How to restore damaged pasture techniques

ah welcome to Pigeon River farm doing farming right I'm Robert Brown the owner of Pigeon River farm thank you for viewing [Music] good evening in tonight's episode we're gonna discuss pastures pasture damage and how I've solved that problem reconditioning a pasture is but damage is a real challenge a lot of different ways to go about it we've had challenging years one of our pastures it's about 15 almost 20 acres we have had multiple years of very heavy rain in our region last year was extreme flooding doing significant damage to this low ground in the fact last year we were limited on how many days we could actually put the cattle out on that area of pasture and even the limited amount that we had them out there over the last two years and few events that happened like the frost coming out of the ground early and so on caused significant damage in certain areas so I had to figure out how to reconcile it I was able to get in last August and use Athena through the Ripper to get some drainage going then we ended up having to approach at the spring while the deep to through fur project worked extremely well there Mary is actually where the lowest areas were drained the best and the higher areas end up being the surrounding areas and it being less strained so that technique now we are not tiled and I have a concern about tiling and dumping nitrates even though we produce very little nitrates but dumping the nitrates into the beautiful Pigeon River so it's one of my concerns so deep tooth ripping into the soil at approximately 30 inches does not allow the water to infiltrate into the rivers I have two rivers on the property one on far east and one basically just touching on up north so the methodology that we've applied here is using a deep tooth Ripper to bust up and it's interesting it's not only a tool to break up a hard pan form from the cattle but it does another thing I can know exactly where the pasture is compacted based on the load of the tractor it's incredibly obvious how if the tractor is pulling hard I can actually hear the engine labor I know I'm pulling with something very heavy it's crazy how quickly you can pull out of that and there is virtually no compaction at all there's other methodologies for soil density testing and so on but this works very efficient once I have the past dug anywhere from five foot on center all the way up to about 30 foot penny on the concern I have then I've taken in actually a relatively old implement it's basically just like a compactor it it has spiked wheels on it and I pull a drag behind it and it breaks up the soil on top without doing a significant disruption to the soil just the areas that I ripped it cleans them up makes a a nice bed for seeding but not like a normal one where you would plow up and conditions so I've done none of that I just simply really were just kind of getting rid of the moisture allowing it to get down to the ground deeper in turn we've ultimately bring in a no-till drill so I bring in a no-till drill to plant him a nice literally there's around 20 different species of plants and obtained in there most of our more setup to you know a wetter weather environment so we know till in you'll notice I use on a relatively big tractor and it almost looks like a little toy behind but believe it or not it pulls very hard the the cutters on a you're really making that your preconditioning the soil and make it a trench for the seeds that we dropped in and then filling it in behind and that's without doing any kind of Eros or erode Abell damage to the pasture so this methodology works really well and real pleased with the method here the drills actually provided by the county the county of walk pack of Wisconsin makes it available to farmers and ranchers in in the county here for a very reasonable cost it's a kind of a cost share type product so again we don't have that forty fifty thousand dollar investment in purchasing it yet we have access to a excellent piece of equipment as you can see the the drill works really well and then shortly I'll play one of the upcoming episodes I can show you the all this effort we put in see how it benefits the cattle so thank you and have a wonderful evening [Music]

Channel: Pigeon River Farm

Views: 16,864

Rating: 4.7660818 out of 5

Keywords: Farming, pasture renovator, Grass-fed beef, Grass-fed cattle, Grass-fed poultry, Organic farm, Doing farm right

Id: 3t3Eu1uJ7NQ

Length: 5min 29sec (329 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020