Post by DoubleD on Jan 15, 2014 23:25:04 GMT -5
My wife and I live in Western Ontario. I am going to outline a little about our operation. We are HMI practitioners. We use daily or every second day grazing for our cattle during the growing season (around here May to October, but Cows can stay on grass until snowfalls in November-December). It is important for us to have both healthy cattle and healthy pastures.
To that end, I wanted to discuss how we are doing our winter management of our herd. We had a nice size corral built at the back of the barn to allow our cows some roaming space. I didn't have the infrastructure in place to do winter bale grazing, so thats out for this year. What we are doing is hay feeding in the corral, different spot each day.
The herd is small, so I go in every day or second day, scoop up as much manure as possible and then haul it out the frozen snow-ice covered pasture. I randomly pick a different spot each time. My goal with this is to give the pasture a nice spring boost.
We also do not intend to put the cows out on pasture until the grass has reached its boot stage (about 3-4 leaves on the grass plant). So with normal spring anticipated, we can expect snow melted and gone by late March or Early April. This would allow a few weeks for the microbes to break down the manure spread out. I realize that not all of it will have fully composted but over the course of the summer, it will. I watched cow pies last summer disappear completely in 4-6 weeks. Lots of bugs and worms.
We are hoping in the future to set up more paddocks out on the pasture for winter use (Using high tensile, metal post and fiberglass post) and do more bale grazing on pasture. Then when spring starts, bring the herd into the barnyard corral and allow time for hay/manure to break down.
The challenges we have in Collingwood, Ontario (Right on Georgian Bay) is lots of snow fall and lots of ice. We are hoping sometime in the future, to be able to grow good thick stockpile and have the cows eat it during winter (assuming its not ice-snow buried).
What are your thoughts on this? What winter management for manure/hay have you used? Has anybody from Ontario used stockpile or bale grazing? Thoughts? Ideas?
To that end, I wanted to discuss how we are doing our winter management of our herd. We had a nice size corral built at the back of the barn to allow our cows some roaming space. I didn't have the infrastructure in place to do winter bale grazing, so thats out for this year. What we are doing is hay feeding in the corral, different spot each day.
The herd is small, so I go in every day or second day, scoop up as much manure as possible and then haul it out the frozen snow-ice covered pasture. I randomly pick a different spot each time. My goal with this is to give the pasture a nice spring boost.
We also do not intend to put the cows out on pasture until the grass has reached its boot stage (about 3-4 leaves on the grass plant). So with normal spring anticipated, we can expect snow melted and gone by late March or Early April. This would allow a few weeks for the microbes to break down the manure spread out. I realize that not all of it will have fully composted but over the course of the summer, it will. I watched cow pies last summer disappear completely in 4-6 weeks. Lots of bugs and worms.
We are hoping in the future to set up more paddocks out on the pasture for winter use (Using high tensile, metal post and fiberglass post) and do more bale grazing on pasture. Then when spring starts, bring the herd into the barnyard corral and allow time for hay/manure to break down.
The challenges we have in Collingwood, Ontario (Right on Georgian Bay) is lots of snow fall and lots of ice. We are hoping sometime in the future, to be able to grow good thick stockpile and have the cows eat it during winter (assuming its not ice-snow buried).
What are your thoughts on this? What winter management for manure/hay have you used? Has anybody from Ontario used stockpile or bale grazing? Thoughts? Ideas?