As regenerative farmers we are trying to increase our pasture quality and diversity for the benefit of animal performance and for the benefit of the land. Ensuring plant recovery between grazings and planning of our grazing helps to assure this, but we can also speed up the pasture productivity or diversity with no, or virtually no associated costs.
We can do this in a couple of different ways.
Existing pastures that have seeded
We know that livestock can spread weed seeds, but we can also use this to our advantage to move desirable seeds around. At times, opportunities arise where a grass or a desirable broadleaf is seeding and we can plan some strategic grazing to move this to an area that lacks that species.
Livestock can spread seed both on their coats – which works well with fluffy, fine grass seeds. It can also be spread through their manure. When seeds are spread in the manure, they are sitting in a nutrient rich environment – just perfect for the growth of the plant once it germinates. Strategic grazing of different paddocks can quite easily allow this to happen – improving pasture with no seed or planting costs.
On our farm this year we have had quite a lot of arrowleaf clover across various parts of the farm. We don’t always have good clover, but this year we had a wet period at the end of summer and start of autumn that germinated it. We also had some biserulla, which we have only planted in one paddock on the farm (which is divided into 6 blocks). The biserulla has recently gone to seed, and over a couple of weeks, we would graze one of those blocks for a day and then moved the cattle into another paddock, which had no biserulla. Once that block was eaten down, we took them back to the second block of the biserulla paddock. We maintained this process of moving cattle back and forward between paddocks. The great thing about this was that we also had arrowleaf clover that had set seed in the second paddock, so we have taken biserulla one direction and arrowleaf back the other. Neither of which were in the opposing paddocks.
You can see here the seeded biserulla and cattle feeding on it.
Here are the seed pods of the biserulla
And here you can see it in cattle manure
And the arrowleaf clover. (The whole paddock wasn’t this thick – this was a contour bank).
The distributors of Casbah Biserulla in Australia state that “a significant amount of seed can survive ingestion by livestock”.1 This is red soil country that we are doing this on, so a finer soil structure for seed contact and as you can see in the manure shots – there is much seed being transported.
We have done this on a previous occasion with lucerne between two black soil blocks and this was the outcome. There was a MASSIVE amount of seed germinate in the cow pats.
With the first true leaf out.
While ALL of these seedlings obviously didn’t come to fruition – many did and we now have plants scattered through the paddock.
Derek tells me that in degraded areas of Western NSW, farmers have actually trucked in Mitchell grass hay in the past in order to reintroduce this. Whilst I think the Mitchell grass would eventually return under supportive grazing practices, this may help to speed the process up. Whilst we may not want to spend money on hay, there may be areas of your farm that you can nurture to have species set seed, with the aim of grazing and spreading this seed.
We have also had great success with reintroducing native blue grass (which has a very light and fluffy seed) into a previously cropped paddock, by grazing an adjacent pasture area. In the first few years of establishing the blue grass, it was much thicker on the side of the paddock adjacent to the pasture, so this supports that it was being carried in, rather than just coming back from inherent seed. I’m not sure how much of this was transported on their coats, and how much in their manure, but it doesn’t really matter to me, I just know it worked – and really well! Within three years we had a pretty good stand of grass and withing four years we had a complete stand of bluegrass (among other things).
Adding seed to supplements
Another way of spreading seed is by adding it to a supplement that you may have out for your livestock. While this does entail the cost of seed – this is relatively little in the scheme of things. We have bought untreated seed of lucerne and arrowleaf clover and done this. If you give this a go – just make sure that you use something that will survive the gut of livestock.
ensuring plants establish
It’s great if we can achieve such outcomes of improving pasture quality without the expense of pasture seed and the planting process. It is possible however, that we might do the extra work of moving animals back and forward and successfully move seed, and even get the seeds to successfully germinate, but if we want these plants to go on to also establish well – we need to practice grazing principles that supports this.
I’m sure we’re not the only ones that have experienced or practiced this. Have you had experience doing this with the same or other species?
References
1. Casbah Bisurella, http://www.seedmark.com.au/products?dataId=89774B50-0BF3-11E0-BE1000155D285803&category=7F23BD90-FEA2-11DF-89F400217072CC04 22nd Nov ’14.