Mowing Pasture l How To Improve or Maintain Your Land

there's our bush hog it's an eight foot there's two spinners in there the 3308 i had an older one too like this um that i traded for this one but i use this thing religiously once we get into later june i like to get right before the canadian thistle heads out that's a tough one for us there's a lot of that in the recent years we've been getting ahead of it pretty good and i've noticed this there's way less of it so i don't think i'll ever be gone 100 but it's nice to mow the old grass down that the cows didn't quite eat get new growth and we hooked this thing up to the 7405 and i got one of these quick hitches on here now so when we need this tractor for other things it's pretty quick to get this hooked up and virtually don't have to get off the tractor other than just to hook up the pto shaft so we're gonna do some of that today again [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] and then you see those small trees growing in here and if we let that go like firewood in a year or two it'd be just crazy we'll have to probably take the fence apart to get it out of here but if we cut it now it's small keep it down okay you guys i'm gonna i'm gonna talk about some weeds we got and i may not have this proper term for everything but this guy right here and this is the only place on this farm it is it's it's about an acre here of this three acre field it's just kind of on this end this i think they call this yellow mustard and it only gets dominant in the oats and i haven't had oats on this field for almost 10 years and it's still here so however it got started through a load of manure or i mean it could have fell out of somebody's combine at one point or something but that's the only place it is on this farm but the oats looks really good in it because at one point i was thinking of actually um bailing the oats or something but this oats standing beautifully unless it would lodge up and get real weedy and and the other field looks excellent not a weed in it so but the corn has really been coming along in the hills here and on the bottoms i guess compared to other areas near us i'm quite satisfied i guess and then in our pastures here this is the bull thistle this really big guy and they're going under the fences here so they're gonna have to be took out with a weed whacker or something but they'll get like as tall as a person and they're bi-annual which means they even if you cut them off they'll the same plant will grow back the next year but only two years and then he has to start from seed again so if you've got a mole if you cut them off and you get every one of them within two years you can almost eradicate them completely now they'll come in with the birds or all kinds of ways i mean you buy hay and there's a couple of those in your hay and they get out with your mirror they they'll come back that way but anyway that's a bowl fish and i'll get this big purple flower actually looks kind of beautiful on top afterwards but they can really take over and the one thing i've noticed i think i was only like a teenager my dad sent me out to cut this patch of olfa so with this side more we had on a farmer 200 it was a pretty thick patch and it's where the cows always went all the milking cows always went and they had all the grass trimmed down between all of them down to nothing but then both this were just thick so i cut them all off it was just like early july or something it was really hot out and i remember two days later going back to that spot and all those thistle were gone those cows ate those thistle after they dried up i would have never figured it must be like toast or something it must have to the sun shriveled them up they apparently tasted good but i thought that was something really interesting and that's why if you bail some up in the hay that cattle may eat them but i don't think they're going to eat them green so now there's another one and the bull thistle is a little easier for me to control because you only got like one here and there and if you get them right away you can control them but these this one here this is canadian thistle and they and they're a little different they're still a biannual if they're a little finer and where you see them you'll see groves of them and i think the same thing if they get cut and the cows don't have anything better to eat they will eat them after they dry but they claim they they grow like a grass where they'll grow from the root and the root of one will it'll come up in another spot kind of like quack grass and all that type of stuff and that's where this one makes it a lot harder to control and i try not to cut them until end of june early july maybe even when this this is starting to flower but not seeded yet if you cut them too soon what i've noticed happens is they will start in again of course and they will have enough time by september they can seed out again now they may not be as many but they're still i mean you think of how many thousand seeds are just on one i mean they basically can still survive and that's kind of nature's way of still trying to keep itself going i'm gonna guess they came in with the hay many old timers and some of those dry years way back like in 88 i remember helping a guy onboard a semi-load of grass hay there was a few thistle in there i mean you took what you could get and then of course you gonna you got a species from way up there that hasn't been around here now it's around here i think back in the day when things didn't travel so much it was you didn't see a lot of the weeds we see today and there's one of those bull thistle and he's in such a spot i can't really drive there so sometimes you'd take a big sigh out and you can get some of those but not too many but if you let them go they'll be ten of them next year and pretty soon the whole pasture will be here's one of our ponds and this is another interesting thing this pond was in here back when i bought this farm i put these ponds in and there's cattails growing in there and we had this pond cleaned out and we fenced it off and shaped it up we put some breaker rock on the upper side here so it doesn't erode and it looks good it all worked out good but where those cattails came from i don't know we are a long ways from some kind of bottoms and then on the upper side here we just did this you can see that there's kind of a pile there laying of uh a willow there was some willow saplings growing on the upper end of this pond and again we are a long ways from the nearest willow tree i couldn't even mistakes could be over a mile away that's kind of crazy how that stuff travels so birds are wind i don't know there's nothing upstream like that then right here's another these are like apple trees and i believe they spread because the cows eat my apples in the fall and they go other places and poop them back out and i think that seed takes a rut the next year and these things are everywhere these are tough to to get rid of and it doesn't even really make a tree there's a species of apple that's more la well about looks like about size of a cherry and a real sour the tree will be more of almost a shrub and then i've learned to be more observant in certain certain ones i'll let grow because i see the fruit on them is is a better looking fruit they like this this tree here kind of growing up on an embankment where we really can't drive or that put on some pretty nice apples and then it needs to get pruned again you gotta prune apple trees to make them good but otherwise you see these shrubs there's another one there's two over there and there and those are becoming quite an issue i think 20 years ago we didn't have that here i mean if there was there was very little of it nothing that i would have said was a problem but those are i've seen pastures where you can't find the cattle in there cow had a cap in there they'd be laying underneath that thing and then there's the other pond and we put those ponds in in 92. we put that pond in and that pond in and then there's another small one now this is up behind our buildings as you can kind of see here there's another small one i don't know if you can see it from here and at the bottom of this ravine over here and that and it collects just runoff there's no springs in these and they all have overflow pipes and it's just our way of controlling the water which i just love it at first i used to let the cows drink some out of there but then they kind of ruined the banks and stuff so we fenced them off we got 10 pounds on this farm already and we got one of them kind of farms a lot of valleys and ravines so anyway like up on this knob here there was some of that canadian thistle and what the cows didn't eat and if you know cattle if you got hills they'll lay on the top or in the valley they won't lay on the side hills so on the side hills ends us being your finer grass where there's no manure really in it so you don't get as much grass but the grass on top or in the valleys really grows fast because all the manure so what i do is i set the shoes up higher on my my disc bind and i cut it like i would be cutting hay and just these patches maybe two acre patch here an acre patch there and then a couple days later with the rake and this is all in late june early july and then i'll rake it up and bail that it makes beautiful heifer hay or dry cow hay or even for some steers or a bull or something but you'd be surprised how they eat that up and like i was saying that the thistle they'll eat that if it's dried and then if there's a few weeds in there that ain't good they'd just get thrown in for the manure they didn't seed out see that's the key not to see them out so and then what grows back here it's just awesome it just looks like a golf course i just love it so we're really trying to manage our pastures i think that's a big thing if you're going to graze you still got to do some mowing you're not to mow everything certain areas the cows clean down pretty good by themselves and then some places i'll just mow like every other year i mean so we're not having them every stitch of this farm every year but it's just a way of managing and getting better use out of what we have so so so [Applause] so usually what i have the bush hog is extremely steep and rugged crooked and there's a lot of ravines and knobs and anywhere we couldn't make hay or have a respectable crop were used for pasture and the stuff down here that was hay grass grass hay and then there was electric fence and you kind of see it came right there along this edge and after the hay was made we take that fence out and the cows just raise it for the rest of the year so now i'm just cutting whatever the cows didn't eat on the permanent pastures to get new regrowth there you really gotta kinda keep your head on straight with this stuff so you don't end up in some mishap with this because i'm sure it's not gonna be pretty if that would happen so i'm gonna keep going

Channel: Gierok Farms

Views: 25,721

Keywords: Mowing Pasture, Land Improvment, Grass, Pasture Health, Grazing, Weed Control, Brush Hog, Bush Hog, Ditch Mower, Agronomy, Soil Health, Life on the farm, Day to day life on the farm, Cattle, Cows, Cattle Care, Cattle health, livestock grooming, Tools, Fencing Tools, Barbed Wire, Fence, Fencing, cattle grooming, Spring, Happy Cows, Cows on Pasture, Cows Grazing, Cattle management, Dairy cows, Farm tour, Cattle Barn, Barn Set Up, Dairy Farm, raising cattle on grass, cows, cattle

Id: MUI0AfZrMEY

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2022