ROTATIONAL GRAZING - HOW WE DO IT 

Thanks Stephen! Glad you enjoyed it. Hoping to do more grazing based videos this spring. 👍

He is pretty clever yes Keith! My grandad, his dad, suffered with arthritis really badly and therefore dad always been the thinker and designer etc. He’s done a lot of projects in his time!

@@baldysfarm Let's hope you have inherited the same important skills!!

She lives on the scraper now however I have vowed to restore it to its former glory at some point! How times have changed!

Thanks rob.

Yeh you certainly can, you can always shut up a block that you intend to mow and they return it to the rotations once you have some aftermath to graze.

It’s tough when you get started. We now measure the grass and can allocate it accordingly however originally it was all by eye. The main thing in my eyes is to not graze it too hard before moving to the next paddock. Leaving a longer residual is better than overgrazing. Where are you based!? We are hoping to start a grazing group and have some on farm meeting to promote and educate about rotational grazing.

@@baldysfarm Thanks for your response, very helpful! I farm in Shropshire and would definitely be interested in that. Keen to learn more about it.

Thanks James, great to hear from you. Love spending time in wales whenever I get chance! The herbal leys have been a big change but they are really helping now we understand more about them. They are slower to establish but they are the only thing that grows when it’s dry and they are a higher quality forage for the cows. The plan is to use more herbal leys but keep them down longer (3-4years) and rotate them around the arable land to help improve it. We will also reseed older unproductive pastures with herbal leys too.

Thank you 👍 We never dose cattle out at grass as the worm burden tends to be non existent although we do still take muck samples to test for worms regularly. If we did have to do anything dosing etc, we are able to run the cattle back to the yard or use cattle hurdles to create a pen. As far as stock piling paddocks, we tend to run our cattle in bulling groups so struggle to be able to move extra animals in and out of groups. It’s a good idea though and something worth considering. Thanks for the comment. 👍

Hi Michael, Unfortunately we don't have a lot of access to the type of native meadows your on about. We do have so old meadow land that we graze in the same way as this, as well as some wetland. Its great for the wildlife as it allows a faster recovery and is far less invasive. The field we are grazing the cattle in on this video is a GS4 Herb rich sward which is planted on ground that has historically been arable farmed. It is very diverse with a wide array of rooting depths as well as fibrous roots to improve friability. We now rotate Herbal leys throughout our arable rotation in order to improve soil and integrate livestock within the system.