Winter Feeding and Reclaiming an Old Pasture

Posted by Beth February 14, 2015

Winter Feeding and Reclaiming an Old Pasture

I feel bad. I’ve been remiss in posting an article to our blog about how we feed during the winter after making this promise to Beth.

I guess like most farms each one has a “back forty” and so do we. Our farm has a ridge that runs from northwest to southeast and the way our property line runs, we have about 25 acres that run across the back side of a slope along the ridge. Since it faces to the west it stays fairly dry. In winter it’s tough to get there because our trails quickly turn to mud and the slope is quite steep. I should mention that one of the additional reasons it stays so dry back there is because like most of our farm it was overused and there is little organic material in the topsoil to hold the water. So since we started the sheep operation we’ve held off from doing anything back there except for the occasional bush hog cut to keep the sumac and briars from gaining ground. All the while we’ve kept the sheep within 36 acres close to the farmstead where we’ve been seeding and using managed intensive grazing (MiG) to improve these pastures.

Now that the flock is growing, we need to start using these back acres so we figured that we’d pasture the sheep back there for the winter. Since last December the girls have been doing what sheep do best, eating, pooping, and making the determined attempt to graze what’s up there, which isn’t much more than the bane of Southeast Ohio, broomsedge grass. But “they endeavored to persevere.”

On average, we keep the sheep in a one to two acre paddock enclosed with electric net for about two weeks, basically the amount of time that it takes 60 sheep to eat down four round bales of hay. So what was left within each paddock was a lot of dung, hay waste, broomsedge eaten down to a nub, and soil which has been disturbed by sharp little pointed hooves, all of which we hope will be the start of reclaiming these 25 acres.

Unlike in the past, this year we didn’t have much trouble getting up to this area. Normally I carry a water tank mounted in a trailer I pull behind my ATV. As winter weather takes hold, it’s only a matter of time before I get bogged down in mud making my water run almost impossible. But this year the trailer broke down from three years of overuse. I didn’t want to put money into this trailer because like most accessories you buy for ATVs they’re not made for everyday farm use. I ended up mounting a 35 gallon water tank on the back of my ATV rack. Getting water to the top is now a breeze.

So concerning the pictures; they are mostly of the round bale feeders that we built. I got the plans from the sheep discussion board I belong to. The links can be found (here and here) if you want to check out the design and specifications. The reason I chose this design was mainly because it minimized hay waste and the construction was simple, cheap and portable.

As for other updates on the farm: Compared to last year, this winter has been fairly steady in regards to temperature and precipitation. Last year we were running low on hay, running low on firewood and certainly running low on energy. All of which helped us to better prepare for this winter.

In January the work load decreased a bit because we no longer have our egg layers. I procrastinated and didn’t get the replacement chicks ordered last summer, so we kept this last lot around longer. But as time went on the number of eggs decreased each day and by January egg production was not even worth the cost of the feed. We were getting ready to butcher them for the dogs when a friend mentioned advertising them on Craigslist. Low and behold, two guys came up from Ironton to get the chickens. During our meeting I reminded them that the chickens were two years old. They were fine with that stating that they could get one more year of laying out of them by feeding hog feed which has 30 percent protein as compared to the 17-19 percent from chicken feed I was using. I’m not sure if I’ll keep my next lot for three years, but he sure gave me something to think about.

Well anyway, we are in the middle of February and I’m behind on weblog postings and lambing begins in March, so hopefully I’ll be caught up with our project narratives and I’ll be able to glide into lambing.