Bale grazing system improves fertility, cuts labor, machinery costs

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Developing a bale grazing system can increase the fertility of pastures.

“I was introduced to bale grazing about 11 years ago by an Extension colleague in New York, and I was impressed by what I saw, so I brought the idea back to Kentucky,” said Greg Halich, forage systems economist at the University of Kentucky.

“In Kentucky, we go through a lot of freeze and thaw cycles and a lot of precipitation events in the wintertime,” he said. “So, you may have to modify this system depending on your geographic location.”

Halich talked about other options for feeding cow herds during the winter months, such as feeding pads.

“They are an improvement from the dry lot, but they have some problems with erosion and they rarely turn out like they were built,” he said during a webinar presented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Science and Technology National Technology Support Centers.

Cattlemen may also choose to unroll hay in a pasture.

“I like unrolling hay for the nutrient distribution, but you have to unroll every day or every second day, so the machinery and labor costs are higher,” Halich said. “And there are times you’re going to be out there when you shouldn’t be because it is wet.”

For bale grazing, cattlemen place the bales of hay in the pasture in a checkerboard fashion during late November.

“You allocate how much hay you’re going to give the cattle access to. They graze it down and then move on,” Halich said. “It’s flexible, so the moves may be twice a week or once a week.”

Halich rolls the hay rings to the next bale each time he moves the cattle.

“Some farms don’t use hay rings, so they will have more hay waste, but there will be a reduction in labor cost,” he said. “You need to decide what works for you.”

Grazing 101

If the bale grazing system is not executed well, Halich said, a lot of damage can occur to the pasture.

“The key to bale grazing is learning how to adapt as you learn,” he said.

It is typical for a tuff of grass to be in the middle of the impact zone where the hay bale was placed since the cattle aren’t walking on that spot until the very end of grazing that bale.

“You will have an area with no sod and you’ll have weeds in the area during the first year,” Halich said.

About mid-April, Halich reseeds the impact zone with a hand broadcaster.

“After one grazing season it looks pretty nice,” he said.

A study at the University of Saskatchewan looked at the impact of bale grazing on the fertility of the pasture. There were three treatments — control, a pasture that was bale grazed and a dry lot where the manure from the cattle was spread on a pasture.

The forage production was evaluated for two years.

“The control pasture produced 1 ton of dry matter per acre, and there was almost a 50% increase in forage production for the pasture with the manure from the dry lot,” Halich said. “And the bale grazing pasture had over double the forage production as the dry lot treatment.”

The two most important nutrients for forage production are nitrogen and potassium.

“About two-thirds of the nitrogen will be in the urine, and almost 90% of the potassium will be in the urine,” Halich said.

“Fertility is the No. 1 advantage of bale grazing, the saving on labor and machinery costs are No. 2 and there is also improved herd health from the cattle being on a sod,” he said. “I’ve come to realization that the improved herd health may be more important for some people who have problems.”

Making It Work

J.B. Daniel, state grazing specialist and grassland agronomist for NRCS, was uncertain if a bale grazing system would work in Virginia. He worked with a cooperator last year who has a full-time job and also owns a 100-head cow herd.

Typically this cattleman fed hay to his herd for about 150 days during the winter months.

“He fed from 450 to 500 bales per winter,” said Daniel, who also spoke during the webinar.

“He staged the bales in late November, and he found he could put out about 50 bales in three hours,” he said. “You don’t what to put out 100% of the hay feeding needs because you may have a shorter winter and you don’t want to end up with hay in the field that you have to take back to the farm.”

Since the cattleman didn’t want to purchase hay rings, he flipped the bales up on end for grazing and left the strings on the bales.

“That made the cattle have to work a little to get the hay out of the bale,” Daniel said. “He thought that resulted in less wasted hay.”

For the majority of the bale sites, Daniel said, there was thin residue of hay spread out from where the initial bale was set and there wasn’t pugging damage from the livestock hooves.

“When the weather turned wet, we see hay residue in the center and significant pugging around the circumference of the bale,” Daniel said.

“We had a fairly wet winter, but there was very little sod damage overall just at the few high impact areas,” he said. “On Jan. 24, we frost seeded clover and fescue at the bale sites, so we’ll see how that does.”

“The cattleman has fed hay in a lot of ways — with rings, in a concentrated feed area and with wagons,” he said. “He was looking for a better way to feed hay and he told me that he thinks he may have found it.”

There are a few requirements for cattlemen to make bale grazing work, including having an open mind, Daniel said.

“You also have to do advanced planning, have a way to turn bales on end or move hay rings and cattle must be trained to an electric fence,” he said.

“My eyes have been opened to the positive benefits that we can gain from bale grazing if we plan it and the farmers manage it in the right way,” he said. “I think the bale grazing technique can be a productive tool for a lot of cattlemen to overwinter cattle in a way they never thought possible.”