Eight Acres

Once again we are learning on the job and its time to make some decisions to manage our stock feed through the winter. The typical system in our area is to have pasture with mainly tropical grasses that do very well in summer, but die back in winter.  These are rhodes grass, bluegrass and gatton or green panic.  When the grasses die back the protein content decreases and stock don't put on weight.  They have to eat a lot of the dry grass just to maintain weight and we have to feed them hay.  Some farmers we know only keep steers from spring to autumn and don't even try to keep them over winter.  This means they are buying when the price is high and selling when its low.  forage oats  To help the stock gain weight farmers will grow a forage crop in a cultivated area.  Over winter this can be oats or rye grass, and over summer sorghum or millet.  The cattle can be let into the cultivated area to eat the forage or it can be baled int...

After we brought in the sorghum hay that was growing on the property when we bought it, and had our soil test results, Farmer Pete spent several weekends (and several jerry cans of diesel) ploughing about 25 acres of the cultivation area in preparation for sowing oats.  Then we bought oat seed and organic fertiliser and tried to figure out how the old cultivator drill worked.... It wasn't as difficult as it looks, the seeds go in one compartment and the fertiliser goes in the other, and we had to set up the gears that run off the wheels to put out the right amount of seed and fertiliser.  This is where we got into trouble as I didn't know what fertiliser the rates were based on (more likely urea than our organic fertiliser!), so that involved a bit of trial and error.  We ordered the manual from plough book sales and of course it arrived AFTER we'd finished planting :)  I do recommend trying to get the manual for any old equipment that you buy, it really h...

Round bales are a cheap way to buy hay for stock when the grass dries off in winter or if you're keeping them in the yards.  Round bales without round bale holders don't last more than 24 hours with our cattle!  They tend to pull the whole thing apart and then lie down in it, poo in it and refuse to eat the rest.  It makes a very expensive pile of mulch!  With a good round bale holder, most of the hay will be eaten and only the stalks are discarded, but the holders are expensive to buy, around $400 in our area. Before we owned a round bale holder (and after making a few expensive piles of mulch) we made a quick and cheap version using three cattle panels arranged in a triangle around the bale.  Farmer Pete made one of the panels with wider rung spacing so the cattle could poke their heads through.  This worked quite well, as a triangle is very strong and the cattle couldn't push it over, but it wasn't ideal for them to access the hay (and we needed the pa...

I can't claim to be an expert on hay, but I've certainly learnt an awful lot about making it over the past few weeks! Since owning cattle we have spent a lot of money on hay, in round bales and square bales, to feed to our animals when we ran low on grass.  For ages I couldn't understand why the cattle didn't eat the dead dry grass in winter.  It seemed to me to be exactly the same as hay.  Well I only recently figured out that hay is not just dead dry grass!  Hay is grass cut in its prime and allowed to dry to just the right amount before baling.  Hay contains maximum nutrition for the cattle, that's why they like it so much. When we purchased our new property, a crop of forage sorghum on the top cultivation area had just been cut for hay, and was starting to grow back.  By the time we owned the property 6 weeks later, it was ready to be cut again.  We engaged a contractor (neighbour) to cut the sorghum using a "mower conditioner" which cuts the ...