Management

When you raise animals without confinement there are many more variables that we contend with.  Weather, stress, light, and other environmental changes all change the way animals perform.  Sharon moved the chickens to the egg mobile on pasture, and while the eggs are again at their finest, the changes have caused the chickens to change their production and their activities.  They're breaking more eggs in the box and laying less.  Sharon is investigating, and losing sleep over, ways to mitigate these changes and hopes to make some changes to the next boxes soon.  I've move the cattle out to areas of the farm that haven't been grazed in probably 10 years and at the same time I'm experimenting with stock density.  I can experiment now in early spring because the pasture grasses will actually get ahead of my ability to have the cattle graze it, but once summer temps move in, the pasture growth will slow and overgrazing any area can cause that area to stop producing for the year or more.  I've put 10 pregnant cows into an area about 1/20th of an acre.  One day I had them on the 1/20th for 24 hours.  Then I tried the same size area for about 14 hours.  The idea is to maximize the the cattle's grass intake and optimize the grass utilization without sacrificing the grasses ability regrow.  A grass plant that has been severely bitten will take longer to regrow - like cutting your grass if you cut it too short it will "stunt" the lawn - the same type of thing happens with grazed pasture.  But with grazed pasture the cattle create and are impacted by many variables.  Cattle don't like to graze grass that has been soiled by cattle, so once the ground has is fouled with cattle manure and urine they slow down their grazing.  That's good for the grass but bad for cattle performance.  My next experiment will be to cut their area in half yet again and move them to see how long it takes for them to slow their grazing due to fouling.  I have been considering purchasing a GPS that will allow me to calculate area and to calculate grazing areas better ultimately allowing me to setup a grazing plan once I'm back in the pasture.