In answer to questions about winter stockpile:
‘Stockpiled forage’ means mature plants left standing in the pasture and reserved for use after the growing season. Note that we say ‘mature’ plants, not senescent or lignous. We time our summer grazing to leave half the pasture acres untouched after their mid-summer grazing. For this part of Ohio (east central, zone 6), that means that somewhere around the middle of July, or a bit later, whatever we graze over the next six to eight weeks is going to be taken out of the rotation for the rest of the growing year. About half the farm will be grazed over this lste-summer period. Then in Sept/Oct/Nov we graze the other half, leaving the earlier pastures to regrow. We’ll probably make two rotations on the part we’re not stockpiling, depending on what the weather is doing. In a perfect year — 2018 was pretty satisfactory — we’ll get some good rains and lots of regrowth, and the stockpiled pastures will be fully mature when the cold weather sets in. Then come late November/early December we finish grazing the fall pastures and start around on the stockpile.
It probably goes without saying that we’ve stockpiled the pastures where we have the most frost-free water (spring-fed tanks). We don’t like permanent lanes and the impact they get, but in the winter when there’s no snow on the ground we have to leave a temporary lane open back to water. We use reels to build the lanes, and move them often to minimize the opportunity for back grazing. Some of the bunch grasses (especially orchard grass) are going to be hit too hard if the cows get bored and start lounging back toward water, so we watch for this and shift the lane fence accordingly. This method works well for us, and the improvement we’ve seen in our pasture composition and productivity over the last six years has been very satisfactory.
Not only must we consider the condition of the standing grass (‘stockpiled forage’) and the depth of snow on top of it; the quality of the snow itself, over and above quantity, comes into play. What kind of snow is it? — and how long has it been here? turn out to be significant questions as well.
Slush is yet another matter. If it’s not too thick — half an inch seems to be about the limit — our cows will be philosophical about eating iced forage; beyond that the trouble may not be worth the reward. But slush has another effect on winter foraging, since it packs down wherever it is stepped on and traps the grass underneath, then freezes. When the snow melts this grass will be pressed down to the soil, where it’s hardly accessible to bovine tongues and will in any case rot quickly, adding to the soil carbon but no longer available as forage. So slushy paddocks have to be calculated to allow a percentage, and not a small one, for waste; which allowance has repercussions in the form of potential shortage down the season.
Maybe it’s the grass this year, which has been exceptionally rich and plentiful with alternate warmth and cool, sun and rain. Good grass means plentiful milk, so much we’ve had to begin making cheese twenty pounds at a time, and butter in a four gallon bucket, good things indeed. But heavy lactation right after calving can trigger calcium deficiency, or ‘milk fever’, a nuisance at best, deadly if not dealt with, and we’ve seen two cases now, two for two this month of May. We’ve got a crick from elevating i.v. bottles for twenty-thirty minutes a go, and a permanent case of the shudders whenever we see a hypodermic needle.
A newborn calf is hard-wired for just a few things, but he does them very well: he can stand, walk, search for his dinner and get it put away, keep close to Mama and take long naps, all within the first few hours of birth. He’s almost always generously gifted at all those activities, and with every twelve hours he gets better at them. So when the college kids who came up from Florida to spend a few days at the monastery reported that they’d gone down to the pasture to look at the day-old bull calf and he wasn’t there, we just smiled. He was there, we were certain; calves are always near their mothers. After a good meal they’ll couch down somewhere within a short distance — a few dozen yards at most — from Mama and take a good snooze. A lump of brown calf and a lump of dirt, or pile of leaves, look almost identical, and a newborn can hide behind a pebble or a blade of grass, so there’s little use looking for them until they get hungry, but they’re there. But as the afternoon wore on, no calf appeared; and the cows in the small paddock were restless, calling with the regularity of a bell tolling, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes on end, for that little calf, and he didn’t appear. ‘Those kids got the cows stirred up’, said Shawn, so we dismissed the event and went and milked the cows.
