No rain yesterday – the first time all week! A little Valentine’s Day gift from the weather.
Lots of rain – and we’ve had lots so far this year – means lots of mud, especially when you have animals tromping around the wet fields. And mud isn’t good for much. I’m reminded of the Gillian Welch song “Red Clay Halo“, particularly the lines:
Now it’s mud in the spring and it’s dust in the summer,
When it blows like a crimson tide.
Until the trees and the leaves and the (100% grass-fed beef) cows are the color,
Of the dirt on the mountainside.
…. ok, so that bit in parentheses isn’t actually in the song.
A key principle in the soil health movement is keeping soil covered at all times. In wet conditions animals (and vehicles) can very quickly turn a grassy field into a mud pit. So what’s a farmer to do?
Some farmers will bring their cattle inside a large barn and feed hay there. Later in the year they might spread the manure and soiled hay out on the pasture. We don’t have that kind of infrastructure, so we keep the cattle out on pasture year round. Their thick winter coats keep them plenty warm, especially in these fairly mild Virginia winters.
As much as possible, we keep the animals moving through rotational bale grazing – which we’ve written about here. When the cattle have had their fill of a bale we come behind and spread out the remnant hay over the muddy areas. This keeps the ground covered so that additional rainfall doesn’t wash the soil away, it provides a food source for the soil micro-organisms, and it serves as a layer of insulation that helps moderate the soil temperature. Plus, the cattle help spread it out, so we don’t have the extra step of hauling it out of a barn.
No system is perfect and we can’t get 100% coverage of where the cattle have muddied things up, but we can get pretty close. In the paddocks where the cattle were a month ago we can see some grass coming up through the spread hay!
