bread all my life. I want to have a little bit of peanut butter and jelly. Yes exactly right and that’s part of the reason we want to get sheep out in our pastures cuz there’s species out there that the cows really won’t eat and the sheep will.

We 01:15 - don’t want to call anything a weed because it’s just that you don’t have the right livestock out there trying to eat it. So nothing is a weed for you it’s all some kind of food for one of your animals. Food for animals and it’s you know it’s in the soil. It’s something growing in the soil and that’s what we want to keep so if we can work it for both, we’re working between the soil and the animal and they need to help each other out. We got in trouble with our local weed board a year ago after we had seeded that pasture down there was a lot of musk thistle that came out and the guy sent me a letter and said I had to go out there and spray that I said well that’s gonna kill all that newly seeded legumes and he said well you gotta come up with a plan so our plan this year is I had three high school boys that work for me and we gave him each a knife and they went out and they cut down all of those thistles and we’ve pretty well cleared up our problem without using the herbicide.

If it’s really bad we’ll take our 14-foot rotary 02:24 - mower and cut it low enough to kill the weed but not too low you know not too low that it will keep the grass growing. The concept that there are microbes in the soil that symbiotically get along with microbes in a cows gut. How that works I don’t know but it sure seems to work. The benefits are astronomical. .