Why Mowing Pasture Weeds is Both a Good and Bad Idea

another day another job we've reached the point in the year when the weeds in the irrigated pastures specifically the smut grass are really starting to take over and there it's to the point where I need to mow them or do something about it and because I know that mowing these weeds down is not really a great way to deal with them I do want to talk a little bit about some other methods of weed control and some other things that I would like to try I mowed a little bit a few days ago and I noticed that this mower is really not working that great and smut grass is pretty tough to cut to begin with and I noticed that we're struggling quite a bit so I want to try to lift this up and see if I can get under there and see how hard it is to remove the blades and sharpen them up and then take them out in the pasture and see if they work any better to be perfectly honest I have never done any maintenance on this mower I'm not even sure how old it is now it's definitely old enough to have needed some I mean apart from just greasing the drive line and the little swivel wheel on the back I haven't done anything to this so it'll be interesting to see what things look like when we get under there that's what's going on today on Farmer Tyler Ranch foreign I've got the mower propped up here on the trailer in an effort to not Crush myself underneath this if it should happen to fall for some reason I don't see how it can fall now or at least if it does it would be so slow I should have time to get out of there so uh I'm not sure yet if I want to try to take the blades off to sharpen them or if I can maybe fit underneath there with a grinder and sharpen them like that we'll just kind of have to figure this out they're definitely not very sharp man I could probably get a grinder under here without taking off probably be the easiest way to do it this one's actually not terrible surprisingly I'm gonna try to do this without removing the blades that is going to make it a lot faster and you know we got some acres to cover today so anyway we can save time is a good idea this guy having this job calls for a new flap wheel and because I'm going to be grinding right up by my face I think we're going to go with the face shield today instead of just regular safety glasses that's the hard part about it kind of hard to see what you're doing well it's definitely not perfect but it's a lot better than it was I think to really do a proper sharpening on these blades you would have to take them off but I think that I got them good enough and actually they weren't as bad as I thought they would be I think I was able to improve them enough to where it's worth trying and we should be able to see some sort of difference so let's run down to the ranch and get to it foreign all of the sort of Light tan colored grass that you see out here is smut grass and the cattle absolutely do not like to eat this stuff you can see that it's very stemmy and supposedly doesn't taste very good you know whenever they say in a study that it's not palatable to the animals I always kind of Wonder like how do you know that the cows can't tell you that maybe they don't like eating it because it's a texture issue I mean who's to say the point is or the thing that matters is that they don't like to eat it and smut grass unlike some other weeds that cattle don't like to eat has very little nutritional value so even if like if I kept the cattle out here for two extra days I could probably get them to start eating some of this stuff uh but the there's really no nutritional value or no Advantage for me to do that in fact they say if cattle are grazing on pastures that are heavily infested with smut grass that they can actually lose weight even though they're eating as much as their bellies can hold as I mentioned before mowing this smut grass is really not the best way to deal with it but it does have some advantages first of all the big disadvantage is that as I mow it I'm just spreading seeds and basically I'm reseeding the smut grass all over so next year it'll probably come back even worse than it is now because of that fact I've got some other ideas of how I'm gonna deal with this stuff but I might not be able to do it until next year and we can talk about that a little bit later advantages to mowing though include the fact that along with the smut grass some of this stuff that is going to seed is Dallas grass which is desirable that's what was planted out here and that's what I want to thrive once the Dallas grass goes to seed though the cows don't really want to eat that either the hope is that with the smoke grass mowed down the Dallas grass will kind of come up and and hopefully out compete it although when the cattle come into here and graze they really work against that principle because they are selecting the Dallas grass and eating that almost exclusively and leaving the smut grass to allow it to grow and basically create what you see here so why mow it if there's all these bad things about mowing it well the big reason is that since we've got this tall forage out here the smut grass is in some places close to three feet tall and when the cattle have their heads down grazing that grass can be rubbing on their eye which can create an abrasion which could ultimately lead to pink eye so you'll notice that oftentimes when you graze cattle on really tall forage like this your pink eye problems get to be a lot worse not only that but once smut grass is cut down and lying on the ground it dries out and the cattle will eat a little bit of it then again there's not a lot of nutritional value here but if they're grazing and eating that along with the Dallas grass and the Clover that's out here then at least they're just getting rid of it right that's kind of the theory behind all this let's get started foreign foreign well that's a problem Apparently one of my irrigation valves has been leaking over here for probably close to the last 20 hours and you can see we're all wet so I I guess I'm gonna quit mowing for now because I don't want to run the tractor over the wet ground and compact it and make ruts and uh yeah none of that's good so I'll let this dry out for a couple of days and then I'll come back here with the mower and finish this I got halfway done and that's you know not terrible but yeah I don't think I can go anymore do I seem disappointed that I have to stop mowing it's not so much that I mind mowing it's more that this particular field is really rough there's like a lot of old gopher mounds and just all the clumps from the smut grass make this really rough it doesn't help that that tractor rides really rough because it has such a short wheelbase which is good when you're trying to maneuver around but for doing actual field work it makes it ride uh pretty pretty bad and also my mower is only six feet wide so it just feels like it takes forever to cover Acres with that thing because it does as I've been mowing out here I've been trying to ask myself is it cutting better now that I've got those blades sharpened can I see a difference and I feel like I can I feel like it is cutting a little bit better but then when I'm honest with myself if somebody had sharpened that blade like what I did and I didn't know about it I don't think that I would be able to tell the difference while I was mowing I think some of the clumps of smut grass had cut off pretty good and pretty clean and others not so much this stuff is tough It's hard to cut for any kind of a mower so that brings me to another option for controlling the smut grass I've established already that mowing is not a long-term solution but it is sort of a quick fix the the weed pressure obviously will continue to increase over the years the other form of control that I would like to try is an herbicide application but I'm not talking about spraying generally when you think of applying herbicide you're spraying it with an airplane you're spraying it with a ground rig or whatever it may be and you are applying whatever herbicide you're using to every square inch of land that you're making your application to but I've come across a Contraption known as a weed wiper and what it is is a floating rotating drum that herbicide is applied to and then you would drive that over the field where the drum would only touch the tall plants that the cows are not eating so like the ideal way to do this would be to bring the cattle in here let them graze this hard Gray's at Dallas grass right down to the ground which is usually what not what you want them to do but in this case I think it would be best so that all that is Left Behind is this smut grass and it's going to be quite a bit taller than the Dallas grass at that point you would run the weed wiper over this field making your herbicide application only to your problem weeds out here and then they would die and the Dallas grass would be able to flourish once again those of you that have been with the channel for a while can probably remember me talking about this before this is something that I've wanted to try for a while and I still haven't yet quite found the way that I want to get my hands on one of these I'm I'm trying to find a used one that I could buy or maybe I could work out something with the company where they would send me one to test out and make videos about I'm not really sure how it's gonna go but I'm thinking one way or another I really want to try one of these out it just seems like it would work and I've been watching some studies and some research where people have used these and they've had pretty good results with specifically smut grass which is my big problem out here so that's the dream for now I'm not sure how this is all going to work out or if I will ever even be able to find one if I can't probably what this will eventually result in is me just doing a mass herbicide application killing everything and then replanting these pastures one by one I don't really like the idea of that because that's a lot of money a lot of work and I think probably if I were to pencil it out it would be cheaper for me to just go ahead and buy a brand new weed wiper so that might be the route we end up going I was kind of hoping that my big purchase for the year would be a haybine but as I look at the way the weeds are encroaching out here I I think taking care of that problem might be the top priority now if anyone out there watching has experience using a weed wiper let me know I would I would be very curious as to how they work because to me the concept seems pretty sound it looks like it would be the answer to my problem but I also have noticed that they haven't really been widely accepted I don't really think that I've seen anyone around here use one so that that does make me wonder is that because they don't work as good as they say or is that just because people are slow to adopt new ideas since we got a little bit of extra time I thought it would be a good opportunity to walk down here to the cows and let's go find the two calves that I treated for hoof rot last week and see how they're doing my first patient was this little black and white face heifer here number 2323 and if you guys remember her bad hoof was on her front left as I look at her now I can't see any swelling anymore like we did before previously she had a lot of toe separation and all of that looks to be cleared up and gone now and just watching her walk she she has a perfectly fine gait if I never knew that anything was wrong with her before I wouldn't be able to tell it now and what are the odds standing right behind her is this steer 2321 he had a bad right rear foot with the steer calf here I can see there's still a little bit of a limp there and a little bit of swelling so I think that the only difference in the way that I treated these two calves is one got antibiotics and he did not so because I don't notice a ton of improvement he's really no worse he's just kind of the same so I think that tomorrow when the cows go back up to the Corral there that will get him in the Chute and give him a shot of some good medicine I gotta say I'm surprised that that steer hasn't made a full recovery by now but I guess that's why you come back and check right thanks for hanging out with me today guys and I hope I'll see you again on Farmer Tyler Ranch

Channel: Farmer Tyler Ranch

Views: 15,405

Keywords: Pasture management, Smut grass, Weed wiper, Mowing

Id: ieuYeqGbL0A

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023