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There is a delicate balance when it comes to the relationship between water and farmers. If you’re in the midst of a drought with no rain in site you are praying for rain, but if all it does is rain when you are trying to put up dry hay you are cursing the rain! There is one thing for sure though, you can’t control when it will or will not rain so you’d better be prepared for both options. All of this is to say that this week I’m going to spend some time responding to a listener e-mail about water … or the lack there of. I don’t know if there is a silver bullet type of answer for the question, but I do know that I’ve learned a few things from the past two years of dry spells and there is one major thing I will do different if we are dry again for an extended time.
If you’ve been around the show for a while you know that I’m passionate about farming in general, but starting a farm and beginning farmers more specifically! A little while ago I received a great e-mail from a blog reader who shared what his plan for dipping his toes into the world of farming is. I thought he had some great plans so I wanted to share them … plus, that e-mail in conduction with the e-mail about water got me to thinking.
Thinking about starting farms, trying to be like other farms, the importance to collecting ideas and adapting them to your farm, and even having a farm that is an educational hub! If you have any ideas about farm classes you would enjoy I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
Here are some helpful links from today’s show …
As always, I want to thank you so much for listening and supporting the show with your encouragement and reviews on iTunes! I am continually working to produce a better show, and I’m thankful for all of the listeners sticking with me as I learn.
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I would love to hear your questions, show ideas, or comments about the show. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail! As always you can follow along with “The Beginning Farmer” and Crooked Gap Farm by checking out these links …
Thanks for giving me your take Ethan, I really appreciate it.
The wife is very supportive of me pursuing farming but she doesn’t really have an interest in taking part in the farming. The plan would be for me to try to find some acres within short driving distance from home. Then I would do chores before/after work and she would continue to work full time as well. We don’t have kids yet so at least we don’t really have that to worry about.
The Farm Dreams workshop is July 7th and I’m planning on attending. Hopefully I can make some connections there. If not the backup plan is to talk to a friend’s uncle who does some part time farming of his own (hair sheep, chicken, and grains) and see if I can trade some labor for experience. We shall see how it goes!
I leave for my cousin’s first thing in the morning. Super excited!
I can’t think of any specific topics I’d suggest for possible webinars off the top of my head but I’d be the first in line. I’ll also be on the lookout for any future farm crawls or educational days and see if I can make the drive to Crooked Gap farm.
Thanks again for the advice!
I think I could write a book on my thoughts about drought.
We had drought (mostly characterized as extreme drought) in most of 2011 and 2012. And, we’ve been in extreme drought starting last fall up until now (although it’s rained off and on for a week or so, so we might have improved to severe drought).
The cattle get their water from ponds and they were all extremely low in these droughts. A couple of the ponds had already had their spillways fixed and the dams built slightly higher before 2011, so they held just enough water during the droughts to get by. Without that dam maintenance before the droughts, I’m not sure I would have had enough water.
I have rural water and an older well on the farm, but the well doesn’t produce enough water during a drought to water very many cattle, rural water can get expensive, and the watering points are only available close to the barn. So, rural water and well water would be a last ditch effort to hold on to a reduced number of cattle.
In a perfect world, I’d redo all the ponds and make them much bigger and deeper to hold more water. Besides that, I’m not sure what else I can do about having enough water in a drought.
Other things I’ve done that I think helped me get through droughts are stockpiling grass for winter grazing and “bale grazing”.
In the summer of 2011, I lucked out and was able to rent another farm that had both cropland and pasture. It hadn’t been grazed since the previous summer, so it was covered with knee-deep dormant native grass from last year with a little bit of green grass down towards the ground. I weaned the calves in mid-October and moved the cows to that pasture because I didn’t have much hay and had little grass left. I wasn’t exactly sure if those cows would find enough to eat in all that old grass, but in a few weeks they all filled out and looked a heck of a lot better than when they started (I did feed them a couple of pounds of cubes each day to give them enough protein). I hauled them back to the farm in January, so I didn’t have to feed them any hay for over 2 months.
Now, I purposely let the grass grow all year so I can move the cows over there after their calves are weaned in October. Long term, I think it would improve my grass stand if I let the grass grow all summer in different parts of my pastures (i.e. fallow 1/5th of the pasture each year) and then wintered the cows on those areas. Strip grazing those areas might work even better.
I also started my version of “bale grazing” years before the droughts hit. There are different versions and definitions of bale grazing, but I put out 2 days worth of hay in bale feeders about 30 ft. apart, slowly moving the feeders across an area each time so that I end up feeding around 40-50 bales of hay per acre. Sometimes I have pugging problems, but I usually just wait until it dries out and feed another bale on the torn-up area.
Feeding hay this way leaves a layer of organic material (hay, manure, urine, etc) and creates an increased area of fertility about 25-30 feet around each bale feeding area. In a drought, I often had grass growing in these areas and nowhere else. That layer of hay on the ground keeps the soil cool and catches whatever rain does fall, so the grass only has to worry about growing.
I don’t know if any of that will work anywhere else, but it might be worth experimenting with letting your grass grow all summer or bale grazing on poor parts of the pasture.
From the length of my comment, maybe I wasn’t too far off in claiming I could write a book about droughts.