Drag Harrow Pasture Management and Soil Health Tool

hey everybody my name is donna kilpatrick i'm the ranch manager and land steward at heifer ranch in perryville arkansas thanks so much for taking the time to join us today just learning a little bit about a drag hero [Music] so in this video we're going to talk about how we use it when we use it and why we use it so stick around till the end and we'll show you some great before and after pictures if you find value in this video please like the video and subscribe to our channel [Music] okay so this uh tool is called a drag hero it's a very simple piece of technology lots of people make their own and i have definitely made my own in the past instead of buying one some real common drag heroes that you could make i've seen people connect tires and pull that behind their tractor or atv gator whatever in the past i have used a piece of cattle panel and thrown a couple of tires on top so the basic premise is that you're trying to create surface tension with the soil and with your harrow depending on what your objective is to break up material or another use for a harrow is to turn it over and to actually scratch the surface of the soil as you can see in this harrow here we flipped it so the tines are facing up and i've done that many many times when i'm broadcasting seed as a part of our mission here to restore our ecosystems using regenerative agriculture we try to keep the surface of the soil always covered um so we would never plow or disk but sometimes you do want to scratch up the surface of the soils just so for example if i'm planting clover seeds i want that to have more contact with the soil than being insulated by a layer of biomass above the soil so that's what those tines would be used for just to scratch the surface barely in this application what we're doing is breaking up manure so this pasture here we stockpile grazed and then we put out a bunch of hay in the end part of the winter when you have really active soil manure breaks down very quickly because this pasture has not been used for many many years actually the biology in the soil is a little bit slower we're trying to increase that and we want to help the manure break down faster by by using the drag hero [Music] for this harrow we could pull it with a tractor we have a tractor here the reason we're choosing not to do that is because the tractor is heavier and is going to compact the soil more so we use the lightest piece of equipment that we have which is actually my personal atv and just hooked it to the back using a carabiner and just pulled it along and it works beautifully it's also uses less fuel than a tractor we just received a lot of heavy rain so there's areas in this pasture that we wouldn't drag right now the reason being that you know we're trying to increase uh our soil fertility and we don't want to go through here and make a lot of ruts uh with our atv so we're actually dragging areas that are relatively dry so this hero we purchased at our local co-op in perryville you can get them anywhere tractor supply sells them the cost is right around 400 i believe but this is the kind of thing that you can also find on craigslist or you know facebook marketplace those kinds of things but again remember you can also make your own and there are lots and lots of people that do that save money the goal is for it to be really cost effective low technology user friendly and to be able to just hop out on a pasture whenever you see the need to break up this manure and get these nutrients back into the cycle of the ecosystem [Music] i usually hear right at the end of the spring right before the start of the summer before the grass has really taken off in the growth stage it's not something that i would do if the pasture was lush there's tons of biology happening in the soil and in the forge then and we live in a non-brittle leaning environment meaning that we have moisture in our atmosphere all the time that is constantly the biology here in arkansas is always breaking things down so we don't have a need to you know spread the manure out in this in the in the forge growth season that does that on its own this is really just to get a jump start on the biology that's happening in the in the late spring while the forge hasn't really started to take off yet and just get a spring jump on our growing season so when we feed hay in the winter time 99 of the time we're spreading that out over a field either using a hay unroller which you might have seen in the previous video or shaking it out in various areas where we see the need for either increased impact by the cattle or sometimes i'll shake it over an area that i know has cockle burrows or something like that and a weed that we want to eradicate to get the animals to have higher impact there so doing that you'll sometimes see re residual hay left in large amounts in the in the springtime that hay is excellent you know when we feed a bale of hay we're thinking 50 for the cows and 50 for the environment for the soil nevertheless i feel like it's a good idea to take your harrow if you have time take your harrow and just spread that out a little bit further um so that you're not smothering any any grass that's starting to grow [Music] so thanks so much for watching this video if you have any more questions about drag harrowing or any of this process leave a comment below and we'll get back to you you

Channel: Heifer USA

Views: 72,262

Keywords: pasture management, drag harrow, chain harrow, harrow, pasture, spreading manure, pasture fertilization, soil management, how to make a drag harrow, how to use a drag harrow, when to use a drag harrow, Soil health, homestead, no till farming, organic farming, permaculture, rotational grazing, horticulture, livestock management, sustainable agriculture, regenerative agriculture, heifer usa, grazing, farming, cattle, pasture management for beef cattle, pasture management for cattle

Id: 7RgDdVuK4sI

Length: 6min 10sec (370 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021