Posts tagged “grass”

322

Posted on 18 November 2017

As much as I like spring and fall, shepherding seems to have only two seasons: grazing and hay, the season when sheep eat for free and the season when I pay for their meals. Hay season started today for the lambs when they ate through the last of the lush pasture I had set aside for them, and I brought them the first of this year’s round bales of fermented hay.

This group of May lambs hasn’t had much experience eating baleage, and the older sheep weren’t around to show them the way, so I was happy to see that they immediately recognized it as food.

The main flock is still out on pasture, cleaning up the grass the lambs left behind, but I’ll probably have to start feeding baleage to them as well before the end of the week. This is a bittersweet time for me — in that perfect world that I keep talking about, I would manage my pastures so that I had grass for the sheep to eat until the snow was too deep for grazing and portable fences. But the start of baleage season also means that the relentless schedule of moving sheep twice a day is also over; I’ll bring bales to the sheep with the tractor and move them only every week or two, and once the snow comes for good, everyone will be in the Winter Fortress until the start of the next grass season.

Categories: grazing, hay, lamb, sheep

Tagged: baleage, D-S Livestock Equipment, feeding, grass, grazing, hay, lambs, seasons, sheep, Winter Fortress

306

Posted on 2 November 2017

The boundary between the grazed and ungrazed sections of the lower pasture caught my eye this afternoon.

Sheep and fence are implied, and the image tells the story of grazing management — uniformly eaten pasture now allowed to rest and recover, with the next paddock awaiting the arrival of the flock. Bill has been preaching the value of short, intensive grazing followed by long recovery, and I’m already seeing the benefits on my fields. Much of the grass around the area is heading into dormancy as November overtakes us, but most of my pastures are lush and green, the grass growing vigorously in response to earlier rounds of grazing this summer.

Categories: grazing, pasture

Tagged: Bill Fosher, boundary, Chloe, fence, grass, lush, management intensive grazing, rotational grazing, sheep

299

Posted on 26 October 2017

As I expected, there were freshly-dead caterpillars this morning — the entomopathogenic fungus seems to dispatch them pretty quickly.

Carl Majewski, from the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension Service, along with his colleague, entomologist Alan Eaton, confirmed that what I’m seeing are fall armyworms (Spodoptera frugiperda), caterpillars known for developing large, hungry populations when the conditions are right. We’ve had a recent stretch of very humid weather in the 60s and 70s, perfect conditions for these guys to thrive and potentially damage large areas of pasture. Carl half-seriously suggested we culture the fungus that’s been killing my armyworms in an attempt to develop a biological control for future outbreaks of the caterpillar.

Since last night, the temperature has dropped 25 degrees and we’ve gotten nearly 2 inches of rain (curious readers can see farm weather conditions here), so I’m assuming that both armyworms and their fungal adversary will be much less active tomorrow. The sheep haven’t been thrilled with the weather conditions either,

but between their fleeces and the magic of endothermy, they’ll be fine. The pasture they’re grazing on Holt Road has much less grass than I remembered from a visit 5 weeks ago, and I’m wondering if armyworms have made their way through those fields as well. I’ve found some of the same melting caterpillars that I saw at my place. Regardless of the cause, the sheep are almost out of grass, so I’ll be moving them back to my place on Saturday.

Categories: disease, Fungi, grazing, Insecta, pasture, sheep

Tagged: cold, endotherm, entomopathogenic, fall armyworm, fungus, grass, pasture, rain, sheep, Spodoptera frugiperda, wet, Wilder Brook Farm

297

Posted on 24 October 2017

If this year has been a test of my commitment and resourcefulness, this morning provided a pop quiz. As I was setting up electronet for the next grazing rotation, I noticed something yellow in the field, something that turned out to be a big pile of cracked corn. I grabbed a bucket and scoop before I moved the sheep, since a big meal of grain can be fatal to sheep that aren’t accustomed to it.

The pile mostly filled a 5-gallon bucket and weighed between 25 and 30 pounds.

For reference, a safe amount of corn to feed a sheep who is unaccustomed to grain is about ¼ lb per day. And as I expected, the ewes quickly attacked the remaining corn when I moved them to the new pasture section.

Categories: sheep

Tagged: acidosis, corn, cracked corn, grain, grass, grass-fed, pasture, sheep

160

Posted on 9 June 2017

Electronet without the electrons is a purely symbolic barrier that sheep, dogs, and coyotes could easily push aside. And while I went on at some length yesterday about the physical challenges of setting it up, I’m also adept at failing to get the electrons to flow properly. The trouble arises in the Catch-22 embodied by electonet: I use it to divvy up sections of my pasture, an assemblage of tall grasses and other plants; but if the tall grass touches any of the conductive strands, the electricity flows to ground rather than through the fence.

If I were an optimal shepherd, I would have a lawn mower with me out in the pasture, and I’d mow a strip of grass everywhere I wanted to run the electronet. With no tall grass shorting out the fence, I’d have 10,000 volts of deterrence running through it at all times. Instead, I take repeated measurements until I get a number I like.

The meter reads in kilovolts, and 2kV is about the minimum to get a sheep’s attention through all its wool.

Categories: pasture, sheep

Tagged: deterrent, electricity, electronet, grass, ground, lambs, pasture, sheep, short-circuit, testing, threshold, voltage

154

Posted on 3 June 2017

I’m learning that each season has its preoccupation. In winter, I worried if the snow or ice would keep me from bringing hay to the flock, and during lambing, I worried about lambing. In the early spring, I doubted that the grass would ever start growing (it did), and now I worry how long the grass will last.

Parts of the back fields now have grass tall enough to hide lambs in, but the sheep also manage to chew through it at a fantastic rate. I’m still figuring out how much they eat every day, and constantly doing calculations in my head about sheep-days per acre, and acres of pasture not yet eaten. I usually come to the conclusion that I either will or won’t have enough. The fields here have been overgrazed and underfed for many years, so I’m trying to feed my sheep while still nurturing the pasture back to health (more on this soon).

Several friends and neighbors have offered to let my sheep graze some of their fields for part of the summer, additional grass that makes everything work for my sheep during the early going, but I hadn’t quite figured out how to move my sheep around Sullivan. I have fantasies of walking the flock along public roads to get across town, but I fear neither my herding skills nor the Town of Sullivan is ready for this challenge yet. I have an acquaintance who’s offered to move my sheep in his stock trailer, but at $100 per move, it would be cheaper to feed hay to the flock and keep them home. Earlier this week, Bill Fosher alerted me to an older stock trailer for sale in his town of Surry, and today I brought it home with Bob Jones’s help.

The last step is to sell my little truck so I can buy Bob’s big truck, and then I’ll have the capability to get my sheep wherever there’s grass to be had.

Categories: pasture, sheep, Uncategorized

Tagged: Bill Fosher, Bob Jones, Cass, enough, Ford F-250, grass, grazing, Moritz, neighbors, pasture, sheep, stock trailer, Sullivan

139

Posted on 19 May 2017

I think the sensible way to find a new place to live is to look for a community you like, and then look for a house, but my farm search was all backwards, since there were so few properties in New England that met my needs — big, cheap, and close enough to Boston. When I found my place in Sullivan, after 7 years of looking, I didn’t feel like I had the luxury of questioning what kind of town I’d be moving to; the farm that worked for me was in Sullivan, so Sullivan would be my place.

I’ve been delighted to discover that I live in a town with friendly, helpful neighbors, beautiful woods and ponds, and unbelievably rich resources for clueless new farmers. There’s the cast of characters I’ve been writing about — Bill Fosher, my grazing guru and general rescuer; Jenny Hughes, neighboring sheep farmer, friend, and advisor; and Bob Jones, master of all things mechanical and extremely patient teacher. But I’m also discovering all these other local folks who get paid to be helpful to people like me.

Yesterday I met with Carl Majewski, from the UNH Extension Office in Cheshire County. His title is Field Specialist for Food and Agriculture, but I think that translates into Soil and Plant Nerd, of the best possible sort. Carl walked my fields with me, helping me understand what was growing and why, and making suggestions about how to improve the pasture. He also gave me an impromptu (and extremely interesting!) lecture on the anatomy and biology of grasses.

I’m beginning to feel like I couldn’t have landed in a better place, even if I had been much more intentional about choosing a community to live in.

Categories: Hollow Oak Farm, NH, Sullivan

Tagged: agronomy, Carl Majewski, Field Specialist, grass, grass biology, Hollow Oak Farm, pasture, soil science, UNH Extension

120

Posted on 30 April 2017

A month ago, the pastures were showing the first signs of coming out of winter dormancy. Now a month on, as the farm is taking on a much greener cast, watching the grass grow has become a suspense-filled activity.

Every morning I check to see if the grass has grown enough overnight for sheep to start grazing without harming it. This will be the moment when the farm shifts into summer mode. The pregnant sheep will get full access to their 2½-acre paddock so they can spread out and lamb with some measure of privacy, and the rest of the flock will start moving to fresh sections of pasture every day, chasing the growing grass around the farm. I’ll write much more about both of these changes as they happen, but for the moment I keep watching the grass.

Categories: Cass, Dogs, Hollow Oak Farm, Luc, pasture

Tagged: Cass, Dogs, grass, growing grass, Hollow Oak Farm, Luc, pasture, sheep, watching the grass grow

Travels with Musti

Dogs, nature, photography, and the meaning of life, with apologies to J.S.