We had a little afternoon trip to Wells in Somerset at weekend, and suddenly the sun came out.
It felt like Mediterranean heat and made me pretty uncomfortable under my usual layers of wool and wax. We finished our coffee, got an ice cream to cool down and explored the gardens around the cathedral with noisy birds and flowers bursting out of every corner. Then I remembered this happens to me every February - a fool's Spring.
As a hopeful fool, I dare to dream that winter is behind us, although I expect mother nature has some more installed for us yet. It is odd though, I don't recall ever seeing bluebells out this early.
Obviously they have not flowered yet, but the daffodils are well underway and the crocuses and snow drops have been having a party for a while. It seems the birds are pretty convinced spring has sprung too, and our cows look pretty relieved after a long winter of what seems like non-stop rain.
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Thankfully, our grazing platform is full of woodland, scrub and cover in the valleys. It is amazing how much trees in the landscape influence air flow and thermal dynamics. If you outwinter your livestock, I like to look at what options we have across the farm to make sure the cattle have access to shelter, especially when the worst weather fronts come in. This is the same during the summer when heat causes just as many issues.
Are there any blocks of woodland that could act as an outdoor barn with little more than an opening of a gate or the removal of a fence? Cattle are woodland creatures, and woodlands in the UK have evolved with large herbivores being part of their ecosystem. So, you might be amazed at the positive impact livestock have on the woodland environment and the woodlands impact on animal health, behaviours and performance. This leads me nicely onto the topic of agroforestry which we can dive into another time.
Good grass
Back to our fool's spring. A big one for me in grazing systems is not to get over excited and jump the gun on your spring grazing when these early warm days start to appear. With our mild winters we inevitably get some steady grass growth over the breadth of winter and when these 10-14DegC sunny days come around, we can almost see the grass growing. But, remember that in these early stages of the growing season, if we stress our pasture plants we might set ourselves up for reduced grass covers across the rest of the year.
Spring grazing is the key to setting ourselves up to elevate that grass wedge to its full potential. All that plant wants to do when it wakes up is to grow to its full potential and to then reproduce. So, if we overgraze in the Spring, from now until mid-June and stress those plants, we may just see much slower recovery, stunted growth and early seed heads appearing when we could be snowballing that grass wedge to ride us through another dry summer.
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So, here are some tips to avoid overgrazing in the spring:
- If you can, hold back on turn-out or stick to your winter grazing plan as long as forage stocks allow. For me, spring is not really here until May, so the longer you can resist that first rotation the more we set ourselves up to navigate an uncertain summer.
- Graze strategically. If you know you need some fields for calving, then leave those un-grazed until calving to maximise grass covers. I aim to leave my calving fields only very lightly grazed way back in the previous Autumn to maximise that grass cover come spring. Alternatively, if you know you won't be back to some fields way into the end of June and the early summer, then they could be better suited to an early spring graze, if you need to, to allow plenty of time for recovery.
- If you need to find grazing days on some of this early growth, try to take as little as possible and leave as much behind as you can. The more you leave behind, the more insulated the soil will be and the bigger the solar panel is to soak up that spring sun and get that carbon pumping through your system. This is how ‘grass grows grass'; those warmer insulated soils will keep your soil biology active which is essential for plant growth.
- If you do graze off some fields, don't return until it has fully recovered. This is entirely down to the growing conditions and the health of your soil. If we are doomed to have a cold March and April, like we have seen in recent years, you may not see much growth until we get into May. If this fool's spring is not a hoax and we get up into the higher temperatures much sooner than May, then we may see good growth and recovery 4-6 weeks after a recent graze and they could be recovered by the end of March or April (these growing conditions rarely happen this early).
- With all that said, referring back to my first point, we often hear advice about increasing grazing on the shoulders of the season. For me, we want to graze far much longer into the final shoulder, into the Autumn and the Winter. This is where we save the cost on forage and bedding without putting the system under pressure when we get the inevitable summer drought. This is the key to building a drought contingency plan and to snowballing grazing to get us deep into that second shoulder. I think that for every day or week we delay our spring graze we bank it at least five fold come the following winter.
- So, think about treating your pastures very carefully in the spring, avoid these early spring days grazing if you can and only skim what is there when that first rotation does start. This is the time of year we really need to focus on the needs of our plant system, if we get that right they'll look after us when the conditions get tough later in the season.
- A note that the above is all context specific, and how this looks will differ on every farm. See how they might apply to your context and what new outcomes we might get from a few little tweaks in our grazing management.
Ultimately, they are just some hard lessons learnt from a regular spring fool!
