There are semi-thoughtful ranchers who advocate feeding grain to ruminants. Mike Brannon of Roseda Beef, Bon Appétit’s Farm to Fork partner in Monkton, MD, has a response to the “grain concern”; he believes that ranchers should actively manage the nutritional needs of the cow through a combination of grain and grass. Such a diet can be healthy for the cow and the land, and result in a quality end-product. At different times of year, depending on where the pasture is, the quality and nutritional value of its grass changes, Mike argues. It’s therefore important to augment the cows’ diet with whatever the grass isn’t naturally giving them. For example, in the spring, when the grass is just starting to grow again, it’s very tender and extremely high in protein — but low in calories. According to Mike, that’s when you want to augment the cow’s diet with a little grain to give them some extra calories. In the fall,...

Despite all of the gyrations of climate weirding activists about methane, especially their attacks on graziers, atmospheric methane is not increasing. This is a puzzle for researchers and they have been trying to figure out why atmospheric methane concentrations have stopped rising. Two new UC Irvine papers reach markedly different conclusions about why methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, unexpectedly leveled off near the end of the 20th century. They appear today in the journal Nature. Both note that after decades of increases due to worldwide industry and agriculture, the tapering off of the hazardous hydrocarbon in the atmosphere – which began in the 1980s – was remarkable. "It was an amazing mystery as to why this occurred," said earth system science professor Eric Saltzman, a co-author of one paper, which suggests that reduced use of petroleum and increased capture and commercial use of natural gas were the driving factors. A second UCI paper found that water efficiency and...

It's late springtime in the foothills and things are very busy in the grass farming business. That's normal though there's always a special twist each year that keeps things interesting. This year has been cooler and wetter than usual, which means that the spring flush of growth has been vibrant and prolonged. Trying to stay ahead of the growth - keeping it grazed or clipped - so that the pastures don't get rank with overly mature growth gone to seed, overmatched me this year. I lose. It's perhaps worth repeating the factors in this yearly chore. When grasses reach a certain height, which varies by species and cultivar, and have a well developed root system, they switch from vegetative growth which puts on leaf, to reproductive growth which puts on woody stalks topped with flowers and then seed. Vegetative growth is more productive of biomass and that biomass is more nutritious to grazers. It has more digestible nutrients per...

The rain guage overflowed again. That's the second time this year that brought more than 5" of rain over a couple of days. I ought to check and empty the gauge every day I suppose, but I've developed the habit of checking it once per storm, and that may be three or four days. I've spent a little more time writing to the grazing lists while it rained hard. In one sense it's a waste of time since we seem to have the same discussions, at the same time, every year. Sometimes it's the same old topic with a new set of buzzwords because somebody wrote a book, article or essay that used new words for the same old ideas. I've been there, done that, and wore out the T-shirt, but there are always new graziers that get excited about ideas that are new to them no matter how old they are for me. Last year at this same...

One of the contentious issues in managed grazing is about how to cope with pasture growth that the animals refuse to eat. There are several reasons that they do this. Some of it is unpalatable. For example my polyculture pastures have several native perennial "weeds" that have few predators such as western dock, a member of the oxalis family, so called because the leaves are high in oxalic acid. They get a few nibbles from cattle but not significant consumption. There are some insects that seem to be able to handle the acid but not enough to have much effect on the dock. Left alone it would soon dominate the sward. Some of the refusal is otherwise palatable forage that has been fouled with dung or urine. The animals avoid such patches of forage for understandable reasons but they sometimes continue to avoid those areas after weeks of rest and rain that one might think had cleansed the area....

Perfect Pastures If there were no constraints so that I could design and implement the grazing system of my dreams what would it be like? For my entertainment, and perhaps yours too, this is it. Short Course We have a new guy in our grazing group, so I gave him the short course on grass varieties and cattle. It's seems worth posting here too. Substitute Forage Conversation among graziers in the northern hemisphere often turns to stored forage this time of year as winter approaches and pastures start to go dormant. I see it as a special case of the general problem of variable forage productivity. Grass MEGO it isn't that ruminants are poor converters of protein (i.e nitrogen), it is that their rumen microflora need some easily accesible energy to do the conversion work. Feed the rumen bugs and they feed the steer. This isn't a revelation, deep geekery, it's the well known situation and one of the...