Green Machine Farm

It must be farm-walk season here in the midwest because we just went to another one last night.  This one was put on by the Boone County NRCS office, and held at the Martz Farm (they don’t have a website, so the map will have to do).

The Martz farm was a bit more of your typical NRCS-endorsed Management Intensive Grazing (MIG) operation.  This is very much the type of management that was taught at the NRCS grazing school that my dad & I attended earlier this year.

The whole thing kicked off with a dinner provided by NRCS. Fred Martz then got up to say a few words about his farm, and then continued to say a few words for the next half hour. We quickly figured out we were in for a long evening because he’s a talker.

We then loaded up on the 3 trailers and headed off for the tour.

First stop: sheep.
All the ewes had been brought up by their barn for some reason. They have around 100 head of Katahdin hair sheep which are all grassfed and grass-finished. There’s an LGD (a Pyrenees) in there if you look real close.
I was pretty amazed that a farm that large (450 acres) was that close to the city limits. I could tell just by some of the plants growing (bush honeysuckle, trumpetcreeper & redbud) that we were close to a city.

Next up were the finishing cattle. These three were the remaining finishers for the spring.

Not bad looking, for angus (I’m not a giant fan of the breed). They weren’t fattened out completely yet, but they were getting there. Fred Martz explained that they have trouble finishing cattle on pasture, so they supplement 6-8lbs of corn per head per day to fatten them up.

While he probably has a valid point given the likelihood of endophyte-infested fescue in his fescue-dominated pastures, it does illustrate one of the differences in the MIG approach versus the Mob-Grazing/Holistic management approach.
Did I mention that we just happened to run into Greg Judy and his interns and several folks from the Green Hills Farm Project there?
It made for some interesting commentary.

Anyway, the tour continued, on past a few sheep that hadn’t made it to the barn. They were without the protection of a guard-dog, but they did have a guard-llama.

As the tour wound on we stopped out by their best paddock, paddock 12 (of 40!) where Fred explained their nutrient-management program.

Their paddocks do get some occasional commercial fertilizer and lime as recommended by soil tests. Again, this is pretty much by-the-book NRCS MIG practice.

The last stop on the tour was the spring-calving brood herd. They run two separate herds, one spring and one fall-calving. These cows were currently calving, with several replacement heifers in the mix as well. Their red angus bull was in with them.

Fred explained that they were in the process of switching over to red angus to get more heat-tolerance. They apparently use AI sires for a handful of cows every year, with one bull in to make sure everyone else gets bred. He also said that they’d had some trouble with conception rates, so had started feeding corn to their breeding cows to get their conception rates back up where they needed to be.

There were a couple of cows, the one on the far right in particular who were damn spooky. They were transfixed with two little girls in the crowd, and it’s a good thing the little girls weren’t being too loud or active, as those cows might have ended up in another paddock.

Yesterday was one of the first farm walks of the 2012 for the Green Hills Farm Project. Since I haven’t yet turned down a chance to go see Greg Judy’s Farm, I wasn’t about to miss it.

The farm walk started out like most of the Green Hills gatherings do, with a big potluck dinner.  But after an hour or so of eating, enjoying the weather and chatting with all the other farmers, it was time for the main event.

We all piled in our vehicles, and made a caravan down the road to the leased farm where the cattle were grazing for the week.

There in the foreground is the fresh allotment of pasture, with the previous day’s pasture behind them. The pastures weren’t backfenced, as they are moved off before the cows get hungry enough to go back and hit the regrowth.
As you can see, that’s some pretty good looking fescue pasture, especially given that we haven’t had any rain in 5 weeks.

Greg pointed out a few individuals from the herd. This cow is fairly young, and right around the size he said he’s aiming for with his herd. She looked to be about 1000lbs and in very nice condition.

This, on the other hand, is 136, the cow that Greg said he’d had the longest. One of the only of his remaining red angus from his first herd. He estimated was 13 years old, and she had a bigger frame than the other cows in the group.

We then sauntered over to have a look at the mineral feeder.
It’s made of what look to be 2×12′s with 4×4 runners underneath and it’s all covered by this big rubber flap.

Inside, every mineral has it’s own compartment, so the cows choose what minerals they need.

Interestingly he (and several other farmers there) had all recently started offering straight phosphorus to their cattle with the rest of their minerals.

After much discussion of soil pH and after many refractometer readings it was time for the people herd to move on to their next pasture.

Down a few more gravel roads we came to Greg’s newest lease, a scrubby piece of land that he was currently grazing his sheep on. Immediately upon arriving we were greeted with much barking from the Guard Dogs.

Greg explained that the scrubby look was a big improvement from the cottonwood grove that had been growing in this pasture several years ago. They cut down most of the trees, and the sheep kept the trees from growing back by browsing on any new growth.

We all then met “Friendly Ewe” a Barbados Black Belly sheep who was evidently someone’s bottle lamb. She is the “Lead Sheep” of the group, first up to follow a human to a new pasture.

After a lot more discussion of raising and losing sheep “If you’ve got livestock, you’ve got deadstock.” it was time to head back to the house for a drink of water and some dessert.

You can always learn a lot from Greg Judy, and you can always learn a lot from all the other old-timers who are in the Green Hills Farm Project. Get them all together in one place, and it’s quite a time.