Sunday, March 6, 2011

Looking pretty green around here!

We couldn't hardly have asked for more favorable weather over the past three weeks, and most of our farm is turning a nice deep shade of green.  Generally mild temperatures and well-timed rains have helped our fescue pastures and our fields of spring forages (triticale, oats, rye, and ryegrass) start growing up (stem) and out (leaf).  Even the the bermudagrass hayfields are turning green due to a healthy stand of spring weeds, a situation I hope to address within the next couple of weeks.

I spent the first half of this past week applying additional nutrients to one of our grazing areas in the form of 100,000 gallons of dairy slurry.  Meanwhile, we started grazing our cows for 4-5 hours each morning on the adjacent field of rye and ryegrass.  Not only has grazing allowed us to "cut out" 1 ton of corn silage, 1.5 tons of baleage, and 4 pounds/cow of dairy feed from their TMR, it has also resulted in a 4 pound/cow increase in milk production over the course of the week.

I won't be able to resume my slurry application this week thanks to nearly 3 inches of rain this weekend and another rain system predicted for Wednesday.  Despite the rain, though, our ground is still in good enough condition to allow our cows to go out on the fields and graze.  Look for them if you happen to drive by the farm one morning this week!  If you're not going to have that opportunity, you can do the next best thing by watching the cows graze in the video below.



1 comment:

Unknown said...

Awesome! You have got it going on! This is what I love to hear about! I only wish others would follow suit.