Benedict Bosco

Sam Potter wrote:So electric has a good chance but not a 100 percent chance of keeping them in. Il take your advice and run electric on the inside but not as my main on the outside. I had to go take a proper look to see what it currently is. It is 4 foot woven cattle fencing with some loose barb wire that will need removed. I plan on getting the sheep in the spring. And the grass has all gone to seed. Is it better if I mow that now in the fall or in the spring? I did goats as a way to clear brush so the pasture care is new to me.

Yes, electric is a psychological barrier, not a physical one. It only works if they don't think they can/want to go through it. You'll want to train them to it before expecting them to be contained by it. Sounds like that fence is good, and removing the barbed wire is also good.

As far as mowing - you wouldn't _have_ to mow it at all. The winter will break some of it down and they'll eat or trample most of what's left. If you do want to mow, I guess I'd go for the doing it now, so you get the old stuff started decomposing over the winter and you don't disturb the new growth in the spring with the mowing. By the time things have dried out enough to mow in the spring, you'd probably end up cutting a decent amount of new growth.

This year I decided to mow the pasture mid-summer after they'd been through a couple times, to knock down the stuff that they weren't eating as well. It wasn't a lot to cut, but it leveled things out and pushed the less palatable stuff back down to the same level as stuff that had been grazed.

Honestly, pasture care is an art form; there's many ways to do it and always more to learn. If you don't already, I'd recommend getting a subscription to the Stockman Grass Farmer...lots of good stuff in there about pasture management.

Where are you located? Your local weather and pasture conditions will dictate your stocking rate. They should be similar to goats, and roughly 5:1 compared to cattle.

They aren't hard on fences in my experience. I run 4' woven wire on the perimeter, which is probably overkill but I may get into larger animals and I'm not taking chances on them escaping. Internally, I rotate them with 2 hot wires, which usually works but it depends on the individual animal. I had to rehome an ewe that decided she didn't care about the electric fence anymore. Last winter I had them in the garden with electric on the front and 4' chicken wire on the back, and the only escapes were through the electric.

If they have enough to eat where they're at, they don't take much to contain. If they get hungry, the fencing needs go up. Trying to keep them on hay in the spring as things start to green up but before you want them out is challenging.

I have friends with Icelandics that have (iirc) 5 or 6 strand high tensile that isn't electric, which mostly works but they do get out once in a while. If it was electrified I'd expect they'd stay in pretty well.

Pay attention to your gates (and fences) when you have lambs, they are much more prone to wandering off and slipping through smaller gaps that normally aren't a problem.

I raise Icelandics, and they do browse, but they prefer whatever is greenest and most palatable, which is usually grass and leaves, and won’t eat much for stems (they just strip the leaves, and eventually the bark). My concern with trying to focus on browse for a long term feedstock would be regeneration. How quickly do the plants/trees/shrubs recover after a grazing event? Grass by nature recovers fast and is therefore an ideal feed; I suspect you would need a very extensive area to browse for it to be sustainable.

Richard Rios wrote:I also don’t want to go through a huge process to clean it for that machine. Am I able to skip the cleaning process and shred it? And if I shred it, will I be able to apply it straight to the soil, or do I need to make it into pellets?

I've looked into the pelleting a bit, both into having it done (there are a few people near-ish to me that do it) and buying the equipment myself (not cheap). As far as your questions - the only cleaning you need to do is to make sure it's free of rocks and sticks (likely debris from shearing), and large manure tags. Beyond that, it just goes straight through the shredder. The people who are shredding sell it both as shreds (for mulch) and pellets (for mixing into soil in lieu of peat moss), so how processed you need it really depends on how you want to apply it.

I've not had great success with applying the raw fleeces as mulch - it works for a bit, but once the weeds break through weeding is a bear, because it roots into the wool, which is still bound to itself, so pulling stuff up is pulling an entire mat. I want to try the shredded option and see if that works better.

If your fence doesn’t hold water it won’t hold goats…so the saying goes. You will need good fences. Half an acre of grass and forbs should be enough for a couple goats in a temperate climate, but you’ll need to set up housing for them and probably store hay for the winter. Just be aware that milking animals need a good food supply or they will languish or dry up.

As to the forest, it all depends on management. Look up silvopasture. Steve Gabriel has a good book on the subject, but I don’t think he was fond of goats.

No opinion on the eternal value of goats. However, I will point out that there are also dairy sheep that might work well for small scale dairy. (East Friesian for example, or some lines of Icelandics)

If you keep an eye on the Eau Claire Craigslist, there’s a guy in Fall Creek that usually has some for sale. I got some from him a couple years ago.

We keep a quart mason jar of starter around with ~300g of starter at 100% hydration. That's enough to feed whatever it is we're making (usually ~200g starter in any given recipe). We feed twice a day (100g flour + 100g water) when it's out. If we're not going to be baking for a few days we put it in the fridge, making sure to take it out and feed it once or twice before baking. We've found enough things to make with it (waffles especially, as well as pizza crust, cakes and pancakes and english muffins) that we don't usually have to compost much of it. It is definitely happier out and being fed; extended stays in the fridge (weeks) really slow it down, but unless it's getting nasty it will usually recover after a few feedings.

We keep a small jar of dried flakes from the bread mixing bowl in the freezer to help jump-start a new starter if something happens to ours; once in a while it's left too long, and we've had the starter jar get broken at least once...

Were you able to get him back?

Dave Lucey wrote:I also remove any rumen-protected PUFAs from supplements since I learned, the hard way, that it causes gender skew in the lambs.  (I got 70% rams for years due to that.  Honestly, I removed them entirely since then.)

Can you elaborate on this? What kind of supplements? What are PUFAs?

Disclaimer: I've only ever worked with a small flock of sheep on their own, and haven't worked with cows yet, so take what I say with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

I'd talk to the neighbor. I suspect your success will be very limited on open pasture, unless you or someone you know has a really good working dog; you will probably have to work with the neighbor to retrieve the ram while the cattle are confined to a smaller corral, either for working or transport. Running the cattle through a chute and pulling the ram out when he comes by seems like the most likely possibility to me.

Another possibility would be treats - does the ram respond to a bucket of alfalfa pellets or something? You could try to lure him to a treat bucket and grab him, but I suspect the cows will be just as interested in whatever it is, and make life difficult.

Good luck!