There is a book on our shelves called Kick The Hay Habit written by rancher, Jim Gerrish. The book’s premise is that ranchers are better off not depending on using hay to feed their cattle through the winter months (when the grass stops growing). Rather, ranchers should create a grazing plan to reserve enough standing forage at the end of the growing season to keep the cattle fed until the next growing season begins.
Our second year of raising cattle, I decided to give this a try. Our landlord, Bill, recommended we cut some hay just have on hand in case of a major snow event, but I was determined to “kick the hay habit” and decided we wouldn’t cut any hay that summer. I thought we could graze the cattle from November to mid-April without needing a bale of hay.
Well, I should have listened to Bill. For a couple of reasons we did end up needing to buy hay. First, much of the pasture we were grazing still had quite a ways to go in terms of producing high-quality forage for the cattle, so the cattle needed more grass to meet their nutritional needs. Second, our grazing plan was not fine-tuned to producing as large a quantity of forage as it could have been. This meant buying in hay from a nearby farm.
So the next year I followed Bill’s lead and we did a cutting hay for the herd. Our goal now is to not have to buy in any hay, but just use the hay we cut here. It worked out last winter and I am optimistic it will work out this winter as well.
The benefits to this approach are at least threefold:
- (1) Quality – we know the hay is high quality, first-cut, and heavy on the orchard-grass and clover. Moving the cattle every day means I can easily keep an eye on how the pasture is doing. And that the land has not been sprayed with any fertilizers or herbicides. The cattle love it.
- (2) Cost – because we use Bill’s hay making equipment, our cost is just our time.
- (3) Soil health – because most of the hay is fed to the cattle in the same field from which it was cut, the nutrients from the hay get returned to the soil through both the hay the cattle leave behind and through their manure. Grown here, eaten here, manured here.
As I described in one of our newsletters, we feed the way in a method called bale-grazing: the hay is spaced-out in the pasture such that the cattle are not able to turn any particular area into a mud-pit. Instead, they eat the bales down and leave behind enough hay residue and manure to provide a large feast for the soil micro-organisms to metabolize. In short, bale-grazing can increase soil and pasture health.
Gerrish’s book is still a helpful guide to thinking about grazing management, but rather than “kicking the hay habit” we are focusing on “keeping the hay in-house”.