Angus VNR: Simple Techniques, Big Results
Pasture, the ranch’s foundation, needs enough attention to support your cow herd. That starts with understanding your water table.
“Our season begins actually when the water begins to recharge in our soils, and that begins in October at the end of the growing season. By the time we get to spring, we should have a certain amount of precipitation that has actually accumulated in the soil, and if we get an adequate amount, spring will come early. If we don't, it might be delayed, but it sets the stage for our spring, and if we track it through the spring season, then we can have a better understanding of how we need to adjust stocking rates if necessary. Should either one, we receive abundant rainfall and can add more numbers, or if we receive less rainfall, how do we need to de-stock in order to preserve our pastures?” says Hugh Aljoe, director of producer relations for the Noble Research Institute.
When driving or walking across a pasture, don’t forget to look down.
“Looking at what the residual looks like, do we have adequate ground cover? Is it what we should expect? And is it in a condition that we want to be managing for improvement or to maintain?” Aljoe asks.
An intuitive ranch assessment should score those variables on a four-point system with no midpoint or average.
“Either you’re unfavorable or you’re favorable condition, and then you can be at the extreme. So what we really want to be able to do is gauge ourselves to where over time we have more favorable conditions on all those variables. And then it tells us that our stocking rate is about where it should be,” he says.
“Take half, leave half” is a good rule of thumb, but you have to monitor and record that to help set grazing thresholds.
“We've all got our iPhones. We really like to take pictures. But being able to take those pictures in an intentional manner where we're at the peak of the growing season, and at the end of the growing season, and the same locations on those key sites that we're really trying to manage is what gives an indication over time how well our management is working toward the goals that we've established for our pastures,” he says.
“The other thing that we can do is use grazing exclosures. When we take a bull panel, put it into a circle or into a square, put it out there on some of our key sites, and we know that each of those squares from the bottom up are either four to six inches in distance. If we know what that is, it gives us a gauge every time the cattle are moving through those pastures, about how much we've grazed versus what they have un-grazed inside the exclosure,” Aljoe concludes.
Doing something simple is better than doing nothing when it comes to pasture management.
