Winter Bedding for Pigs

 One of the projects to get ready for winter.  ---On this gray November day grandson Andrew and grandpa Jim are raking, baling and collecting cornstalk bales for the pigs' winter bedding. 

nutrients

     Numbers can be useful. Christine Jones, soil scientist, provides these about the recent reductions in nutritional quality of foods.  She compares levels from 1940 with those found in 1991.  27 vegetables show these declines:

copper declined by 76% over that time.

calcium is down 46%

Iron is down 27%

Magnesium down 24%

Potassium is down 16%

In the meats, similar levels are found:

Copper down 24%

Calcium is down 41%

Iron is down 54%

Magnesium is down 10%

Potassium down 16%

Phosphorus down 28%

These are figures from Australia.  Figures here may differ somewhat.  I think the principle concern remains.  Jones does not believe this is primarily a factor of depletion by overuse, however.  She pins the problem on lack of soil life, which is a direct result of our farming practices.  Soil life working with root systems are critical for nutrient uptake. 

This is one more problem we can do something about if we pay attention.

Management

 Any farmer who copes with a northern climate with its short growing season faces a choice.  Get more for the crops that can be grown.  Get the government to pay you what the markets won't provide for these crops.  Or, try to get more out of the season.  I am not opposed to any of these choices, but the last one of them often seems to be the alternative most available.  

For our farm which feeds hay to the cattle on pasture in the non growing season, an opportunity presents itself.  Or perhaps it is just making lemonade out of a lemon, as I heard a farm boy from the plains of Texas tell when he described the mixing of cattle and sheep on the same pasture not as "combination grazing" but rather, "just what we had to do to make a living".  Because where we feed the hay is regularly tromped into oblivion, shortening the grazing there to just a cleanup of whatever grows late in the season, this year we finally woke up enough to get some seed out there instead of just taking what the farm and climate offered.

So we seeded oats and an improved variety of rape in early September.  Oats will grow anywhere at any time and is generally pretty palatable and rape is thought to have a two month growth window before being ready to graze.  Additionally, this variety of rape is reputed to withstand temps down to ten degrees before quitting for the season.  This does not make up for seeding it about a month late, but we can observe, see what we get and adjust accordingly for next year.

Questions remain.  Will the rape/ oats provide a satisfactory ration for the cattle or will it need to be supplemented?  How to follow it up and get back to perennial pasture?  Will the rape succeed on our low and poorly drained pastures?  I formerly used rape in producing hogs, and it worked very well, but that planting was on higher and sloping ground.    

It would be helpful in terms of establishing a perennial pasture next spring if the cattle could take the crop pretty much down to the surface without pugging the soil, but that depends entirely on the fall season.  If they did leave it relatively smooth, we might have a shot at no tilling the new pasture into the area fairly early in the season.  Minimizing machine use is always a goal here at Pastures A Plenty.  I did use the disc and then the drag to prepare for seeding.  I am not sure that seeding it early would have changed the need for that.  

Perennials are better for the land than annuals.  That being true, we have wanted not to interfere with the pastures at all once they are seeded down.  So this attempt is on the order of an experiment.  If we are to evolve into a better farming, we must make it up as we go along. 

Kernza

 Kernza is an exciting new grass from the Land Institute in Kansas via the University of Minnesota's Forever Green program.  It was developed from  intermediate wheatgrass into a kind of perennial wheat, which can be harvested for grain as well as used for grazing. That it is a perennial means that, unlike standard wheat, it does not need to be planted every year, saving the tillage necessary, and of course, the seed cost.  It should be a goal for all of agriculture to have living roots in the soil year around as much as possible for soil stability and health.  This can be a large step in that direction.

But of course, this is new and there are issues.  The University is putting considerable work into building markets and there are bakers and brewers in the Twin Cities that are beginning to incorporate Kernza and Kernza flour into their products.  The taste and baking characteristics are somewhat different from wheat so it will take time.

For us here on the farm, the grain would add to the cash income from crops while the forage will be useful for grazing the beef herd as well.  We don't know as much as we will about how this may fit together, or how long a Kernza seeding will persist.  But the annual crops currently in use in western Minnesota and on our farm are corn and soybeans, both of which require fall and spring tillage, especially in an organic system.  This early spring work on our wet clay soil, especially if it has not been tilled in the fall,  is difficult to do well, resulting all too often in compaction both shallow and deep and the consequent difficulty with getting the crop to thrive.  The very system opens the soil to severe wind erosion in winter and early spring but alternatives are not easy.  

It was our desire to get away from this bind, this tilling of wet soil to achieve high production, that first brought cattle into our farming, with the perennial forage needed that could be seeded in summer or fall and maintained for several years offering us a way out of a cycle of damage.  Kernza, we hope, will offer us some of the same advantages.   

reseeding

 I just finished seeding about eight acres in the pasture that was standing in ragweed.  I used a bushel of oats with six lb of a good forage rape from Barenbrug.  We had winter fed hay there in 2021 and expected to see a return to good grass this year.  But this is often enough not the case on our farm.  I don't want to back off of pasture feeding due to the wonderful efficiencies-no manure to haul, minimize tractor use in winter, and so forth. But it is becoming apparent that it is very easy to damage a poorly drained highly clay soil such as ours with heavy traffic even in winter.  There really is no such thing as standard one size fits all grazing advice.

It may be good for us to regard that winter feeding area as an opportunity to produce a good annual crop of forage, followed by a return to perennials the following spring.  This would involve some heavy tillage, which is not great, but it may be just the thing for this problem.  Of course, a good annual crop of forage assumes that it is going to be planted well before the end of August.

Rain

 We did get rain about a week ago now.  Four and one-half inches at home here and three and a half on the Eagle Lake pastures.  Virtually nothing ran off.  The situation was not good before the rain and we will see how much good comes of it for this year.  It does bring up an interesting comparison though, which consists of impressions only as the inch and seven tenths the pastures got in June that the home farm didn't plus the stark differences in soil and slope make it impossible to reach much in the way of a logical conclusion.

Obviously, every thing is green now.  We had to restart the lawnmower.  The pastures are slow to fire up though, clearly demonstrating the usefulness of schemes to leave a certain level of grass behind at each move.  The grass finds it slow and hard to begin booming again from a start of not much more than an inch or two.  Poor management here.  We resisted destocking the entire summer hoping for rain, and consequently grazed too hard. 

Also noticeable is the difference between the impacts on heavy use areas between the two locations.  Here at home the area right around the drinker being used during the rainfall-which stretched over about two days-is crusted and compacted, surface pugged and very difficult to walk over.  At the east pastures, twenty five miles distant, it is difficult to see any particular impact at all in the paddock where the cattle were during the rain.  It did rain an inch more at home, but I think the major difference is that the soil here is very predominately clay and on the east location it is heavily sand.  

The damage to the soil surface of a heavy rain and cattle impact on a clay soil will have to be taken into account if we are to succeed in grazing these soils, which are so much more productive than the sand based soils on the glacial til that runs across the state, and on which our east pastures are located.  Sand holds up better under heavy use and rain, but clay produces much more if we can avoid compacting it. 

drought

 Climate change is expanding the western drought into western Minnesota.  The USDA climate hub reports for us rainfall at about 50% of average for the month of July.   This follows a moisture short period in June as well.  Additionally, our temperatures are running several degrees above average, humidity readings are on the low side and the winds are pretty constant.  These factors cause plants to use extra soil moisture to cool themselves, thus exacerbating the dry conditions, and adding to the problem.

Planning for a diversified livestock farm must take all this into account and a judgment must be made about whether this is a one or two year event, or an ongoing trend.  We are thinking this will be an ongoing reality for us.  So first, we will likely see a need for shade for the herd periodically, to which we never paid much attention.  Fortunately, we have the farmstead grove of trees which can be used and also two maturing field windbreaks which we can set up for cattle to be moved into on hot afternoons.

Additionally, we may need to work toward a different pasture sward.  Currently we have three or four cool season grasses and some clover for them to graze.  But cool season grasses do not do well in the heat, so we may need to work toward more alfalfa, chicory, plantain and so forth, all of which are tap rooted to some depth.  Intermediate wheat grass, used extensively west of here, is worth a thought too, as it develops a tremendous ball of roots, some of which extend quite a depth.

The pigs require a different approach.  Unlike cattle, pigs will cool themselves nicely if they have access to standing water or can get to a mist sprayer.  The only time this does not work as well is when the humidity is very high and even then, it helps quite a bit. They do need shade, but this is pretty available to them as the housing provides a good bit of it.

It might be helpful to change the pig feeding over to a timed event, rather than simply having feed available all the time.  An animal with a full stomach-especially a simple stomached beast like a pig suffers from a full stomach when the weather is hot.  It may be possible and certainly worth looking at, to devise ways to encourage them to do more of their eating overnight and in the early morning hours.  The technology to accomplish this is quite inexpensive and easy to adapt.

And in the future, we may need to adjust our cropping pattern.  Corn, our major hog feed, requires a great deal of precipitation to grow and may become more of a problem.

To get through the remainder of this season we must sort down the grazing herd, and sell some animals we did not want to market.  This must be done as a first move to get the cattle appetite in line with the available grass.  We hope it rains, and soon! 

We all do need to pressure those with agency to change our economy so that we stop putting so much carbon into the air.  Politicians, of course will never do anything unless their feet are held to the fire.