Quickly Estimate Pounds of Dry Matter in Pasture

Did you know that when you ship 1,000 lbs of milk from your pastured cows, you are sending off 6 lbs of nitrogen, and 2 lbs each of phosphorus, potassium and calcium? A thousand lbs of beef includes 27 lbs of N, 8 lbs of P, 2 lbs of K, and 13 lbs of Ca. How are you going to return that to pasture? A better question: how much of it should you return, since the cows are returning a fair amount themselves. With good grazing management, 60-96% of the nutrients in grazed forage are returned directl

As Jim Munsch describes in this video from Wisconsin Grazing Resources, a pasture walk is an opportunity for graziers to get together to learn from each other.  Farmers and ranchers can share things they’re trying to do to improve their forages, livestock and grazing management, and they can talk about problems, and even come up with solutions for each other. Pasture walks are a great way to see how others manage their pastures and to share experiences of things that have worked, or haven

I’ve left a small amount of pasture untouched since spring. It originally wasn’t done intentionally, but I found myself needing more animals this year and just didn’t get them. It wasn’t just the price of purchasing more, it really was just a time thing; lack of sufficient time that is. I am actually surprised by the quality of that stand and the abundance of native forbs and legumes. Lots of desmodium, better known as tickfoil, tick-trefoil, beggars tick or stick-tights…you

Biodiversity in your pastures provides many benefits to pasture productivity, soil health, animal performance, and wildlife habitat. The table below shows typical composition of our home pastures on our old Missouri farm. There were many other less plentiful species present that are not listed. Nine different plant functional groups are represented in these pastures with 40+ individual species.The main point I wanted to make was the functional diversity of the pasture. A good mixture of cool-