From the Barns: Cabin fever

Winter has definitely tightened its grip on us this week. We have 12 inches of new snow accompanied by gusty winds and far below normal temperatures. I’m feeling a little cabin fever since us old guys are supposed to be very careful about scooping snow by hand. However, I have managed to keep the cats fed and check our automatic waterers each day.

I also used the 6430 to clean all the driveway and on down the lane to the cattle shed where Carson needs to get hay and has some fall calving cows. The 50 new feeder calves seem to have thrived on the cold temperatures and frozen ground. Things seemed to have slowed to a crawl in the community with schools out, mail service missing, trash pickup missing and traffic on our township road nonexistent.

We were able to get three full days of work in the woods and silvopastures done before the January snows came. With two tracked skid steers and two chainsaws going and my part-timer to paint stumps, we covered a lot of area, clearing a path through some light woods for a new fence came first.

I have wanted to fence off the “Clay Pit woods” for some time. The five clay pits serviced the Bardolph Brick yard before the turn of the 20th century with clay moved on a narrow gauge railroad the three miles to the yard. I feel it is somewhat of a historic area that needs preserving, so more fence to build next spring. We finished some other areas in the silvopastures with Carson pulling smalls with his machine and Adam stacking and burning those along with the big, thorny locust we eliminated. I sawed the second day and was very tired at the end, but proud we accomplished a lot. We have almost entirely eliminated weed trees from the silvopastures.

I am seeing the need for a new phrase for our vocabulary, “ecosystem services.” We are already hearing a lot about carbon sequestration and how we have or can store soil carbon for added income while we help enhance our environment. According to several studies, management intensive grazing does this better than any other agricultural system. Because society places value on clean water and healthy soil, new ecosystem service markets can reward farmers who balance production and environmental protection. However, no financial incentives yet for soil retention, phosphorus retention, storm runoff and flood reduction, grassland bird habitat or pollinator habitat. According to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Investing in managed grazing systems is a win-win-win for the environment, the farmer and the community.”

We completed our winter grazing season on Jan. 19 after a successful 70 days. We averaged 80 bred for early spring calving cows during that time on approximately 88 acres of stockpiled fescue/red clover. That statistically is 7,980 animal units (88 x 1.3 x 70 days; one animal unit is 1,000 pounds in our system; these cows were estimated at 1,300 pounds) or 91 units per acre alone on the winter grazing.

If the units have a value of $1, then those acres returned $91 per acre. Add to that the spring and summer rotations and several of those acres grossed an impressive return. That is not because our ground is better than average or we have better forages, but because of the managed grazing system that is used.

We need to frost seed. So, let’s get the snow melted down and have some good freezing-and-thawing days. Stay safe and sane.

Trevor Toland

Macomb, Ill.