Opinion is divided on how well the experiment went, but overall I am very pleased with how the cows did, having never been grazed in such a manner and on such a botanically diverse grass ley before. I honestly thought that they'd refuse to go in there after day one and would eat around all the "funny" plants, particularly the herbs like chicory, plantain, burnet, sheeps parsley, yarrow, etc.
We had hoped that we’d be able to reduce the amount of food we gave them in the sheds at night, but no matter how much I allocated them in the field, they were still licking the shed’s troughs clean, and if I gave them too much grazing then they wouldn’t graze it down properly.
Their milk solids were more erratic than when they were set stocked and their milk urea levels roved about too, the latter indicating a drop in their protein intake, which was very perplexing because they were grazing huge quantities of protein-dense clovers! Hmmm.
We’re keeping the night time feed the same and we’ll see how milk is affected in the coming weeks when they return to their set stocking field rotation tomorrow morning.
This is all a very long term experiment and strip grazing the herbal ley is as much about biodiversity for cheese flavour as it is for doing our bit for improving the farm’s biodiversity (15 or so grassland species vs. three or four). It is also about building resilience into our soils by growing & grazing crops so that they put down deep complex root systems so that the land is better able to cope with extremes of weather – both drought and high rainfall – and also to act as a carbon sink (more organic matter in the soil = more carbon drawn out of the atmosphere).
This afternoon, I shall shut-up Rick field to let the plants to regrow and we’ll be back in there sometime in July for the next round of grazing.
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