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The Cheapest Hay Is the Hay You Never Buy *Additional management considerations for this article were provided by Kent Solberg, Understanding Ag, LLC Stockpiled Pasture Regenerative agriculture and adaptive grazing often focus on reducing inputs in an agriculture production system. Fall grazing stockpiled pasture.
For the past 40 years, our farm was in a hay, pasture and cereal grain rotation. Local practices included moldboard plowing to reseed perennial hay fields and as part of the plowing procedure, it is common to place drainage furrows with a plow on 30-60-feet centers. At first, I thought this was what I needed to do.
Since the 1940s , oats, wheat, hay, and pasture have been replaced by a duoculture of corn and soybeans. Farmers would often plow the cover under early in the spring before it could provide optimal soil health benefits, and USDA restrictions didn’t allow much flexibility.
From a distance, the field looked like it had been plowed. Obviously the disturbance, and then those deep tap rooted weeds, awakened the latent seed bank of timothy (some seeds no doubt had lain dormant for decades) and the conditions were perfect for that wonderful grass to express itself. The following year it was solid weeds.
While government schemes financially incentivize planting trees and other vegetation in order to capture carbon on fallow fields, farmers are also finding that native pasture and grasses are more resilient to drought and overgrazing.
From losing seed crops as wildfires rage for weeks, to losing entire crops as a result of erratic freezes, to losing farms as drought dries up available water, farmers’ risks are rising. CalCAN is a member of NSAC and played a part in developing the original version of the Agriculture Resilience Act.
Farmland itself was also once a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide as farmers cleared carbon-rich forests and plowed up prairie soils, releasing carbon from trees and the ground. Both warm the atmosphere far more, per molecule, than carbon dioxide. Now, climate-smart agriculture aims to recapture some of that carbon. “A 28, 2019. “But
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