Friends in Far Places

http://www.elevage-salers.fr/photos-english.HTM

One of the blogs I follow regularly is "Grasspunk," written by Brent Curtis about his family farm in Gascony, France where they raise Salers beef cattle using Intensive Rotational Grazing.  I truly admire what Brent and Jean have done with their farm, turning old vineyards into lush pasture where they raise delicious grass-fed beef.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found my little blog mentioned  in his post the other day, "Some Great Farm Blogs to Improve My Farming."  Not only was I astonished--I was completely humbled!  Brent and Jean are doing what I wish we could do.  I'm afraid our pastures will never look like theirs.  I have had to accept that IRG is not within our capabilities at this stage of our lives--but Brent's perspective on pasture is the ideal that I keep in mind.

Here's what Brent wrote:

Adventures on Zephyr Hill Farm goes into amazing details on the ins and outs of milking and running Dexter cattle for the smallholder. Watching her defeat the challenges of her farm is always inspiring. Cute cows, too.

I'll grant you the cute cows; I know that's true!  I just didn't realize that us defeating our challenges could be inspiring.  Although I find myself hesitant to accept such an accolade, it does encourage us to keep taking on the challenges.  And maybe some day, we'll have them all figured out and I can finally change the title of this blog to what I should have called it in the first place (if I'd only had a brain!) . . .

"Dull Days on Zephyr Hill Farm"  

Meanwhile, thank you, Brent, for including me in such heady company.  Now I'm heading over to check out some more of those blogs you listed.

A Good Day's Work (Tuesday, Apr. 26)

Storm light over the farm warned us that we might not get much work done outside today and we'd better get going.
The first item of business was to make a new paddock and move the animals. Here they are in the new paddock (at right). You can see the difference between this fresh grass and the grazed area (at left).

Zephyr inspects the fence line!  You can see where Herb weed-whacked under the electric fence.  He has to do this to keep the long grass from shorting out the fence.  In other applications we've seen, one single wire higher up is all the farmers use, but since our little Siobhan is a pint-sized Dexter calf, she has been able to scoot under the bottom wire unless we place it quite low.

Here is the left half of the new paddock, with access to water in the creek running to the left of the horses.

Here's the right half, with access to shade.

Our paddocks are a lot bigger than those usually used with rotational grazing, but they're better than nothing.  For now, since we don't have water over most of the property and since finding shade is a problem, we are making paddocks as we can.  We are also able to graze the animals on grass that has been untouched for the last few years since it has never been fenced.

We're still pretty new at this, still getting our routine down, and it took us 2 hours to get the new paddock built and move the animals in.  They are really getting used to the new routine, though--as soon as we started, they were standing there waiting to be let onto the fresh grass!

After lunch, it was time to plant the sweet potato slips and the seedlings that Charis and I grew.

We had to do a lot of weeding first, but several hours later, we had some new pole beans planted and more space ready to sow some new seeds.  Notice Charis' nice big bean plant at left--way ahead of mine!  Go, Future Farm Girl!

Here's Charis' big bush bean, dwarfing mine again.

And here is one of her muskmelons; my poor little specimen is way in the back.

One fringe benefit of all that weeding was having a ton of green stuff to throw to the ducks when we did evening feeding.  They were delighted!

After this good day's work, before a shower and supper, I walked out with the dogs to check on the animals in the new paddock.  Hero thought it was a great chance for a run; I'm glad he had enough energy left!

Zephyr is a Hero!

Tuesday was our first day starting our new rotational grazing program.  We've been taking the horses out of the new Home Pasture and putting them in temporary electric paddocks during the day to lessen the impact of having all four animals grazing the Home Pasture.

We were supposed to be able to open the double gate at the bottom of the Home Pasture and have it connect to the double gate of the Lower Pasture, thus allowing the animals to pass through a chute between the fields.  But nobody has the 12' mesh gate we need, so the Home Pasture has been closed off with a cattle panel wired across half the gate.

However, we did not want to over-graze our new pasture, so once Herb set up an electric paddock in the Lower Pasture, we decided to move the animals the hard way without the gate/chute.  First we got them all up in the barnyard (see the brown building at the top of the hill in the photo above).  That part of our system works fine.  We put lead ropes on both horses and Siobhan.  Herb took the horses, and I took Siobhan, trusting that Sara would follow her calf.  (NO one is getting a halter on Sara!)

We opened the gates from the barnyard into the Home Pasture and headed down the hill.  The grass was wet and slippery from rain the night before, and the bottom half of the Home Pasture is very steep.  (You can see how steep the hill is in the photo above; to the right of the long white barn, it drops sharply down.)  Everything went fine until Sara, who had been hanging way back, suddenly decided to catch up--galloping and bucking her way down the hill like a calf!  That got everyone excited, and there were a few tricky moments on the slippery hill, but we made it safely down,  and Sara followed us into the Lower Pasture although she continued to lag far behind, "just like the old cow's tail."

The one thing we failed to plan for was Hero.  Angel and Brandy, who are quite leery of the electric wire, shied quickly past it into the new paddock.  That was all Hero needed. A game!  He charged at the horses, barking loudly.  They both shied in opposite directions, Herb lost his grip on Brandy's lead rope--and the chase was on!  Brandy galloped away trailing her lead with Hero hard on her heels, barking thunderously.  When Herb turned Angel loose, Hero decided this was double fun!

Meanwhile, we were trying to encourage Sara to come on down and join us in the electric paddock.  Good luck, with Hero running amok!  So Herb dropped the electric gate wires to go off and corral Hero while I made circles with Siobhan who was trying her hardest to get loose and go join her mama.  When Sara finally wandered down close to us, Herb had to leave Hero and the gate and go wave his arms at her to move her towards the opening.  Sara finally came through, Siobhan got a few more pats before being turned loose to join mama, and Herb turned on the solar charger.

At that point we looked around, amazed that the horses had not come running to take advantage of the wide open gate to escape into the pasture.  There they were in the back corner of the paddock (see above), grazing peacefully while little Zephyr stood guard in front of them, holding them where they were.  Neither one of us had given her a command--we wouldn't know how and we were way too busy with cows and wires and Hero!  But our faithful little Sheltie figured out what needed to be done and did it.

We were so proud of her, and when we finally called her away from her charges, her grinning face showed that she was pleased with herself, too!


We were pleased with ourselves, too!  It was quite a feeling of accomplishment, once all the excitement was over, to see the animals grazing happily on new grass.

After a few minutes, Siobhan ran over to join her horse friends.  It's surprising how much the cattle have bonded with the horses, and they're happier when they're one big happy herd.

We've got the whole length of the Lower Pasture to use for successive paddocks before we need to use the Back Pasture.  The one thing we can tell you for sure, next time we move the animals, Hero will stay in the house!