One of the things that people ask most commonly is “How do you get so much litter on the ground?” Good question and that is what I am going to talk about in this article. Before we get started let’s go over the advantages of what ground litter does for your grazing operation. First off, the more carbon that we can apply to our soil surface, the greater response we will see from our forage. Plant litter is the cheapest fertilizer that we have available to apply on a daily basis in our grazing operations.
I hear folks that have mistakenly put down large amounts of purchased chemical fertilizer to boost their pasture yields. This is one of the quickest ways to the destruction of pasture wealth and personal wealth that I know of. Not only are you killing your earthworms and soil microbes with the chemical fertilizer, but draining your pocketbook at the same time! A double edge sword stabbing you in two places at once.
I would much rather use natures natural fertilization process of trampling plant material that slowly feeds the soil microbes and builds new soil. Litter also protects your soil surface from all the weather elements that mother nature throws at it. Rain, heat, drought, moisture absorption and wind. Think of litter as natures “skin” that protects the soil surface.
I did not realize how much soil life was under the ground until I watched Dr. Pat Richardson’s video of soil microbes. She actually took a video with a 60X microscope lens of high microbial life soil taken from a pasture. My eyes about dropped out of my head when I saw all the animals cruising around. I could hardly stay in my seat. There was every imaginable beast that you could ever dream up living in that soil. The scene would have put Jurrasic Park to shame!
I saw a caterpillar looking beast that had around 30 legs on each side crawling along. About that time another beast jumped on it from an overhanging ledge and drove its fangs into the side of it. There was a death struggle, the beast won. There were other things that looked like Giraffes walking around. Some of the animals hopped around from one ledge to the next.
There was life everywhere! A lot of the animals were being eaten by predators of every configuration. This one film was an eye opening experience for me to say the least. Folks if we will make a home for these soil animals, they will come. Every one of those animals were soil builders working non stop without a union or a contract. They are working for their dinner, that’s it.
They are the interface between the litter and getting the litter incorporated into your soil as quickly as possible. All they need is a place to call home. Any chemicals that you put on your pasture or livestock kills all this soil life stone dead. First of all for a premier microbe diet, I think you need a mix of dead plants, manure and urine. This should be followed with a full plant recovery period. If all this mix is diced up with animal hooves complements of high density grazing, the recipe is just perfect for the microbial life to explode.
I came home with a renewed interest in building microbe food, vast amounts of soil litter is our focus from here on. Last year I wrote the article “Building Soil with Wasted Grass” and wanted to give you an update on what these pastures look like today. They have absolutely exploded with all different kinds of grasses and clovers. The pastures are so thick that you can hardly walk through them without lifting up your feet. The litter bank in the bottom of this canopy is being devoured by our soil microbes on a daily basis during the growing season.
One major difference that I saw this winter was how the grasses sealed the stockpiled forage from the freezing weather. The benefit of the intense sward of grass is that the sealed forage keeps the leaves green deep into the winter. Instead of feeding dry brown stockpile, the cows get some green forage all winter long. Our cows love it and perform wonderfully on it as well.
The best part of this process is that it takes no machinery to make this green stockpile or harvest it. What a gift to your cows to offer them some green leaves in the winter! The other thing that I noticed about the forage grown from our litter bank was how massive the root system is under the plants. In very rainy periods, we don’t get the pugging that we used to get. We have a tremendous sod in place holding them up during those periods.
Remember soil compaction is a function of time exposed to the mob. I used to worry about the mob destroying our pastures during these wet periods, not an issue if you move them. We have no sacrifice areas for rainy periods, move them faster.
Now I want to address the topic of how we grow the litter bank. Before we switched to Holistic High Density grazing we never had very much litter on our pastures. We were focused on keeping the plants vegetative. The livestock ate immature forage and there was very little plant material left for ground litter. Even if you took half the immature plant and left half, the material left was minimal at best.
With the Holistic grazing approach we are focused on grazing completely recovered plants with fully re-grown root systems under them. There is much more plant material available to the livestock with each grazing cycle. The livestock get to select out the best plants from what is offered that day. The clover is around 30 to 40 percent of the sward mixed in with the different grass species.
Our recovery periods used to average 40 days in the growing season and if we got in a drought, we could push it out to 60 days. The problem was that the plants were not recovered even with 60 days rest. The reason was the short roots under our grazed immature plants in the early growing season. Our recovery periods now can extend as long as 150 days in the summer months. The plants are never grazed until they have fully recovered.
We always have a tremendous amount of forage to work to add to our litter bank. I want to make sure that you understand what I am calling a good litter bank. Our present green material that is being trampled on a daily basis ranges from one half inch thick in the early spring to 2 inches thick during the summer grazing periods.
Starting out, my biggest concern with the 2 inch thick litter, was killing out the grass because it was a huge layer of mulch blocking the sunlight from the ground. Four weeks later my fears were put to rest. The clover plants and grass plants were exploding up through the new dry layer of ground litter. Over half of the litter was gone in four weeks from the earthworm feeding frenzy. There were miniature mountains of earthworm castings all over the top of the ground when you pulled back the ground litter.
Now that we have grown the litter ingredients how do we get them on the ground? If you can not get the material on the ground surface all you have is standing cellulose. You must get the litter on the ground for the microbial animal’s food fest. The best technique that we have found to work came from Ian Mitchell Innes from South Africa.
You hear a lot about paddock shape when designing your grazing cells. The more square the paddock is, the higher the utilization rate. We are not interested in higher utilization rate, we want higher trampling rate. So we now lay out our daily paddocks in rectangles. The longer the paddock the better trampling rate we get.
The mob travels back and forth from one end of the cell to the other picking out the succulent plants. In the process, the mob steps on a lot of the forage trampling it down on the ground surface. Once a plant is stepped on numerous times, the livestock will not eat it. The plant material is fouled and they do not like it. Your plant litter bank of fertilizer is in place for the microbial food hounds!
The other positive action that takes place with grazing mature forage is the plants are tall. Once the tall plant is bent over by the mob stepping on it, the stem is cracked which stops the flow of nutrients being fed to the plant from the roots. The plant turns brown and starts drying up. Multiply this action by the millions of leaves and stems that get the mob action on them daily. Instantly you have a litter smorgasbord. We are focusing on animal performance daily by giving them a fresh sward every 12 hours. By allowing the animals to select the best and trample the rest we are not compromising animal health.
Conclusions: Folks we have complete control over our grazing destiny with our natural pasture fertilization. Our pastures are getting better every year with no purchased inputs. Our costs are lower than they have ever been in our grazing operation. Our soils are healthier than ever before thanks to the microbial animals at work at our litter plate. You cannot beat Mother Nature’s fertilizer system, if you learn to work with her, she will reward you handsomely!
