Baling Twine as a Fence

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Some people have scoffed when I said I used baling twine as a fence…

Well I took the fence down and rolled it up and let the horses into the forbidden zone this morning.  Photo below of the rolled up “fence”.

It works because my stock is accustomed to a good HOT fence.

It was only about 70 or 80 feet of excluded area….but even the goats had not crossed the single strand “fence”

Below is what was fenced out and the horses were sampling the new found goodies.  Even Perkins came out for the taste test but the horse flies sent him prancing back to the stable and Condi soon followed…Pete endured another five minutes or so and he went to the stable as well.

The donkeys sought out the sunflowers…Perkins like the Sun Hemp and cow pea leaves because they were easy to chew with his old teeth.  Condi pulled on a Cow Pea vine and  pulled about six feet of vine out of the millet.  The vine startled her and she pranced around dragging the vine, until she decided to eat it.  Pete concentrated on the pearl millet…

Saw this device at a clients horse farm this morning.  It is a fly trap for biting flies.  They were very happy with it and felt is had really reduced the horse fly population and caught many stable flies as well.  There was a couple of inches of dead flies in it and several who were dying…

Perkins wants to borrow my credit card to order one…

http://www.bitingflies.com/

Here is a shot of morning day two of access to the new stuff.  It is interesting and unusual that they are staying in the short stuff and eating the new stuff from the top down,.  The goats and cows however go into the middle and eat from the inside out.  Yesterday afternoon the goats were hidden in this patch eating…I could hear their bells.  When I grabbed the camera to snap this shot, Condi was standing in the short stuff grazing at head height, but when she saw me she took off for the stable for her breakfast.   Yeah she and the others get a token handout morning and night when Perkins gets his sustenance.

Baby Jim  back by popular demand.

As Always….to see any photo larger click on it….use your browser back button to return to the blog

It is all the fault of Facebook.  It is so easy to post a photo and knock out a quick blurb about the photo.

I confess that I have been victim of the allure.  But finally I realized that in writing and opinions I am not a man of few words and I tire quickly of trying to communicate on a virtual tiny keyboard with my mangled and misshapen fingers……….That leaves me trying to type with a stylus and argue with auto correct about what I am typing and it is frustrating beyond belief.

So having some things to say I realized that I have a blog and it is easy and non limiting…takes a few more minutes to set it up but so much more satisfying than auto correct on Facebook.

Relative to the misshapen fingers, I realized this morning that Naproxen Sodium and Instaflex Plus is what is keeping me functioning.  I forgot to take them last night and awoke with great pain in my hand and wrist this morning from the Rheumatoid Arthritis.   The worst of my two bad knees was also making itself known.   Thirty minutes after taking them I was again functional….Won’t forget them again…

I am not quite dead yet in spite of my advancing age….I was in tractor supply yesterday and ran across a good price on some protein supplement tubs.  I asked a young man who worked there if they had a way for me to get one of these to my truck….100 lb tubs.  He brought out a cart and I lifted one off the stack and put it on the cart and he followed me and my shopping buggy through the checkout line and to the van….I saw him looking at the tub…just looking and not moving…I picked it up and set it in the van….he just looked at me.  I said, “I bet you didn’t think I could do that.”  He said, “No, I was hoping you would help me because I knew that I could not do that.”

Anyhow to the cause for this missive.

I often advise folks to use portable electric fence for pasture division and grazing management….I get a lot of funny looks…Portable electric fence is basically one or two electric wires or polywire or poly tape or polyrope suspended on step in plastic posts.

I also advise folks to use the same setup to create travel lanes between the aforementioned grazing paddocks.  More funny looks..

I try to draw out layouts and get more funny looks.

So yesterday while walking down a temporary travel lane that Marie and I put up in the mid nineties….I stopped and snapped a couple of photos of it….She and I put this lane up way back then for some reason long since forgotten in order to make her livestock management easier while I was travelling for work.  She and I put it up in about a half hour before I left for some out of state destination.  It has been so useful that it still exists today….this was when we first started managing grazing and back then it was for the cows as we did not have horses until 2003 when I got Val and Junior.

One side of this lane was a paddock we had fenced off for grazing management….I took a couple of pieces of 2 inch PVC pipe about five feet long and using a block of wood as a cap hammered them into the ground….creating an insulated post.  This works but I have since discovered that it is easier to drive a steel Tee post into the ground and simply slide the 2 inch PVC over the post making a good strong corner for poly wire.

I used the same trick to hammer some sections of 3/4 inch PVC in as line posts.

We created the lane by moving over about ten feet and doing the same thing.  On this side we used what we had available, which was step in posts and poly tape.

Been there for over 25 years and still functioning.  Here is a shot of the lane.  the left side paddocks have been grazed and mowed and had fall multi species cover crop broadcast on them in the last two weeks.  The paddock on the right side will be grazed in a week or two.

My horses are so accustomed to electric fence that I can now use baling twine as electric fence and they will honor it.  I am using a piece of baling twine today as a horse fence.  My guess is that the goats will pretty quickly figure it out as they are not afraid to test their limits.

No photo of this but I finally have the goats in with the horses.  Since Star Baby is no longer in residence all I had to do was see if Condi would tolerate them.  Perkins absolutely does not care and Pete is pretty easy to get along with.  Jonah does not love the goats but he does not bother them.  Condi says as long as they stay out of her groceries she could not give a rip.  So I rigged them up a place in the stable where they could escape the equines if necessary and they have resided with the horses for two days now.  It has actually helped in making the two goats that I got last year more sociable.  I can now easily touch them, where they have always been skittish and standoffish.   Nelly has long been an in your pocket goat and is constantly investigating my clothes for something edible.  I wanted them with the horses to address some of the weeds that the horses will not touch.  The goats have gone right to work on them…I have enough weeds to keep twice as many goats’ busy full time…next year by this time we should have a few more goats.

Speaking of Condi, we went up to Brunson’ this week to try out Amanda’s obstacles.  I took Condi and Stewart brought his mare Samosa.  Condi and I just walked thru them and she did pretty good…Amanda had a remote control car that she drove around the horses….Condi did not like it at first but then I was driving it and we went all over the arena with Condi following it…Another obstacle was pool noodles sticking out of some barrels.  Condi would go thru them okay but when they touched her hind legs she hurried thru them..

So we hung some pool noodles in the stable over the weekend.  When Condi saw the first one she left the stable…but after I hung it she came right back to investigate…now she has to stand between two of them to get her groceries.  She adapted pretty quick.

Perkins uses them to keep the flys off…not much bothers that old boy.

The only other obstacle that bothered her was the bubble machine….she did not act foolish and was listening to me throughout….but she could not figure out those bubbles…Once she figures something out she accepts it.

I could wave the flag all around her and over her and no problem.  I even covered her whole head with the flag and she just stood there.

CHANGING PERSPECTIVE

JIM TATE

CONSERVATION SPECIALIST

HANOVER – CAROLINE SWCD

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I started this job with the district in 1999, so come Labor day I will be beginning my nineteenth year.  I began fooling with horses and cattle about 1960 when I got my first horse.  It took me a long time to figure out that as a stockman , my first job was to be able to grow grass for feed for the livestock.  Since that big revelation it has been a steady progression of learning just how to do that.  Don’t get me wrong….I am not tooting my horn because I have made so many mistakes along the way that it is shameful to recall them all.  Some of those mistakes were my fault because I am a little bull headed.

Some of those mistakes are not my fault because I was doing what I was taught…..Some of the teaching was conventional wisdom and some of it was university research.

I think my strength is that I can recognize what is not working and attempt to try something different hoping for a better result.  This in itself has taken me down many a blind alley.  But I have tried not to be one who repeats the same process over and over expecting different results.

It took me a while to get here but for the last eight or ten years I have been on a quest to find ways to do things more holistically and with lower inputs and in concert with nature.

My personal livestock endeavors transformed from a sideline business to a hobby about that time when my neighbor and cattle partner died and I returned to riding horses for pleasure.  I sold the cow herd down to two good old lame cows that were too good to slaughter and yet too unsound to sell to anyone else.  Those two cows are gone now, but I am back up to four registered and one commercial cow to breed this fall.  The commercial cow raised a set of twins on her own this past year so she is a pretty good one too and I will probably sell her as a commercial cow next spring after weaning her fall calf and breeding her back.  Three or four good cows Is my goal and I even registered a heifer this year for the first time in three or four years….

But I digress.  At that time I was raising cattle by the university tested paradigm….I was performance testing and measuring growth and doing all of the approved management practices and soil testing and fertilizing and spraying for pests both plant and animal and was a regular customer at all of the farm supply stores.  There came a point where decisions had to be made and poverty avoided.

About that time I was exposed to several outside the box thinkers who are still widely denounced as impractical and quixotic.  But what they were saying registered with me.  I won’t go into all of them and their methods but I decided that there had to be a better way.

I quit buying fertilizer and lime.  I greatly reduced my use of pesticides for both weeds and insects.  I attempted to embrace nature and diversity.  I recalled some of the techniques practiced by the farmers of my childhood right after world war two.  I knew farmers who used horses and mules and recall when 8N tractors were the thing many coveted.  Almost every farm had a surplus army jeep as a farm vehicle.  I remember good bountiful crops before the age of chemistry.  I remember when all farms were diverse with multiple species of livestock and crops.  But yield goals were changing and small farms were becoming big farms and specialization in farming was well under way …… by the time I got to college.  My specialty became Beef Cattle and  I have worked with registered angus  ever since…remember,   I still have five.

But now in my doterage I recognize what we have lost….we have lost diversity.   We have lost the interrelationship of crops and animals.  We have lost natural interrelationships of animals fertilizing the land.  We have lost natural production cycles.  Nutrients are commodities that are moved on and off the farm with abandon.  We have lost wildlife habitat.  The greatest symptom of that is the decline in Bobwhite Quail.  It is theorized that this is mostly due to loss of habitat.

The answer to every problem today comes in a chemical jug.  Now I am not knocking progress and we have found solutions to many problems and have the ability to produce more every year….until something happens in the supply chain,  Or until nature discovers a work around.  One of the great challenges today, is due to the use of Roundup for everything .  We now have roundup resistant weeds that are super aggressive..

Nature abhors a vacuum and she will put something there to cover the soil and her solution is often a bigger problem than the original problem you thought you took care of with the chemicals.  I sprayed some fence line because the grass was shorting out the electric fence….Killed the grass fine….but now I am fighting multiflora rose and wild blackberry and pokeberry and tree of heaven and cedars and so forth that were never there when the fescue was there.  Today I mow fence lines with a push mower….No it is not easy but it is easier than dealing with the multiflora rose….

Now to the points of all of this.  Yes there are a couple of points to be made.

The first is stocking rate.  The conventional definition is number of animal units that can be successfully managed on a given amount of land.

For simplicity an animal unit is generally considered to be 1000 lbs of animal generally regardless of species.  The problem is that many people have no idea what their animals weigh.

Virginia Tech generally recommends that it takes two acres to carry one animal unit.  My position has been for years that Virginia Tech is in the Mountains of Southwest Virginia with a different climate and distinctly different seasons and pasture species than we have here at the juncture of the Coastal Plain and the Piedmont.  I have contended for years that three acres per animal unit would be a better target.  Since no one has heeded my advice in that regard, I am relatively safe in changing my recommendation to four acres per cow.

But people want to have what they want to have.  So they rationalize.  Well I buy all my hay any way.  I buy my feed.  I don’t want the horses to get to fat….clover makes them slobber, too much grass makes them founder, my horse is an easy keeper….the county allows two horses per acre…..and they plant grass every year or have dry lots.

Cattle people do it too…they stock for the best production time of the year…cows get fat in the spring while the producer struggles to make spring hay around the spring rain showers and about a third of the hay gets wet with quality lost.   Then we hit a spell of hot dry weather like this weeks (today is 21 July 2017 ) 104 degree days and no rain for several weeks and the cool season grasses just give up and go to sleep.  I have seen people this week feeding hay that was intended for winter…Hay feeding initiated now is likely to carry on through September or until we get meaningful rain from a hurricane.  In the last couple of decades we have seen summers like this about one in three.  Yet people continue to stock at two acres per cow or less, because that is what we have always done.   My thought is why not stock for the worst of times to be sustainable and have luxury in the good times.  Then you can background your calves rather than having to send them to market …the easiest money to make in cattle is in backgrounding weanlings….if you have the forage.

I was on the farm of a producer this week who does not feed any hay….He has not fed any hay for the last couple of years….his stated goal is for his cows to graze 365 days per year.  This producer does several things differently from the conventional cattleman.

First his stocking rate is four acres per cow.  He had about eighty acres and about twenty cows.  And he had pretty big cows.  For those of you who have seen my cows his were nearly as big as ours used to be and the current ones are now.  Three of my five are still pretty big.  One of the five is but a weanling heifer and one is a smaller cow who produces like a big one.

This producer has grass right now….fescue up to my knees and swithchgrass some of which was over my head.  He is not Making any hay….he is managing his grazing and stockpiling forage.

He rotationally grazes…he controls where the cows graze and more importantly where they do not graze.   Simple one strand hot wire fence….

He allows his pastures to rest and recover after grazing.

Yes I said switchgrass….he has a twelve acre field of swithchgrass and that is where the dry cows are spending a good part of their summer and they are fat and sassy.

I have used and advocated using Summer annuals to do this same thing for several years.  But I was convinced to plant some native warm season grasses in the coming year.   I am planning on beginning my preparation this fall.  I am thinking of a plot of switchgrass as well as a plot of gamma grass and a plot of indiangrass and bluestems.

The first advantage is that the summer annuals cost me seed and planting cost every year.  Once the native warm seasons are established they have little to no maintenance costs.  The stand I was in was twenty years old and had not had any lime or fertilizer or pesticide since it was established.

The native warm season grasses will put roots down 12 to 15 feet or until they hit bedrock which makes established stands able to withstand our hot dry summers.

Below is a picture of corn in my neighborhood this weekend which illustrates how dry we are….some areas are getting rain but we are in a drought year after a wet spring.  This is pretty characteristic in our area about one in three years.  Pastures are dry, dormant and crunchy unless you have some Bermuda grass.  It is still green.

The NWSG will also provide a break from the heat stress on the cows grazing endophyte infected fescue….The endophyte is hardest on the cows when it is hot and dry….a logical alternative is to graze something that is not endophyte infected during the heat of summer….That is what I have used the Summer annual cover crops for.  This year though even the pearl millet and sorghum sudan are rolled up and suffering from the lack of rain….this is one of those years that will reveal what your stocking rate should be….Due to its deep roots and native hardiness, the switchgrass field I was in was tall and lush and leafy and excellent forage and the cows were slick and clean and fat and not suffering with the heat stress.

The NWSG will also make good quality hay but it must be managed a little differently than cool season grasses.   To me however the real value is the ability to fill the void of summer slump in the cool season grasses with a crop that requires little in the way of management or inputs.  Yes it is different than what we have always done but it is the grass crop that was predominant in Virginia before we brought in the cool season grasses and pressured the warm season grasses out of our pastures..We did this by over grazing and over stocking….The NWSG are extremely productive but they can not stand continuous grazing and their growth point is about 12 inches and not 3 or 4 inches like the cool season grasses.

The NWSG will require a different management.  But it is not rocket science.  All it takes is an open mind and a willingness to try something different.  Why would I not try something that can reduce cost, improve animal performance, reduce inputs, address summer slump, provide an alternative to fescue toxicity and make life simpler and possibly more profitable.

We have one local producer in the area that is grazing two large swards of warm season grasses and he is liking them very much.  I just spoke with him yesterday on how he is grazing and managing with the warm season grasses.

Raising livestock is simple…..the hard part is keeping it simple…

As I embark on this new adventure I will try to document my steps and comment on any success as well as any failure.  Dr. Pat Keyser of the University of Tennessee has developed a management sequence that is yielding good results and I am going to try his method of establishment.  My first obstacle is lack of equipment so I have to find a method to plant my small paddocks in something akin to a no till fashion.  I still believe that tillage kills soil and want to avoid tillage.  And no till is an excellent method to plant these warm season grasses.  But the seed is not cheap and I want to have a successful stand with the initial planting.  I will have to use some herbicide to get a stand started and reduce competition but I feel like it is a good trade off to use a herbicide in one year in return for a stand that may last me the rest of my life with very few inputs.  My goal will be to begin grazing it the second summer after planting.

I am targeting four of my paddocks, two on the horse side and two on the cattle side of my property.

Me, mounted on Dancehall Dixie, the great little Mule owned by my friend Stewart.

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We have finally had some rain…we were getting dry and had only had 2 inches so far in April which is normally one of our rainier months.  In the last two days we have had two thunderstorms, and had 3/10 of an inch the first day and 4/10 last night.  It was gray and gloomy this morning and so we walked about and took some photos….taking photos was not my original intent and so I did not take the camera and used the cell phone….unlike most people today the phone is not my better camera and so the photo quality is not quite as good.   But I think it will illustrate   the things we want to point out.

First up are some shots of the pasture near my front yard.  This pasture has been divided into two long strips with one poly rope….this is typically a horse paddock…it was last grazed about two months or more ago….the tall side was grazed and I broadcast some cool season seed and closed it off.  The short side was grazed the following week and it also had some seed broadcast and it was mown and had a tire drug over it….the tall side is taller because I did not set it back by mowing it and the plants not grazed bolted in the spring…the new seedlings are just becoming apparent in both fields.  And the tall side has one week more growth here in the spring.  Sometimes the only way to figure out if what you are doing is right is to try something different.  I still don’t know which will end up better but the different management is apparent at this point….now the taller one has bigger weeds as well.

I really need to switch the horses and the cattle to take control of the weed problem but the goats won’t honor the single strand horse fence and just go everywhere….and I can not put the goats with the horses cause both Pete and Star Baby love to chase em….

Next are some shots of paddocks across the big bull field….this one pasture has been divided into five paddocks with poly wire…it was grazed in the late winter by the steer and the goats.  The same animals will go back into these in two more weeks….by then the forage will be over the poly wire…what is of interest is that each paddock was grazed for about a week in the fall and then seeded and mown and or dragged.  The seeding mix was not very different for each….but there are differences in the plant community in each paddock…the closest one is dominated by vetch and crimson clover…one is dominated by barley and others have varying degrees of the mixtures…

oh and I must point out here that while I was powering up the camera to take these shots a turkey hen flew up out of this field which is right beside my house…Last week she and two suitors were in my back yard….these cover crops are not only good forage….they are great for wildlife.

One thing has become apparent….these pastures where I have continuously had cover crops, have very little fescue.  I used to think fescue was the only thing that would hold up….but these continuous covers and rotational grazing have changed the plant community without using herbicides….now I have used some herbicides this week.  The goats are not numerous enough to keep up with the brush and the goats do not have access to the horse side so I have been spraying back some blackberry and multiflora rose and thistle and poke berry this spring….

but back to my point…I continue to think that multi species cover crops are a good agent of change suitable for use in converting from endophyte infected fescue to endophyte friendly fescue….two or three courses of seasonal multi species cover crops, supplemented by spraying between cover crops should adequately suppress the endophyte infected fescue.  I like the productivity of the cover crops so well that I intend to continue to use them as a primary forage.

Next up is the series of eight paddocks that the horses are grazing now.  They are currently in the fourth of the eight.  They have each one for about a week.

Here is this week’s paddock with the crew at work.

Here is last week’s paddock, seeded and mown and aerated with my spike tooth aerator.  Got it done right before the rain….Oh, and it was seeded with the new summer mscc mix I got this week from Green Cover Seed.  I don’t have the mix right here to hand but it has :  Pearl Millet, cow peas, sunflower, sun hemp, okra, dwarf essex rape, florida broadleaf mustard, chicory, buckwheat and I forget what else.

I have an area that once upon a time was garden and now is home to the chicken tractor.   My routine is to move the chicken tractor weekly and then I throw down some seed and mulch over it.  Some of it had gotten pretty tall and so I let the horses and donkeys in over the weekend to knock it back a bit…Pete liked the barley and rye….Star Baby was eating vetch and crimson clover.  The donkeys just stood in one spot and ate  it all.  Perkins decided he liked the chicory.  The chicory was about two feet tall and Perkins went from plant to plant and grazed it to the ground.

Not cover crops but these are the day lilies looking good around the graves of eight of my best friends….

Here is another shot of the paddock by the stable where a pair of quail are frequent visitors….the Rape in this shot appears to have taken over.

But there is small gain, crimson clover and vetch as well as a pretty good stand of orchardgrass.

Last but not least…..my chestnut trees are blooming.

I grew these chestnuts from seed that I picked up from a huge chestnut at Big Spring Mill in Elliston, Va. Over 25 years ago….I actually had a couple of chestnuts last year but did not see them bloom…this year there are quite a few blooms.

Jim Tate

PDF FARM EXPERIMENTS

8/28/2016

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I liked the new letterhead that I made for the OP-ED article so I am going to use it again…The mule is my good friend Stewarts good little mule Dancehall Dixie….The jackass riding the mule is yours truly.

I have a lot of photos I took of various things this morning as I was working.  The photos are from the cell phone and I cannot see to aim the thing in the sunlight so the photos are not as good as my regular camera.  The phone camera is just as high a quality but if you cannot see to aim it the photography suffers.

This is the mornings work area…the three pvc pipes are the left hand boundary of the two lots grazed by the heifers this past week…this area will be broadcast to cool season seed mix and bushoged and closed off while the cattle move to the next lots up the hill.

In sowing yesterdays lot my shoulder bag seeder when kaput….so while I was out yesterday afternoon I stopped by home depot to get one they advertised on line….but they failed to have one in the store….

So I stopped at tractor supply and found this one for a little more than half the price and I think I am going to like this one.

Metal gears that are exposed and can be lubricated.  Metal seed opening adjustment.

Real good seed distribution.  Easy adjustment for volume and easy cranking….

Below is a step that I got behind on this year…and I have been paying the price.  I did not trim under the electric fences the first time we grazed and then the crops got over them and I have been trimming fences ever since…this works for me as well as anything…a mower with the wheels set as high as I can set them….lot easier than a string trimmer..I have a wheeled string trimmer and it is worthless.  This little mower handles blackberries and small trees and poke berries and the residue.  More on residue to follow….residue is important…Part of what I want to illustrate is the amount of residue I am leaving….in this paddock the residue probably averages 8 inches high or more…I could make them eat more…

But that does not leave anything for the livestock underground….building the soil microbia is a key component to building the soil….this takes underground roots and surface residue…my goal is for the livestock to take half and leave half and I think we have come closer to it this year than any year in the past….a good part of the credit must go to the timely rains we have had most of the summer….water is the most important nutrient.

I have learned some things this year…It is not awful for grasses to go to seed.  I have a couple of wet paddocks that I could not get into to seed or bushog after grazing….these paddocks had a pretty good mat of walked down residue and I wondered how it was going to affect the grass…the orchard grass and fescue  had put up seed heads and they had matured before it got dry enough to even let the horses in that area.  Now a month or so after grazing I have new grass showing all over the lot.  Natural reseeding.  I am also seeing increased red clover in areas where I have not seeded red clover in a couple of years.  In addition if the livestock grazed those seed heads they help with the reseeding.  Yes I get a few weeds but weeds have some value as long as they do not take over…bush hogging after grazing will control the weeds.  I actually need more goats to graze with the cattle for better weed utilization.  My lazy goats are not hungry and lay about the barn most of the day.

The morning light was not the best for the photo below. It shows the stages of the lots mown and sown the last three weeks.  Last weeks has barley up about three inches tall today.  The grasses are too fine to see.  Clover is starting to become apparent.

I mentioned above that I have lots that did fine without mowing…the only reason I mow regularly after grazing is for weed control and to suppress the existing vegetation to allow the new seed to get established.  A good grass stand will not allow much competition to get established.

Below is where I will talk about what I learned about quantifying the value of residue just this weekend.  Some background is in order.

A couple of years ago I attempted to set up an aquaculture experiment…raising fish in rain water tanks and using plants grown in gravel to filter the water and fertilize the plants…My experiment did not work because I could not find an economical 12 volt pumping system…small pumps would not pump enough water and the fish did not get enough aeration, and pumps of sufficient volume killed the battery beyond solar charging capacity.  So for a couple of seasons now I have just scattered seed in the tubs full of gravel and observed what would grow.  Last summer I dropped some improved crab grass seed in these tubs and grew a whale of a crop….no nutrients just kept it watered growing in pea gravel.  In the fall I dropped some cool season cover in it and had a decent spring cover crop, again just gravel and water….when the cover crop faded with summer heat the crab grass came back,,,naturally reseeded…I normally water my cover crop buckets daily and also water these tubs…

Now, these tubs have a valve system to keep them from getting water logged and if full, the drain opens and drains the tub…sometimes a heavy rain will trigger the valve and I have to refill them…so I check the water about every day….Normal transpiration will use about two to three quarts of water per day.

I decided to drop some cover crop seed in the gravel again this fall…the crab grass and buckwheat had overgrown the walking area so I decided to cut it back…I took some shears and cut it back to about six inches and generated a pile of residue.  After I generated the pile of residue….I thought why not chop this up and mulch the seed with it…the second tub I did not cut as it was not in my walking area.  The residue I took off when chopped up made about a five gallon bucket of mulch….I put it on the seed and it made a layer at least six inches thick….All this was late Friday afternoon.   I did my regular watering during that evenings chores.  Saturday afternoon the tub with no mulch required the regular two quarts of water.  The tub with the mulch require 1 pint of water….only one quarter of the normal amount.  I will try to see how long the effect lasts.  Same on Sunday….two quarts in the tub with no mulch and about a pint to the tub with the mulch.

Photo below is the mulched tub and then the two tubs side by side.

Update 9/7/2016

the mulch tub is still only using about a pint or less of water per day…..the unmulched tub is using a quart and a half to two quarts depending on the heat of the day.   the fall cover crop is coming up in both….more easily seen in the unmulched tub but the cover is coming up through the mulch in the mulched tub.  will try to get some new photos

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WE GOT AN EARLY START THIS MORNING AND SEEDED A PADDOCK THE CALVES WENT INTO MONDAY NIGHT…THIS FIRST PHOTO IS TO SHOW THE SMALL SIZE OF MOST OF MY PADDOCKS…THIS ONE IS ABOUT 40 FEET BY 100 FEET AND IT CARRIED FIVE WEANLING CALVES FOR FOUR DAYS

SEEDED WITH 4 LBS PEARL MILLET, 4 LBS OF COWPEAS, 1LB OF KOREAN AND 1 LB OF FOXTAIL MILLET.  THE SEED WAS BROADCAST AND THEN I WENT OVER IT WITH MY HIGH TECH SOWING EQUIPMENT

MARIE SENT A SUPERVISOR TO MAKE SURE i DID EVERYTHING RIGHT.

BELOW IS A PADDOCK RESEEDED LAST WEEK

THIS IS A CLOSEUP SHOT THAT SHOWS THE RESIDUE AND THAT THE SEED WAS PRETTY WELL COVERED UP WITH MY HIGH TECH PROCESS.

THIS IS THE CALVES PREPPING THE NEXT PADDOCK FOR SEEDING…YEAH IT IS A LITTLE WEEDY BUT IT HAS NOT BEEN GRAZED SINCE EARLY SPRING WHEN THE GOATS WERE IN THESE PADDOCKS.

THIS IS THE ADJOINING PADDOCK THAT WAS SEEDED ON JULY 4TH….IT WAS TOO WET THEN TO PUT THE TRACTOR ON IN. SO THE DOCK SEED HEADS ARE STILL THERE….i DON’T WORRY ABOUT DOCK ON THE COW SIDE AS THEY WILL EAT IT….THE HORSES NOT SO MUCH.  THE SEED SOWN ON TH E4TH IS ALREADY UP

THIS IS THE LOT THE HORSES HAD THIS WEEK….FOR NEARLY A WEEK….THREE HORSES AND TWO MINI DONKS.  THEY GRAZED A LOT AND WALKED A LOT DOWN….LOADS OF RESIDUE….TOO WET TO GET ON WITH TRACTOR SO i AM JUST SHUTTING IT OFF AND LETTING THE PRETTY GOOD GRASS REGENERATE.

HERE IS THE HIGH TECH EQUIPMENT….I BROADCAST THE SEED BECAUSE MY EXPENSIVE EQUIPMENT DOES NOT DROP SEED EVENLY BUT IT DOES A PRETTY GOOD JOB OF GETTING IT TO THE SOIL…AFTER BROADCASTING SEED THIS MORNING THERE WERE SEED EVERYWHERE…AFTER MOWING AND AERATING YOU REALLY HAD TO LOOK FOR THE SEED.  MY THANKS TO THE LOCAL STARLING FLOCK WHO SENT IN A SPECIAL TEAM TO HELP ME FIND SEED.

BELOW IS A CLOSEUP OF THE WEEDY LOT BROADCAST ON THE 4TH…SEED IS COMING UP….I USED A MUCH MORE DIVERSE MIX ON THIS PADDOCK THAN i USED TODAY.

THIS IS TODAYS PADDOCK SEEN FORM THE OTHER END.  THE GREEN IN THE BACKGROUND IS A PADDOCK THAT WAS SIMILARLY SEEDED TWO WEEKS AGO.  BUT IT HAS A PRETTY STRONG STAND OF ORCHARDGRASS FESCUE AND CLOVER….WE WILL SEE HOW THE COVER SPECIES DO IN IT.