While it can bring other problems, abundant rain produces abundant grass. If this describes your grasslands, let’s find a way to take best advantage of this blessing; haying, stockpiling, and grazing.
First, grazing. While having more grass than we can graze sounds like a blessing, when it comes time to graze this tall grass much of it often gets trampled rather than eaten. Rotating fast when grass is growing fast is a common practice in these circumstances, but as we come back to graze those pastures a second time, there is a combination of new regrowth, tall stemmy grass, dead and brown trampled grass, and partly pushed over but still green old grass. How should that mess be handled?
Animals turned into these pastures with enough time and space will wander around grazing just the regrowth, then beller to be moved to fresh pasture. That may be fine if you have plenty of pasture, but there are other options.
One option to consider is increasing stock density. If you increase stock density so your animals have access to about one day’s worth of grazing at a time, grazing and manure distribution will be more uniform, animals will eat more of the less desirable older forage so carrying capacity will increase, and grass that was trampled previously will be better incorporated into the soil for faster recycling and soil improvement. This requires some temporary cross fencing as well as planning regarding water access, but it can be well worth it.
Another option to try is stockpiling, or saving some extra pasture growth for grazing during the winter.
There are lots of advantages to winter grazing. For starters, less hay needs to be fed next winter. Thus, you won’t need to make as much hay this summer. And stockpiling in summer and fall followed by winter grazing is one of the best methods to improve the health of your grasslands, especially native range.
If you have some run down, poor condition, low producing pastures, these often are the best candidates for winter grazing. Grasses that need invigorating will be strengthened if you avoid grazing them during the growing season. Later, your winter grazing will clean off much of the frozen growth during winter. Cattle may even eat some plants like yucca and ragweed during winter that they won't hardly touch during summer. Sure, you'll need some protein supplements, but cattle do a pretty good job of picking high quality plant parts to eat while winter grazing.
The last and maybe most obvious way to conserve extra growth is by cutting hay from parts of the pasture. While it does come with a cost, if you have the equipment, the time, and more pasture than you can use this spring, cutting hay for use later in summer or winter when pasture becomes scarce is a good option.
The best case is to cut as seedheads emerge for good hay quality and plant regrowth potential. We also want to fence out soon the area to be cut from the rest of the pasture, otherwise, cattle will ignore and waste the taller, stemmier grass as they just graze new regrowth after cutting hay. You might even apply a little nitrogen fertilizer to stimulate growth if soil moisture still is good.
Don’t let extra pasture go to waste. Grazing strategically, stockpiling for winter grazing, or cutting the excess as hay can turn an abundance of early grass into a way stretch your forage supply later in the year.
-Ben Beckman is a beef systems Extension Educator serving the counties of Antelope, Cedar, Knox, Madison and Pierce. He is based out of the Cedar County Extension office in Hartington. You can reach him by phone: (402) 254-6821 or email: ben.beckman@unl.edu