posted 5 years ago
Hi B. Hicks,
If the grass is past boot, or the forage is in the reproductive stage: the protien content and digestible fiber has dropped drastically in most forages. Dairy cows typically need quality forage, so depending on the variety of grasses, plus how much precipitation you will continue to get this time of year, could also determine if your grass will even regrow once mowed.
These are things worth looking into, the types of forage growing in your pasture. As a good mix of warm and cool season growing grasses, with a good mix of annual and perennial legumes, that will also grow in the warm and cool seasons: will help keep your pastures providing quality forage, almost year round depending on seasonal conditions.
With 8 acers to graze, you will definitely need more then 2 cows, to help keep your pastures from over growing. Don't get me wrong, it's good to let a pasture rest and drop lots of seed every few years, also providing a good mulch layer. This can help prevent some quality forages from being grazed out of your pastures. But with that much land, it would probably be beneficial to use a mobile electric netting, doing smaller paddocks of daily mob grazing. Running laying hens 4 days behind your dairy cows, will help spread the manure piles, and eat the fly larvea before they hatch. This keeps the flies down drastically. Then if you were willing to get a good variety of paricite resistant Hair Sheep, like St. Crox, you could use them as a dead end paracite trap, by grazing them 3 to 4 weeks behind your dairy cows in mob rotation. This will help reduce feild maintenence by evenly grazing, give better pasture utilization, help keep your grass in its nutritional prime, and with the two unrelated ruminoids acting as dead end paricite traps for each other, it will reduce paricite problems.
A good permaculture breed of dairy cow, that are a heritage breed, do well on all grass forage, and are just generally tough, is the Devon breed of dairy cow. They are a horned varietie, if thats a concern, but they are very docile for cows.
Hope that helps!