Passion!

One thing that has struck me, over and over again during my travels, is the passion people have for their subject. I noticed it with Jay Fuhrer in Bismarck and I've just experienced it again with Diego Fontenla in Tres Arroyos.

Diego is a busy man. He gave up the majority of his day today, collecting me from my hotel at 7.30am, to show me around his farming operations, despite his phone ringing whenever it had a signal. Eventually, by mid-afternoon, he had to excuse himself with too much to do, but promised to return later.

True to his word, he returned just before 8pm, to let me know the details of the two visits he had organised for me for tomorrow. Rather than just being allowed to deliver his simple message before racing home, he was instead faced with an Englishman with a host of follow-up questions about his farm. He refused to brush them aside in a rush to get home to see his wife and four children and instead enthusiastically launched into a clear and empassioned explanation of the minutiae of his operation.

(For those who are interested, the gist of Diego's explanation was that, within his rotation, he discovered that crop yields were maintained for approximately five years following the pasture cycle. Beyond this, they tailed off rapidly, hence his 5-year cropping folowed by five years of pasturing of the land. Stretching the cropping to a sixth year meant smaller profits under his all-organic system).

That's one of the most rewarding things about a Nuffield scholarship. I've been given an opportunity to meet and mix with like-minded people. People who, one could say, share my passion for farming. I love it!

Buenos Dias Buenos Aires

"Are mob grazed cattle the perfect arable break crop?" This is the title of my Nuffield study and, up to now, I have focused on the 'mob grazed' aspect of things. The farmers in North America taught me huge amounts about what to do and how to do it.

Now, the new year brings a new continent and a new area of focus, it's time to look at cattle as an arable break crop.

Hence I find myself standing with Diego Fontenla in the Pampas of Argentina, surrounded by Hereford cattle, talking rotations.

Organically reared yearling heifers (this side of fence) and steers (opposite
side of fence) close to finished weight and condition in Santa Elena, Tres Arroyos

Diego is manager of a large farm in the Tres Arroyos region of Buenos Aires, some 15 miles from the sea. The land is all organic, growing a mixture of crops, predominantly sunflower and wheat but also barley and rye. Effectively, the farm operates a ten-year rotation, the first 5 years being down to pasture to build fertility followed by five years of combinable crops. All crops are planted in the spring and combined in the autumn.

Following combining, Diego plants cover crops of either rye or oats to be grazed through the winter months by yearling steers. These cover crops are ripped up in the spring to allow for drilling of the combinable wheat or sunflower.

From a farming point of view, the system appears to be working. The sandy soil benefits from the large amounts of cattle dung and organic matter from the roots of the pasture plants, improving fertility and water holding capacity. Because of the weed burden, no-till drilling isn't practiced and instead Diego uses neighbours with high capacity disc-tractor units to cultivate the fields. I questioned whether this practice loses too much valuable moisture but, as Diego explained, it's quid pro quo - what is lost through water evaporation is gained through better weed control.

Unfortunately, whilst it works as a farm , as a business it has been hit hard by government intervention. In the past, virtually all of Diego's cattle were sold as organic beef to Tesco. In 2009, though, the government banned the export of all beef and Diego lost his marketplace overnight. As demand for organic meat in Argentina is low, he has had to work really hard to continue to make the enterprise profitable.

However (and this highlights their true worth) Diego continues to farm cattle within the rotation because of their invaluable contribution to the production of the cash crops. Maybe cattle, even when one's marketplace disappears, really are the perfect arable break crop.....!

Planning for Argentina

It's time for me to set off on my travels again and I'd love to hear from anyone with contacts in Argentina. I want to meet up with farmers who are integrating cattle into their crop rotations by growing grazed cover crops, grass crops, grazed corn crops etc.

They don't have to be mob grazing them!

I want to look at how farmers manage livestock and cropping enterprises together, how the soil is affected and, as importantly, how the profitability of livestock stacks up against conventional break crops.

Please email me if you have any contacts over there, my email address is tom@heathchapman.com.

Thankyou in advance.

'1,000 cow Neil' to visit UK

Neil Dennis, he of the '1,000 cow' fame is to visit the UK in March. He'll be in Hertfordshire on 12th March 2012 and then will be moving round the country. The draft itinerary is as follows:

12th March Hertfordshire
13th Hampshire
14th Devon
15th Derbyshire
16th Yorkshire
then on to Northern Ireland and finally to Wales by the 20th.

He will be doing farm walks, workshops, presentations etc and for anyone interested, this is a great opportunity to meet with a recognized expert and longtime practitioner of mob grazing.

If anyone's interested, please email me - tom@heathchapman.com

Best practices

As I sat in my hotel room on the morning before my final visit of the trip, I reflected on what I had seen and what I had learned. Mob grazing is a catch-all description for many subtly varied ways of high-density grazing. Most were successful, in terms of improving plant recovery rates and increasing stocking rates, as well as making pastures more drought-tolerant (and better able to stand heavy rainfalls too!)

The majority of practitioners were also practicing holistic management, focusing on its three entwined measures of success, namely financial, environmental and social measures.

However, there were still certain things eating away at me. The main one was weed control. Would UK pastures, in our non-brittle environment, revert to a mass of inedible weeds in a few years? What type of management strategy would need to be adopted to avoid this? Would we be forced to top our grassland with mowers to prevent this or could cattle alone be used?

If weeds did invade, how easy would it be to manage them away in favour of grasses and other more desirable plants?

The trip to see Dr Allen Williams that day could not have been more timely, and provided a whole host of the answers I had been seeking.

Allen was an academic, specialising in genetics, who has more recently changed tack to become a farmer. He brings an investigative and inquiring mind to the topic of mob grazing, coupled with a rigorous intellect, a habit of postulating theories, recording results and drawing sensible conclusions.

Three years ago he, and his business partner Al Smith, took on a block of CRP land. This had been within the CRP programme for 25 years which, as no grazing, cultivating or topping was allowed, had reverted to scrubland and semi-mature woodland. The first step taken by the partners was to clear the larger stems with a bulldozer. After that, they made the decision that all subsequent clearing work should be done by cattle. No more mechanical operations would be undertaken, chemical controls would be avoided and burning was out of the question.

The woodland is in the background, the cleared land in the foreground. Allen had purposely left elongated stands of trees to provide shade from the worst of the Mississippi summer and shelter in the winter

The results were nothing short of amazing! The impact was made greater because this was so much a work in progress. Land that had been properly managed by Allen for three years had transformed into lush, rich grassland in which cows grazed on shoulder high grass stands, the seeds all naturally occurring in the soil from the (at least) 25-year-old seedbank!

Allen's management had transformed the land from weed-covered scrub to dense, productive sward after only three years of mob-grazing. Incredibly, no reseeding had taken place, the clovers, grasses and other legumes were all either already in the seedbank (and had been dormant for the past 25 years+) or were carried / blown in from elsewhere.

Those pastures being exposed to only their first year of grazing were covered in weeds, mass invaders designed by nature to provide speedy ground cover, protecting the soil from the ravages of sun, wind and rain. This showed what the vegetation would look like without intensive management of the grazing (the first step towards reverting back to woodland).

After only one year of grazing, annual weeds still dominated the pasture land. More intensive grazing / trampling needed!

Next stop was to look at a pasture in its second year of grazing. Allen had concentrated the animals really tightly, encouraging them to eat all the weeds, leaves, grass and vegetation down to ground level. The perennial grasses were just starting to regrow and would quickly form a thick, dense sward, out-competing the annual weeds that had previously towered above them.

Allen had mobbed up the cattle tightly, forcing them to eat everything virtually down to the ground. There is a risk of cattle performance suffering if you ask them to do this too often, though Allen used dry cows who are better able to cope with a high roughage diet of relatively low nutritive value. As can be seen, the pasture looks more like a sheep-grazed field. This allows the sward to thicken up and it will outgrow any annual weeds this year and in future years.

As a final contrast, he also had a paddock that had been properly managed for the first three years but then for this year had been set-stocked with a group of purebred angus cattle. The sward was showing typical signs of overgrazing, with thin, bare patches interspersed with unpalatable ageing tussocks.

The set-stocked land. Bare patches interspersed with tussocks show how selective grazing allows cattle to overgraze some plants, returning time and again to eat off newly emerged leaves, whilst leaving other plants standing to seed, die and slowly oxidise. Adequate rest next year should allow the pasture to start to recover.

The variety of pastures on view was a natural result of the gradual progress Allen was making in improving the land. However, it had all the appearances of a scientific experiment, with control plots and various different 'treatments' on view. Quite fitting for a former academic!

MIG and Mob

Durwood Gordon is typical of many of the farmers I met: Observant, willing to think through problems and happy to take the road less travelled.

For example, he practices managed intensive grazing (MIG) in the summer but a more intensive mob grazing during the grass-dormant winter months. He also, against the advice of his neighbours, sowed a mixture of big bluestem and other warm-season grasses (the neighbours claimed they would be grazed out within a few years; 15 years of excellent pasture management later, they are still the dominant species in the sward).

His cattle were some of the best I saw during my travels, well adapted to their all-grass regime (Durwood farms organically) with good rumen capacity and excellent conformation. His grasslands looked productive, despite the heat of Mississippi, and he'd installed a very good infrastructure of permanent electric fences, water sources and cow tracks to make this an easy-to-operate one man system.

A drilled stand of warm season grasses that has thrived under Durwood's grazing management

An unusual flytrap used by Durwood. The dark colour replicates an animal's hide. The flies try to fly underneath the 'body' and the transparent sheets below guide them instead into a liquid-filled trap

Sweltering in Mississippi

I was fortunate enough to meet Sledge Taylor and a neighbouring farmer-friend of his, Sonny Henry, at the mob-grazing school hosted by Greg Judy in April. Somehow, I managed to get myself invited to visit Sledge's farm (he was probably too polite to refuse my request!)

Sledge is a successful cotton and cattle farmer based in Como, Mississippi. He is also a busy man, and on my arrival was in the throws of installing a huge cotton gin into his factory. Corn harvest was also about to start, cotton was in full bloom and being regularly irrigated, soybeans hung heavy with pods and he was carrying 400 cows on the farm. Despite all this, and typical of the kindness and hopsitality shown by all the people I met on this trip, he willingly gave up his whole day, and evening, to ensure I was shown all aspects of his operation.

It was fascinating. Whilst looking at his mob grazing setup, the adage "If you want something doing, ask a busy man" sprung to mind. Sledge had only visited the mob grazing school a couple of months ago but had already installed miles of fences and water pipes and was mob grazing cattle across a large part of his land.

Sledge inspecting a water connection within his recently laid water system



It was early days for the mob grazing system on Sledge's farm but already things were looking good. Lespedeza and other legumes were interspersed within the warm season grasses and the diversity is likely to increase with the longer rest periods given to the pasture land.

Mississippi is also extremely hot and humid, which further aids vegetation growth, though it does make things hard for cattle - they spend the heat of the day in the shade of the trees. One problem faced by livestock farmers in the warmer states of the US is that of endophyte-infected fescue which is toxic and exacerbates the effects of heat. Careful management of the pastures under the mob grazing regime and selective breeding of cattle are both necessary to combat its ill-effects.

A further indicator of the early success of the mob grazing was the signs of life in the soil. Dung beetle activity was visible in cow pats and there was an incredible array of grasshoppers and other insects rising in front of us as we crossed the grass fields.

Heaps of earth within the cowpat are a sure sign of dung beetle activity. They roll the manure into a ball and bury it underground, naturally cultivating the land.

Cotton farming is something new to me (not surprisingly, coming from the UK where, as I was sweltering in 98 degree F temperatures and near-100% humidity, my wife told me it was mid-60's and raining in the UK, with 'a touch of autumn in the air in the early mornings'!) I spent a fascinating few hours looking at all aspects of its production - the half-mile long centre-point irrigator on land within the Mississippi delta was particularly memorable, as was the logisitical challenge of installing a nearly-new cotton gin into a factory with the cotton harvest only weeks away.

Following a delicious steak, eaten in the enjoyable company of Sledge, his wife Denise and various neighbours at a local restaurant I retired to an old wooden house, moved 20 miles and renovated by Sledge in the last few months.

Huge programmable centre-point irrigators watered the crops growing on the Mississippi delta, driven by powerful diesel engines. The wheels on the irrigator are driven by electrical motor and operated by a pressure switch - as a wheel is activated, it moves its section of the pivot forward, thus tripping the switch of the next wheel along the boom and activating it too.

It's not mob grazing but.... cotton growing on a plant in Mississippi

A cotton harvester

The house that Sledge (re)built. In fact, he had it moved from his land on the delta, some twenty miles away. It was jacked up and transported by a specialist firm of house movers. Sledge added the veranda oncve in-situ here