Seeding Paddocks - What plants for forage?

It is my understanding with rotational grazing that you are allowing animals to graze down plants but giving them time to recover.

Assuming that there might be some timing issues to learn, I assume that you might need to seed some paddocks to restore them with good nutritious plants aimed towards whatever animals that you have. What are you favorite forage plants to grow?

Do you only seed once or do you routinely seed things in your paddock? Do you do it by hand or do you have a process?

Thanks for your thoughts.

I have chickens that I rotate between paddocks and am still learning when enough is enough in terms of grazing.

I have tried clovers with decent success, but the scratching tends to thin out the stands. I'm at the point where I'm planning on purchasing a cover crop mix and seeing how it tolerates the hens after it gets established. I am trying to remove some garlic mustard, creeping charlie, and a few other less prized plants at the same time.

What are some of your favorite forage plants?

My feeling is that this is thee best way overall to gain, regain pastures in the fashion that Mother
Earth always did it, does it.

Hydrating small and large areas of land.

 https://youtube.com/shorts/SsIBX-pE5TA?si=B6UzOIYJIKgkVICP  

This depends on many factors. I assume you want to grow forage for ruminants like cows or sheep.

You want plants that will grow a good yield of nice leafy biomass that stays leafy long enough for your animals to enjoy. You also want species and cultivars that will grow well in your climate and soil conditions.

A very important question to ask is do you want seeds that will:
A) grow perennial plants that are the final succession in your pasture, or
B) seeds that will help progress succession to what you want, and grow lots of tasty forage in the mean time.

I find people tend to pick A, but they do not take intake account the state their pasture is in and whether the perennials would do well. If the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio is very low aka very bacterial dominated soil, or low organic matter, compaction, low or high PH, any of these will cause typical perennial forages to struggle.

The best way to tell is by what's already growing there. If there are lots of weeds especially annuals like thistle, ragweed, pigweed, then it is likely an indication of soil conditions that are more optimal for weed-like annual forages than perennials. And these weeds are not necessarily bad! Cattle and sheep especially can gain a taste for them with enough exposure, and they can be nutritious in the right stage of growth. But it is important to see what is already growing as these will be an indicator of the soil conditions. A soil test will help to confirm.

If there are less than optimal conditions for perennial forages, I recommend growing robust annual forages that will produce a good yield of palatable biomass while moving soil conditions to what you want. You can even throw in some less palatable species that have benefits for the soil, just don't add much to avoid them taking over the pasture. To choose which seeds I highly recommend the SmartMix tool that can be found here: https://smartmix.greencoverseed.com/. It allows you to choose both your goals and growing conditions to choose a suitable seed mix.

Whether you grow weeds or introduce annuals simply letting them grow will do a lot to improve soil conditions and advance plant succession. After just a couple years of doing this you may even see conditions change enough that seeds in the latent soil seed bank will emerge and you may be very surprised by what comes up. Once you see this then it is a good time to consider which perennials you may want to seed.

Terry Byrne wrote:My feeling is that this is thee best way overall to gain, regain pastures in the fashion that Mother
Earth always did it, does it.
Hydrating small and large areas of land.
https://youtube.com/shorts/SsIBX-pE5TA?si=B6UzOIYJIKgkVICP

Thanks, Terry. Indeed, if you have streams and denivelations, the right way is to do all you can to keep this precious water on your property.
I'm in sandy flat ground mostly used for potatoes in Central Wisconsin. I've erected long piles of brush to stop the winds and capture snow as much as I can. I get a nice hollow between the 2 lines of brush piles but that's not enough to enrich the soil. Thank goodness, I have chickens and comfrey...

I have existing neglected pasture.  It ‘s primarily perennial grasses and prairie dog mounds, the local native asters and plenty of bare soil and thistles.  I’m am lucky to have a bit of irrigation water as well.

I plan to do pasture improvement.  I will be adding chicory, daikon radishes, legumes such as alfalfa, red clover, sanfoin and sweet clover.  I will add some other grasses, big blue stem for its deep roots, orchard grass and other cool season grasses, lesser amounts of warm season grasses.

Patches of day lilies, hollyhocks, some woody-shrubby plants like wild roses, elderberries, Maximilian sunflowers, grape vines.  I plant varying size patches, adding a fungi rich innocculant type mix like happy frog, a thin layer of compost and or straw, depending on what I have.  When I have scratched the surface and layered on everything, I water, then position pallets over it, to prevent birdie helpers from disturbing my work.

A few more thoughts:  for the places where annual weeds flourish, I collect the seeds off of a local weed called kochia and sow it on the ground.  It is a C4 plant which just goes crazy during hot weather.  It’s high protein, and goats love it.

When seeding something like alfalfa, with tiny seeds, planting a nurse crop like oats increases the survival of the alfalfa.  Oats germinate faster, have more resources in their bigger seed, grow up tall enough to shade and protect the alfalfa seedlings, maintain a higher humidity, protect from desiccating winds, and lessen the temperature extremes.

I try to include the pollinator friendly plants, the ones with tiny flowers. (parsley, sunflowers etc)  The parasitic wasps need them.

Bind weed is a favorite of my goats.  

Just a tiny bit off topic but not really too far.  Maybe everyone else already knows this.  I was thunderstruck when I first learned it, because once I was told, it seemed so obvious that I was surprised I hadn’t figured it out for myself:

When letting animals out on to a new paddock, or out for the day, wait until the plants have had time for a few hours of photosynthesis.  Sugars are utilized by the plant over night.  If you wait until 11 ish, your animals get a lot more nourishment per amount of plant eaten.  It’s true for ruminants, horses, chickens, probably every other plant eater!

If cutting hay, same thing!

Your own lettuce in your salad is probably sweeter if you pick it at noon than at 8 am.

I get rye "screenings" (small grains, weed seeds, chaff, etc) for almost no cost.  I broadcast them by hand in the poultry pens in the fall, no soil prep.  In the spring there is a lot of growth for the birds to eat, and generally I let the grain grow enough the some of it even makes seed heads before being eaten/trampled: this is the summer pasture for the ducks.  Winter pasture for the ducks is all the garden plants, as I use their other pen as a garden in the summer.

Pasture #1: Spring/Summer = Garden, Fall/Winter = "pasture"
Pasture #2: Spring/Summer = Rye "pasture", Fall/Winter = time for ground to rest, rye to grow
Video of the ducks getting access to the rye
https://youtube.com/shorts/sHafYoEuuUc?si=lOGe0jCFNH0ckd8K

I'm doing some trialing of different plants to see what establishes well in my pasture soil. I'm first experimenting with cover crops and advancing from there.

The mixtures I am most excited are as follows.

Plot one will contain triticale, peas, oats, vetch, rye, and crimson clover.

Plot two will contain forage kale, turnips, and beets.

Plot three will be straight up buckwheat. The soil is iffy on this plot so I'm going with something tried and true.

When we had our homestead we only had 10 acres with about 5 acres devoted to grazing for cattle so we never did rotational grazing.

We prefer coastal bermuda though I feel it has a lot to do with what part of the world a person lives in.

I like the plants that Timothy is experimenting with.

I wonder about experimenting in more grasses, especially the native grasses.

I've done paddock rotations starting last year with my goat/goose pen and my chicken/duck pen.  My plan this year is to overseed pasture forbs and grasses once the melting is done and to overseed lightly again when I close off a paddock.  The overseed mix I got is species specific for goats and one for chickens.  Come fall this year, I should know how well this plan worked.

Timothy Norton wrote:I have chickens that I rotate between paddocks and am still learning when enough is enough in terms of grazing.
I have tried clovers with decent success, but the scratching tends to thin out the stands. I'm at the point where I'm planning on purchasing a cover crop mix and seeing how it tolerates the hens after it gets established. I am trying to remove some garlic mustard, creeping charlie, and a few other less prized plants at the same time.
What are some of your favorite forage plants?

I think of my chickens as an army of Attila the hun: anything that is planted, they will scratch to death. I have noticed that they will not touch Agastache hyssop... if they can get something else. But they may still scratch it, just for the perverse pleasure of killing stuff! I swear!
Nepeta is another  they do not care for, so that's what they *don't* like so much. But it doesn't help.
They have an area where they really like to stay, and that area has no grass: they do a lot of dustbathing in it. They do have access to grass, tall, bunching Wisconsin grass (about 50+ft away) but if I want to give them clover, I would have to either grow it outside of their pasture or keep an area fenced where they cannot grow until it's good enough to forage.
I have done that before, and it kinda worked: The clover grew like crazy. tall lush green growth. Then I let them loose on it: It was gone in 2 days!
So to give them something green, I grow comfrey *outside* of their pasture. They also get all the weeds we pull from the garden. I don't have a bagging mower, only a mulch mower, or I would go once in a while and bag some grass. I have a Ryobi hedge trimmer that I'm thinking of putting in a frame so I can 'mow' what I plant in the pasture, then rake and give to them. It is that or buying a bagging mower, and that's just not in the budget now.
I have seen a system where you lay a frame on the ground and plant it but keep some sort of wire over it: they can pick what is sticking up above but they cannot scratch  the plants out of the ground. The wire has to stay 2 or 3" above the ground and be narrow enough that they can't claw at it.
That might be OK if you have a small area and not many chickens, but a large pasture isn't workable. I am thinking of making a few frames and just growing grass or clover (cut and come again type of vegetation).
My garden is at least 300 ft from the chicken yard (bad planning on my part), but I really would like to put all my "Attilas" in the garden at the end of the season to till, till, till. (Attilas, after all. Yeah. It's a lame joke)
I did have all my extra roosters (in a hoop house there, and it worked well but I didn't have enough roosters to really till the whole thing. They did a great job where they worked, though.
(I decided to incubate my own last year, and about 50% always come out roos, so)...
My girls do a great job in the orchard, eating the fallen fruit and cleaning close to the tree trunks at the end of the season. They are especially good around my 6 aronias, which were very bushy, so I really had a tough time cleaning around them. but my girls did a splendid job there.
To transfer them to a different part of your property, I've seen some hoop tunnels that I think might be workable, but if you have layers, be ready to either let them out later in the day or go egg hunting every afternoon.
Those are my solutions to keep them pastured and eating enough green stuff. It's still a work in progress and I hope to find better ways.

My paddocks are my back yard, side yard, barn yard, south lot, and cafe garden. Or more properly, I should say that my 508c1a spiritual nonprofit's land is used this way. I live in the middle of Wichita, KS, zone 7a and have gradually acquired 3 residential lots and adjacent commercial cafe building and garden lot on the edge of the 'hood' which made it more affordable. In my retirement, I plan to homestead this sanctuary of almost 1 acre and have community gardening and homestead workshops to feed myself and others. I have 2 dwarf Nigerian goats and 3 farm yard hens that are enough for me and this land. I graded my lots to manage water and am planting food forest and fodder as my landscape. I've landscape gardened professionally for 25 years and it seems that to fit in, in town, it's important to add color to my yard, keep easement fodders low or try to mow high, and group plantings with obvious pathways.

For the goats and hens, I have fenced off beds of various fruits, berries, herbs, veggies and flowers and open the fenced beds for controlled grazing. What ever grows out of the fencing is free for the eating. I'm learning about planting grains along bed edges so the animals have winter feed and have learned that they love purple winter creeper euonymus which is growing all over the city that I can prune and bring home. It's said to be toxic but they show no ill signs and Hilda's weepy eye actually cleared up. Other winter green forages that I've noticed they also love are arbor vitae, pine, bamboo, dames rocket, liriope, hardy peas and brassicas, some clovers, iris and star of Bethlehem. I pick up bags of tree leaves for them as well as buying hay which I'm trying to learn to grow for standing hay. It's amazing to watch them eat certain things at certain times of the year that they won't touch any other time.

In spring I plan to plant sedan, sunflowers, and amaranth around the sunny south lot while the fruit trees and berries get added over time. They like green seed heads of milo too. I plant mostly for the goats but I've noticed that the chickens really like green Dutch white clover and Bermuda grass seeds. I'm using the self seeding trees to pollard at a little higher than goat height for fodder and screening around the property lines. They love mulberry, hackberry, pear, and the wild grape leaves.

Take a good look at the native vegetation in the area, before settlement nature decided for us what plants and where. I have read that you will be hard pressed to do better on a net energy basis than the native vegetation. Too many inputs used in all of the annual reseeding, some perennial and native vegetation will save the day. Also, drought tolerance is part of the equation, in my part of the world, deep rooted prairie plants survived the 1930's.

This is not to say the paddocks must be entirely native, some additional species may benefit the entire growing season. In Australia they intercrop wheat into their warm season pastures. The wheat grows when the grasses are dormant, the wheat is harvested making way for the native grass. Keep a living root for as long as possible for maximum soil improvement. A mix of cool season and warm season grasses is a must for season long grazing.