The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - Rotational Grazing Tips with Sarah Flack (e.111)

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

Tristan Banwell, BC-based rancher and occasional co-host of the show, recorded this interview with Sarah Flack, author of The Art and Science of Grazing: How Grass Farmers Can Create Sustainable Systems for Healthy Animals and Farm Ecosystems. From Sarah’s website: Sarah Flack is an author and consultant specializing in providing practical information on grass based and organic livestock production to farmers, organizations, institutions and individuals. She has a diverse background in sustainable agriculture, which includes both on-farm and academic experience. She is nationally known for her public speaking, workshops, books and numerous articles on a range of agricultural topics.

The first time that I started studying the science of grazing management, I was told one of the most important things to do after you come up with your grazing plan warning signs that you're going to see in your livestock and your pastures and your soils, letting you know where things are off track with your plan so that you can start that replanning process. This is The Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca, email me editor at theruminant.ca, and you can find me on Twitter at ruminant blog or search for The Ruminant on Facebook. All right, let's do a show. Tristan Banwell, hello. Yes, hey Jordan. Tristan, you are back with another livestock focused episode for The Ruminant and all of the livestock people who listen are thrilled about that, I'm sure.

Yes. So today's episode features your interview with Sarah Flack. So let's start with this. Who's Sarah Flack? And what can listeners expect? Yeah, Sarah Flack is a combination of a true expert in the field of grazing and also a very approachable person who can distill these topics, complex topics down into easy to understand information. And she's the author of The Art and Science of Grazing. So is that the general topic that you covered with her is grazing or did it get? Is it mainly more specific than that?

What did you focus on with Sarah? That's exactly right. We talked about grazing management in higher rainfall, less brittle environments and irrigated pastures. And it was a great conversation. I think the listeners are going to enjoy it. Cool. Any standouts that you can think of right now? Any highlights from the conversation?

Yeah, I think I really appreciated talking about the gradient from the impacts of continuous grazing and what could be deemed overgrazing of the land and how to start shifting that continuous grazing system into, you know, bit by bit into a rotational grazing system that can help improve the land and some great stories that she told about success stories that she's seen in her work. Oh, that sounds really interesting, Tristan. And look, thanks, man. We've talked about before how you're a lot better suited than me for these interviews, and I know the listeners appreciate that. so I can't wait to listen. I'm looking forward to doing more of them.

Thank you very much for joining us on the Ruminant podcast. And actually, could I say thank you for bringing ruminants to the Ruminant. So it's meta. This is great. My pleasure. I'll give a little bit of context for listeners. You grew up with grazing management and mob stalking on the family farm. I came to this realm, you know, about 10 years ago with no background and started searching out best practices and techniques for grazing. But it's

safe to say that you and I both fall somewhere on the spectrum from true believers to evangelists when it comes to management intensive grazing, right? But when we look out on the agricultural landscape, we can see that most pastures are not being managed well, and in many cases, livestock have actually disappeared from the landscape altogether. Could you speak a bit about the status quo for livestock production in North America today? Yeah, definitely. And great question. So yeah, I continue to be kind of amazed that pasture is such an underutilized resource on so many farms. And, you know, I see some farmers making that shift to instead of looking at pasture as just an area that animals go and hang out, into thinking of pasture as a crop.

But I do think that that is a shift that a larger number of people, including farmers, but also non-farmers, policymakers, really need to start thinking about pasture as a crop. And we would never manage our corn field or our vegetable production field by just chucking a bunch of animals out there, but that's often how pastures get managed. And making that paradigm shift to thinking of how do I manage this as a crop? How do I use the livestock themselves to improve the productivity and the overall ecological health of the pasture is definitely something that I'm talking about all the time. And I get to really see the positive effects for farms who are able to make that shift and start really managing that pasture resource better in my work.

Okay, and so the grazing management stuff you're working on, I mean, it's all brand new, right? Like you have a passage in your book from an essay from Scotland from 1777. Yes, it is amazing how long we have known this stuff and just been kind of circulating this information around and around. And I really, you know, when I'm teaching workshops or writing, I like to give credit to people who were around a couple of hundred years ago who've been saying the same thing that I'm saying now. I'm definitely not inventing anything new here. There have been a lot of really, really smart farmers and researchers over the years who have

pulled these concepts together for us. And so really, I'm just taking this pre-existing excellent information on how to use the livestock to improve the pastures and just saying, okay, now this is how we do it with this new science that we have to understand a little bit more about soil health and the plant physiology and the ruminant nutritional needs. And now let's also combine that with this high-tech electric fencing that we have. But you're absolutely right. There were folks who were doing this in the 1700s,

and they were using hedgerows and stone walls to create their paddock subdivisions, and yet they were still able to do this and were able to use the livestock to improve the pasture quality and productivity long before we had fancy, portable electric fencing to do it with. Right. Well, for now, I'll stick with my three-to-one retrieve reel and polywire and be glad that I'm doing this right now when all this information is available as well, right?

So looking at these places where livestock are still out grazing on the land, I'll first give the listeners the disclaimer that we're going to be talking about less brittle areas, areas with more rainfall or with irrigation on the pastures, not on extensive arid rangelands like you'd see in some of the arid and semi-arid west, right? That's correct, yeah. And when I wrote my book, I really tried to be clear that I was writing for an audience who were in that non-brittle ecosystem. So areas that have reasonably regular rainfall. We're not talking about those western dry land grazing. There's some great grazing consultants who are excellent at grazing systems for those sorts of ecosystems, but I really stay focused on the non-brittle ecosystem grazing. Right, okay. So how can we identify those overgrazed pastures,

whether we're just zipping by on the highway or walking the pasture on our own farms, what's that going to look like? Well, it can look a lot of different ways. So overgrazing damage happens when animals are eating plants that haven't had enough time to fully recover and aren't ready to be grazed again. So we've got these amazing grazing adapted plants, and they like to have time to grow to a certain stage of maturity, and then they like to be grazed down, and then they like to have that opportunity to be able to grow back again before they get grazed again. So it's this cyclical system, and that's what they like. The overgrazing damage happens when we leave animals in a paddock for too long, so they are grazing the plants as they're starting to regrow a little bit.

And it also happens when we return the animals to the paddock before those plants have had time to fully regrow. And so it's all about time management. How long are they in there and how long before you put them back in there? before you put them back in there. But the way that that grazing damage shows up for us visually depends on the type of plants that are in there and how severe that overgrazing damage is. So in some cases, we'll see pastures that are grazed too often and too short by quite a lot of animals.

So those plants are really, really short. You get this sort of a golf course effect where it looks like a putting green. And those plants, their survival technique, because these plants are amazing at surviving, their survival technique is to stay really, really short and not grow tall. Because any plant in those very heavily grazed pastures if they grow tall they get killed the danger zone yep and so the really short plants survive and you end up with this you know putting green looking pasture this is particularly

common if you're grazing with you know a non remnant like a horse that has you know a whole lot more teeth in the front part of their mouth, and so they can really efficiently graze those plants. They can bite it right down to the soil. Yeah. So that's one way that these overgrazing damaged pastures can look. But the other way they may appear is they may just start to get weedier and weedier. And in some cases, you'll have not just weeds like thistles and buttercups coming in, but you'll start to get some of the secondary successional plant species coming in, like the, you know, bushes and, you know, small woody trees and things like that. how many animals and the intensity of that overgrazing damage will determine what direction the kind of visually things will start to appear in those pastures. So that latter scenario you

describe is when you've got these undesirable species or less palatable species and the livestock are focusing on grazing the more palatable species to those species detriment, but the less palatable ones are able to persist because the livestock tend to ignore them. Exactly, yeah. That selective grazing pressure that you get in those cases. And if we want to get real nerdy about this, which I can definitely do quickly, I'll define two terms for us so we can start using some of the technical terms. And so let's talk about stocking rate and stocking density.

So stocking rate is the overall number of animals that you've got on the whole farm. Stocking density is the number of animals that you've got in a specific paddock at a specific period of time. that you've got in a specific paddock at a specific period of time. And so that first scenario we were talking about with the putting green appearance of the overgrazed pasture, that's when you've got a high stock density and a high stocking rate and that continuous grazing pressure. The pastures where those weeds and woody plants are able to take off and just not be grazed and start taking over the pasture those are continuous grazing systems with a lower stocking density and

lower stocking rate and at that with the less animals in there that's when the selective grazing pressure is exactly what you said it's where they'll eat their favorite plants over and over and over to their detriment. And those are always the desirable plants that we as farmers would really like to have thriving. And in the meanwhile, they're leaving anything that tastes bad or is thorny or, you know, difficult for them to graze for some reason. Right. Okay. for some reason. Right. Okay. Okay. So we could be overgrazing in different ways, and it sounds like almost undergrazing in certain ways at the same time. Yes. Yep. That is true. Yep. Okay. So you've had the opportunity to inspire and to witness a lot of positive changes in grazing management on different types of farms

in different contexts. Could you share some examples of how or why farmers and ranchers have come to realize that they should make a change in their management? Yeah, I think farmers come to wanting to do improved grazing management for a pretty wide array of reasons. For farms where I'm working with them as their, you know, whole farm business planning consultant, a lot of times the first thing we do before we even look at the pastures is we're just looking at the farm's financial health. And a lot of times we'll identify feed costs or the cost of spreading manure from animals in confinement back out onto the fields as an expense that's really high for the farm.

And so in the process of looking at how to increase farm net income, a lot of times we'll target pasture as a way to make some financial improvements for the farm. And so then that's just an immediate practical incentive for the farmer to go out and say, okay, how can I change the way I manage my pasture and how much time my animals spend on the pasture versus in confinement, and how can that improve my farm net income? But there's also a lot of other farms I work with who come to an interest in improved grazing management because they've heard of some of the information coming out about improved ecological health of their pastures through good grazing management. So they might be interested in,

you know, how do I build more soil? How do I improve the ability of my soil to deal with high rainfall events? How can I get through the next, you know, five to eight inch rainfall event and have water infiltration into the soil instead of runoff so that I'm reducing or eliminating erosion on my farm? Or how can I increase plant density to shade the soil so the next time I have a really hot, dry period on the farm, I'm able to maintain the pasture growth and productivity by having the soil be moister and cooler so those plants can continue to grow through that sort of a severe climate event. Or they might come to me and say, I'd like to sequester more carbon in the soil. And I hear I can do that better if I'm doing good grazing management. And sometimes people are interested in, you know, even broader ecological improvements

of having higher diversity and, you know, different wildlife species on the farm. And how can we use grazing as part of that? So I really do get, I get to have a lot of fun working with farmers who are coming from very different perspectives, but ultimately all are all interested in, you know, how grazing management fits into their farm system for them. That's great. And then, and then no matter which angle they arrive at it from, they're going to reap a lot of different benefits, a variety of benefits, economic, ecological benefits as well. Yes, that's right.

Yep. That's excellent. So there's a lot of complexity in these systems, a lot of which comes from the human component, but also ecologically and all of the different choices we can make. And it can feel a little overwhelming. So you've already discussed a little bit some of the basic principles, but can you just boil it down for us at the most fundamental level, what are the basic principles of good grazing management?

So I love that you asked that question, because sometimes I'll get through these interviews and forget to talk about that. So from the perspective of the plants, these are our grazing adapted perennial plants. The basic principles of good grazing management, which are how do we use the animals to help those plants be healthier, is we want to have relatively short periods of occupation so that you're not leaving the animals in the paddock for so long that they're either grazing the plants too short or they're not re-grazing the plants as they're starting to regrow a little bit. So that's principle number one, short periods of occupation. And then the second principle is how long are we letting those plants regrow? And the length of time that those plants need to regrow needs to be varied

so that it's not on a fixed rotation. We're really paying very close attention to those plants and observing them and not returning animals back to that paddock until those plants have reached the correct recovery stage. Okay, that's why it's the art and the science. That's right. There's a lot of observation and monitoring and spending time standing in the pasture watching the animals eat and also walking around the pastures observing how the plants are regrowing, where they're regrowing, how fast they're regrowing. And that's that constant monitoring. And the first time that I started studying the science of grazing management was I was told one of the most important things to do after you come up with your grazing plan. So, you know, we sit down in the winter and we come up with our plan for how we want to graze the farm this coming summer. And the most important thing you do as soon as you make that plan is assume that

you're wrong. And the reason that assuming you're wrong is helpful is it immediately helps you get started thinking through what are the early warning signs that you're going to see in your livestock and your pastures and your soils, letting you know where things are off track with your plan so that you can start that replanning process. Because we're managing a constantly moving biological system where we are not going to have the exact amount of rainfall at the exact amount of time that we'd like to have. And so sometimes things are going to grow faster or slower. Sometimes we're going to underestimate or overestimate our livestock's nutritional needs as far as the

amount that they're going to harvest from the pasture for us. And so we're constantly monitoring, observing, and replanning. And so that is the complexity of it, is we're not just coming up with a plan and doing it. We're coming up with a plan, and then we're constantly changing it and adapting. And we need to make those adaptations to our plan before it's too late, right? Because that's when we need those warning signs. When you're making the decision too late, that's when the damage is occurring to the pasture and the land. That's correct, yeah. Especially if you get into an extra hot, extra dry period in the middle of the summer,

that's typically where I see some of the most serious grazing damage get done. And, you know, that's right at the time of the year where we'd really like to be taking care of those plants that we have on the farm that are able to grow through that, you know, extreme weather condition. But if we haven't started replanting our system, that's the time of the year we're most likely to damage those most productive, hardy plants on our farm. Right. And I think I just kind of showed my cards in a way with that last point that I usually tend to think of the effects of overgrazing a pasture in terms of the impact on the plant health and on the soil health. But you have a lot to say in your terms of the impact on the plant health and on the soil health,

but you have a lot to say in your book about the impact of continuous grazing or even problems with your grazing system if you are rotating, the impacts those can have on animal health. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so the way I put the book together is I wrote a whole section in the book on grazing from the plant's perspective. And then I wrote a whole section in the book on grazing from the livestock perspective. Because there are really different things that we need to look at and we need to manage for both. And so from the livestock perspective, we need to be thinking about maximizing intake from pasture and making sure what they are eating in the pasture is able to meet their nutritional needs. And so for some farms, there's going to be just pasture and water and mineral supplements in their ration. And so

for those all grass-fed animals, this becomes even more critically important to make sure that that pasture is meeting all of their nutritional needs. And then for some farms, they're going to be supplementing with grain or supplemental forage. You know, typically a dairy farm will be providing something in the barn twice a day when the animals are milked, and then they'll be out on pasture grazing the rest of the time. And so then in that case, it's a little different where we're trying to balance what they're getting from the pasture with what they're getting in the supplemental feed. But there is a whole science to maximizing pasture dry matter intake for our ruminants. And I'll just list a few of the interesting things that farmers will focus on

as they're trying to increase pasture intake by their animals. And that is thinking about what the correct pre-grazing height is from the animal's perspective. And that allows the animal to get a large enough bite of pasture plants in each mouthful as they're grazing. And the more of that really high-quality, digestible, palatable plant material they can get in each bite, the more quickly and efficiently they're able to fill their rumens and then go lie down somewhere in the shade of a tree or in the barn and ruminate and chew their cuds, move that material through their digestive system, and then they can get back up and come out and graze again. And so aiming for

that correct pre-grazing height from the animal's perspective is just as important as aiming for that correct pre-grazing height of the plants that has allowed those plants to fully recover. height of the plants that has allowed those plants to fully recover. So this would be pretty broad, but what would be your initial advice on getting started for someone who is currently set stocking their pastures? So set stocking, also known as continuous grazing or extensive grazing, depending on where you are, is when you just leave the animals in the pasture for the whole year. And it is the most common grazing system still in existence in North America. It's pretty easy.

It's the easiest thing to do. You put them out there. They've got their water. They've got the pasture. So yes, step number one is to start to think about what level of labor and work that the farmer can put in, being really practical about the grazing system. So we're not going to move immediately to a system where they're moving the animals multiple times a day unless they're full-time farmers and they want to make the fastest possible improvement in their grazing system. So if, for example, it's somebody with a cow-calf operation who also has an off-farm job,

but they'd like to start to gradually improve from set stocking to something else, I'm going to look at what is the simplest grazing system that we can set up, and it may only have five to eight paddocks. And it's not going to hit the exact perfect grazing guidelines of very, very short periods of occupation. We might leave them in each paddock for, say, three days or one week and then take them out of that paddock and let those paddocks recover for three to five weeks, depending on where they are geographically and what the climate's like and how fast the

plants grow. But I find that in those systems where this is not a full-time farmer, we can't set up something that's really, really complicated. Once you get to that seven or eight paddock system, you can start to have some significant improvements in the pasture productivity and quality and also in the livestock performance. that going from continuous grazing to, I think, 14 or 15 paddocks is what he was suggesting, would quadruple the productivity of your pastures. Wow, yeah. And so that would be nice if you could hit 14 or 15 paddocks, but I start to see those improvements happening when you hit 7 or 8 paddocks.

Okay. The other improvements that are able to be done relatively easy is for farmers who have a very simple rotational system already, but it's not working very well. So that example would be, say, somebody who has four paddocks, and they move the animal, say, every two or three days to a new paddock. So they're not getting a long enough regrowth and recovery period between each grazing. Those paddocks are only getting six days or maybe a week and a half of rest between each grazing, which is never enough no matter what climate you're in. And so in that sort of situation, we can use the existing paddocks

and just slow the rotation down by increasing the period of occupation in each paddock and moving them, therefore, more slowly from paddock to paddock so those pastures start to get three to five weeks of regrowth between grazings. Obviously, you've got to still make sure there's enough feed in those pastures for the animals, but that's an example of how using the existing paddocks on a farm, but just changing the timing of how long they get left in each one and how long before we rotate them back to them can significantly change the productivity and quality of what's out there. That's good for people to know that there is some kind of low-hanging fruit that they can get started on

and then they probably if they start to see those improvements they probably get curious maybe they won't end up at eight times a day grazing shifts with bat latches right away but just electric fencing would make those subdivisions a lot easier as someone started to advance their system yes definitely the definitely. The electric fence really does make it much simpler, especially as you're moving into using some of the technology like the bat latches, which are the computer-operated gate openers, so you don't even have to be there and the gate opens and the livestock moves to the next paddock. Or things like tumble wheels, which will work if you can confine your animals with a single strand of polywire. You can use tumble wheels, which will work if you can confine your animals with a single strand of poly wire.

You can use tumble wheels to not have to move each individual fence post. They roll themselves along if you're just moving the reel on the fence on the side, on the perimeter fence. So those are some technologies that can really decrease the amount of labor and allow you to have those shorter periods of occupation, longer and really variable recovery periods. But I have to say there are several farms that I've worked with that for various reasons choose not to use electric fence. So some of the Amish farmers I work with, for example, are using all barbed wire fences. And it's more labor to put those fences up. It's more challenging for them to rapidly set up multiple small paddocks. But we've set up some

really good non-electric grazing systems. And so there's a lot of flexibility and adaptability on how we do this. I'm always going to go in hoping that we can use electric fence because in the long run, it's going to be less cost, less labor, and a more effective grazing system, you know, with that less labor. But, you know, it's good to know you can do it with stone walls, hedgerows, or barbed wire if you need to. Exactly. Okay. All right. So tell us a nice story. If we're doing things right, what does a high quality, well-managed pasture we're striving for look like? Okay. So I'll give you an example of one of the first grazing consulting jobs I did when I was fresh out of grad school,

it was a continuously grazed hillside pasture on a dairy farm, and it had been continuously grazed for a lot of years. It was relatively close to the barn, so the cows like to hang out there. So just kind of turn the cows out there every day sort of thing. Yep, exactly, yeah. And so I somehow, as a naive, you know, just out of grad school person, said to this farmer, let me work with you on subdividing this pasture, and let's just see how it improves. And so it was going to be the night pasture, because it was close to the barn,

it was convenient for them. And I think I managed to talk him into dividing it into just like 14 or 15 paddocks that first year. And so he would put the cows in each paddock for one or two nights in a row. So we were able to pretty quickly hit about a 24-day recovery period. 24-day recovery period. So instead of being grazed continuously, those plants suddenly were getting more than three weeks of regrowth between grazing. So he started going around the rotation, and both he and I were pretty blown away at how much forage started growing in all of these other paddocks. And by the time he got to the second rotation, he called me up and was quite annoyed because he was going to have to go cut hay up there. And so this is an example of,

you know, what happens when, you know, you've got the overgrazing damage, but there's still really good soil fertility there. Just because it was so close to the farm, it had plenty of manure and there wasn't a problem caused by soil compaction in that area from the overgrazing damage. It was really just the damage to the plants. So they came back very quickly. And that farm to this day continues to have an area in that previously never-hayed field where they take first cut each year, because that's the only way they can keep up with the improved

productivity in that area. And so they graze some of the paddocks, take a first cut off of some of it, and then as the other paddock growth starts to naturally slow down into the mid-hot part of the summer, then they add in the rest of that area where they've taken first cut and allowed it to regrow back. Right, and so that's an example of these types of improvements without a lot of intervention other than adapting and adjusting the grazing management. And I think that a lot of farmers, beginning farmers or people who've been doing this for a long time, when we think about improving things, our mind first jumps to heavy machinery, tillage. We see that poor quality pasture that you described earlier in our conversation,

and we think, got to rip that up, got to replant that. But both on our farm and lots of examples that you've seen, we've managed, if you can manage to keep your butt off the tractor and just adjust your grazing management, we can see lots of improvements without actually doing those costly interventions in terms of species diversity and growth and everything. That continues to amaze me. Yeah, it is pretty incredible all of the improvements you can make

before you start spending your money on inputs and tillage and things like that. I will say one thing I always do right up front when I'm starting to work with somebody on pasture improvements is I'll immediately want to have them pull a current soil test and take a look at the soils because although a lot of times we really can make the improvements through just improving the grazing management system, the improvements through just improving the grazing management system. If there is an underlying soil deficiency or imbalance in soil health, you know, in a specific nutrient that we are short on, we do need to address that right up front. And so, you know, for example, if we're real low in potassium or boron and we're trying to make pasture improvements

and we are not seeing enough legume in our pasture, we're probably going to want to go in and apply some potassium and boron right away so that then if we go in and, say, do a frost seeding with some low-cost legume seed, we have a higher chance of having that germinate and stay established in the pasture. Right, so knowing what you're starting with is critical. And I also think that if people are starting out on this path, if they can start off by doing that soil test and then also documenting some of what they're seeing out in their pastures through photo points and maybe some measurements, that's a great way to tell that

story and be aware. Because when you see those changes happening incrementally, I think it can be hard for people to actually track if the changes aren't as dramatic to really see the improvements they're having on the land. Yes. And another measurement technique that I increasingly use is looking at soil compaction. As we have more of these high rainfall events. And then, you know, we're dealing with the past history of livestock on the land that might weigh a lot and tractors and equipment on the land is I'll use a soil penetrometer and walk around the pastures during that initial farm assessment

and try to get a sense of whether we're dealing with a soil compaction issue. Because even if you get the soil nutrients balanced and then you get out there and you've got the right species getting started, if you've got a significantly compacted layer in the root zone of those plants, that'll be something that in some cases requires some mechanical repair if you want to quickly improve the plant species composition in a pasture. Okay. Okay, let's talk about some other crap. I love the section in your book on manure and great poop photos. So you might be a farmer if, right? I've got some poop photos in my photo albums too. So when we moved to our current farm, which was set stocked when we got there, we had manure building up under shade trees around water sites. We had pats not breaking down because

of systemic insecticide use and management involved harrowing all the fields in the spring and scraping all the winter feed areas into big piles for gardeners to haul away. I think that's kind of a fairly common set of issues. And I'm curious what you like to see in terms of manure management. Yeah, great question. So yeah, so one of the many benefits that we haven't had time to talk about yet as far as moving towards shorter periods of occupation in our paddocks and getting that paddock correctly sized so that you've got the right amount of feed in there for the animals for the number of days that you're going to put them in there, is it moves us towards an improved stocking density.

So the stocking density is like the total number of animals in a specific paddock for that period of time. So the stocking density is like the total number of animals in a specific paddock for that period of time. And when you get to that improved stocking density, the animals will more evenly distribute the manure in that paddock. And, you know, if you've got a shade tree in there or water in there, sure, you might see more of the manure building up in those specific areas, but you're not going to have that really significant deposition of manure in the shade or in the barnyard the way you do in a continuous grazing system or set stocking. They're there and then they're gone. That's right. And you'll get, if you'll, you know, if you get those paddock sizes down so that you're leaving the animals in each paddock for just one to two days,

they're going to leave a really nice, even distribution of the manure in each paddock. And if you then graze each paddock, say, three to six times each season, over the course of two or three years, statistically speaking, over the course of two or three years, statistically speaking, you have a pretty good chance of having a cow pie or some sheep manure drop on pretty much every square feet of your paddock every three or four years. And the better the grazing management, the higher the stocking density, the more likely that you're really going to have that even animal spreading the manure happening on the farm. really going to have that even animal spreading the manure happening on the farm. And so then you don't get that nutrient transfer that happens in the set stocking or the continuous grazing

system. So for example, if actually we did this when I was a kid on my family farm, when we would go away on our family summer canoe trip, kind of vacation time, we would go off into the wilderness, the family in a canoe, and we would set up a big paddock for the sheep because it was easier for the farm sitter. And so while we were away, the sheep would go out and graze in this big field every day, and then they would go and poop under the hedgerow in the shade, even if it was cool and overcast and they didn't need to be in the shade. They just kind of habitually would go over to the shade. And we would really notice that when we would get back for several years afterwards,

is this nutrient transfer would occur during vacation week, where the animals would be grazing in the high-quality pasture and then pooping where we did not need the manure spread under the trees. And then, you know, so then we had to do exactly what you were talking about. You've got to go scrape some manure up from somewhere and go out and spread it in the area where the animals were grazing, but not dropping their manure. The other thing that I observe with the, you know, the manure being distributed more evenly around the pasture, is it creates better habitat for the manure decomposing, you know, macro and microorganisms. You know, so, for example, if any of your listeners haven't done this, I highly recommend going out and looking for dung beetles.

And depending on where you are, you're going to have different dung beetle species but the the most common ones as you get up into the northern parts the colder parts of north america like where i am in northern vermont and where i was the last couple days up in canada north of here is you can go stand around behind your cows observe some some fresh cow pies and you kind of have to hold still because the dung beetles can be a little bit shy, but they will fly in and land on those fresh, warm cow pies and start to tunnel into them, and you'll see these little oval, small openings in the tops of the cow manure, and you'll start to see these small, shiny little beetles moving in and out of the cow pie

and creating these kind of a, it's almost like they make your cow pies into Swiss cheese, which allows the next batch of decomposing organisms to move in, which will sometimes be flies or earthworms, depending on where you are. And by having the manure distributed nicely around the pasture, you're more likely to get that really healthy population of organisms that will help cycle those nutrients into the soil for you. Okay. And can you tell us a little bit about manure scoring? Yes. So manure scoring is something that we do as one of the many ways that we are trying to monitor and assess livestock well-being in the grazing systems. So in much the same way that we're constantly monitoring the soils and the plants, we're trying to do the same thing with

our animals to make sure that they're thriving out in our grazing systems. And so by looking at the texture of their manure, we can get a sense of whether we are adequately meeting their nutritional needs on the pasture. So if we start to see manure which starts to look really dry and kind of balled up, particularly in a cow, with a lot of non-digested fiber in it. We know that our pastures are probably overmature and have too much non-digestible fiber in them, and we might need to either supplement our animals or move them to a different area in the pasture. And then the opposite extreme of that is what happens to our animals when we're grazing really lush pastures that are perhaps too high in protein and maybe too low in good effective fiber is the manure will start to become really, really soft and loose. And the animals in extreme cases will really get diarrhea.

And that can be caused just by having too much protein, not enough fiber and energy in their rations. Right. And probably the most dangerous time of year to stand behind that cow is when that early season grazing on the lush new growth. So what, I know it's a point of lively debate, but what should we consider when deciding when to turn out and start grazing in the springtime? Yes, so that decision on when to start grazing in the spring is a tricky one. And it is, in general, one of the times of the year where I'm going to recommend that you start grazing before the plants in some of your paddocks are fully ready to be grazed from that kind of classic, you know,

plant physiology standpoint because we can't wait until every single plant on the farm is ready to be grazed because then you'll graze the first couple of paddocks, and by then the rest of your farm will be overmatured. You're way behind. And so in the spring, we've got to say, okay, I've got to start grazing something. These plants aren't ready yet. Where am I going to have that animal impact by grazing some plants a little too early? And we can actually do some pretty cool stuff if we strategically decide where to start grazing first thing each spring. So for example, if you have an area on your farm where you have pasture grass, some, you know, orchard grass is a great example, that perhaps is starting to get

too dominant in one area of your pasture, one of these big, rapidly growing, highly productive bunch grasses like orchard grass. We could choose to graze that orchard grass pasture too early in the spring, because we've got to graze something too early in the spring. So let's graze that orchard grass pasture first. So we march all of our cows or sheep out there, build ourselves a temporary paddock, and have them graze that area too early, and maybe even graze it a little too short. But doing it very intentionally and strategically, and what that's going to do is that's going to set back that now really dominant orchard grass

and cause it to be a little bit weaker as we go into that summer, and that gives some other sod-forming grasses that perhaps are less tolerant of being shaded an opportunity to get established in between those orchard grass plants. to get established in between those orchard grass plants. So you might be able to increase your plant density, change your plant species diversity to improve the addition of some other species just by strategically deciding to graze it too short and too early in the spring. Right, and by having that sort of steering wheel and brakes of controlling where and when and how long and the density of your animals. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

When I consider the benefits of the grazing management we've been doing on our farm, one of the biggest gains we've had is in reduced winter feed costs. And I'm wondering if you could explain how folks can extend their grazing season on that fall end. Yeah. So the reduced feed costs come from a couple of things. One is reducing the amount of supplemental feed during the grazing season. So in some cases, farmers will be able to eliminate all supplemental feed during the grazing season. That's typically true for the beef and the sheep herds that I'm working with. For dairy herds, there might still be some supplemental forage or grain being fed in

the barn, but there's still a significant reduction in feed costs during the grazing season. So then the other way that we're reducing feed costs is extending the grazing season. And so that can actually include figuring out how to start grazing earlier in the summer. For farmers that have an interrupted grazing season because they typically have really hot, dry earlier in the summer. For farmers that have an interrupted grazing season because they typically have really hot, dry summer in the mid, weather in the mid-summer where they can't graze through that summer slump, improving the availability of forage

through that mid-summer can actually be a huge cost savings as far as feed. And then the piece that you mentioned is, you know, how do we then extend the grazing season into the fall or the winter as long as feed. And then the piece that you mentioned is, you know, how do we then extend the grazing season into the fall or the winter as long as possible? And that is typically done through what's called stockpiled grazing, which is where we plan ahead, we figure out what date we want to be grazing those specific pastures, and then we work backwards from that in our grazing plan and figure out how many days does that pasture need to regrow so that it's fully recovered and it's at that ideal

height to be grazed once those plants have gone dormant in the fall or in the winter. So it takes a lot of planning to do it well. And the challenge is for a lot of us, to do it well. And, you know, the challenge is for a lot of us, we have unpredictable snowfall and we have also ice, which is much worse than snow as far as shutting down our well-planned fall and winter grazing. And, you know, so we have to really be flexible as we're doing that planning for the stockpiled grazing. But even in pretty far north climates, we've got folks who are dairy farmers who are well over 180 days in length of their grazing season, all along the Canadian border. And we've also got a bunch of farmers, including dairy farmers, who are approaching 240 to 270 days, even in those northern climates where we have the challenge

of ice and snow. So people really doing some great work pushing the limits of what we thought was possible. That's great. And when we know that in a lot of northern grazing operations, that winter feed cost is one of the biggest costs, if not the biggest cost in the operation. Yeah, absolutely. So I encourage anyone interested in grazing livestock to pick up your latest book, The Art and Science of Grazing

by Sarah Flack. And there's really something in your book for everyone from the armchair pastoralist to experienced graziers. And I feel like the appendix on troubleshooting pasture problems should be hanging on every grass farmer's office wall. But where else can someone find out more about your work, Sarah? I am terrible at keeping my website up to date, but I do try to keep a list of the workshops that I'm teaching on my website. And so actually I'll try to do that this afternoon. But I am teaching workshops, you know, all over the U.S. and Canada on a pretty regular basis. And, yeah, and then folks can also find copies of some of my fact sheets and handouts for free on my website, too.

You say in your book that good grazing systems allow farmers to create positive changes in their landscapes, livestock, and checkbook. And I think farmers have a chance to improve their land and their livelihood through grazing management. And through your work, you've inspired and equipped countless farmers to do just that. So Sarah, thank you so much for the work that you've been doing. And thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me for the ruminant today. Thanks so much. My pleasure. All right. That's it, folks.

I hope you enjoyed that. And special thanks to Tristan for conducting that excellent interview and to Sarah for joining us on the show. I will talk to you all soon. I think you can expect another episode in the next week or two. And until then, happy farming. So we never have laundry. We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves live life like it was meant to be i don't fret honey i've got a plan to make our final escape all we'll need is each other a hundred dollars And maybe a roll of duct tape

And we'll run right outside of the city's reaches We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry. We could be happy with life in the country. With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands.

skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve. I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be. Ba ba ba da ba ba ba Ba ba ba da da da Ah ah ah ah ah ah Do do do do do do

Do do do do do do Do do do do do you