first steps in restoring a pasture

One of our pastures (about an acre) is in sad shape and we'd like to restore it. I'm just starting to learn about things like no-till farming (seems awesome), and cover crops and such, lots to learn.

But at this point this pasture has a bunch of windrow-ed, unusable-as-hay, hay on it. So I'm wondering what to do with this hay as a first step. It's very dry. Some options I'm considering:

- collect it for composting
- cutting it up with a rotary cutter then leaving it for whatever cover crop(s) I plant.
- leaving it long (1' to 2'), and leaving it for whatever cover crops..

thoughts?

Here is a video on pasture repair.
I use a spiked roller to break up soil and open the surface for air and water.
The video speaks of similar techniques .

Thanks for the link, I got a couple of good ideas from it.

But I'm still uncertain about what to do with the windrow-ed hay that's sitting on the pasture now?

It would be great if I could just chop it up in place and call it "soil armor"

That would be the easiest answer for me, I just don't know whether it would work when we go to plant cover crops?

I'd lean toward the chopping it up in place option but really, do you know what species it is;  anything desireable?   Any seed heads in there in large quantities of stuff you definitely do NOT want?   What's your time frame?   Do you plan to fall or spring reseed..  overseeding?    

So many options.   Is your goal to put animals on this pasture in the near or far future?    Sheep/goats would eat and appreciate different natives I think than cows/horses.  

:)  

Id say the windrows are 90% the grass / hay we DO want. A few weeds. We'd hoped to hay it, and before we cut it for haying we took out most of the weeds.

We hope to do a fall, cover crop planting. We're researching what cover crops would be okay for horses to do some limited grazing on. Once the pasture is healthy again, we plan to do limited "strip grazing" with our horses, and if we manage that correctly, we'd like to hay it. The haying isn't essential, if all we can do is limited grazing, we can do that.

In the Spring and early summer, the horses can't graze. The grass is too sweet and rich to be healthy for them. During those times, they have to eat hay. But in the late Summer, Fall, and Winter, we like to let them graze when possible. We're under the impression that it's okay to let horses do limited grazing on hay fields, but we're open to other ideas