Gabe New

John F Dean wrote:Here in the US there could be all sorts of legal knots.  Many farms cannot legally be sold due to wills, trusts, etc.   Great granddad might have thought that was a great idea. But here I sit on a farm that I have no interest in, it is failing, and I can’t sell it……or…more likely ….I can only sell to a blood relative.  

Put it in a trust and grant a 99 year lease.  

Spitballing, as I haven't done this; you might be able to make them unattractive by spraying garlic and Neem oil.  I'll be trying that this year as I have the same competition here.

Fred Morgan wrote:I can show you plenty of destroyed plantations down here due to people trying to have cattle with their trees.

You said earlier that where you are people simply turn them out and "forget about them". There's no management in that, so compare apples to apples in order to be fair. There's plenty of evidence that proves that trampling by cattle is wonderful for the soil... IF it's followed up by a rest period. If it's trampled under continuous grazing, then yes, it's terrible.

Matt, although I totally understand your desire, I second what the others have said. One other thing to consider is that the bull will eat what a cow could be eating. For the very small operator, it's best to AI or borrow.

I recently got my first Muscovies and love them... except that they aren't laying. I expected the move to interrupt any laying, but they've been here for one month and we only got two eggs the first week. They're in a mobile pen with free choice whole grains. Should I switch to a "complete laying pellet" for a while? I can't let them free roam for now.

Mob grazing is just one tool, it's not a year 'round plan,and with good reason because it's not the way ruminants behave all year. As to MIG not being sustainable, I'd love to hear why it isn't. Certainly, the way some people do it it isn't… but by definition it simply means that the management (not necessarily the grazing) is intensive. As such, you could be using Holistic Management in your grazing, so without hearing his speech anything else that I could say would just be arguing semantics out of context.

R Scott wrote:I think there is a market for the free choice minerals for small herds, I just don't know how to scale down the feeder price-wise.

It's not hard to build your own. If I can do it, almost anyone can.

Absolutely you should graze it, it will improve it if you do it right. Make sure that you get plenty of high density and fast moves, especially in the beginning. Fast because you don't want the cattle to be forced to graze stuff that may be bad for them and high density to knock down what they don't eat. High rainfall environments need the trampling in order to build up organic matter, just like deserts do.