 So I'm Leslie Hodgson and along with my husband Brad Hodgson, we have a farm in southeastern Minnesota, Fillmore County. It's hilly and we bought the farm in 98 and it was all row crops. It was November when we looked at it so it was just plowed up ground and a lot of clay showing on top of all the knobs. And we got a livestock loan through Heifer International and got ourselves started with some purebred Galways, a small herd of cows that came with their calves. And we started on our journey of turning all those plowed fields into perennial grass which was helped along by a few of the hay fields. We had rented for a few years and then we would keep, every time the renter would be willing we'd get one of the hay fields back from him and then that would become a pasture. And two years into it we established some big bluestem. I was real interested in getting some native grass going and I had come across a book at the University of Minnesota, Prairie Plants and Their Environment by J. E. Weaver. It was a fellow that did a bunch of research in Nebraska like back in the 60s and he had done all those monoliths with the roots that went on forever. It's a really amazing little book if you like looking at root systems of prairie plants and so we got a corn field, this was the corn field and this was the bean field out in front of the house and we rented a true axe drill from the soil and water office and we sourced some local genotype seed feeling that that would be the most appropriate way to go if that seed belonged there, that's what we wanted to use. And then after we seeded it in the spring we mowed it early summer, it had a lot of weed competition and then a few years later we burned it and then we burned it again a few years after that because the first year we didn't have enough duff to really get it to burn well and then we've left it and then we've hated it a few times, it makes beautiful hay. We really liked the hay but it grazes nice too so now we have that quandary. And we had this question in our heads about grazing it early in the season before it comes out of dormancy because now there's a lot of cool season invaders coming in. So we had the idea about grazing it early in the spring ahead of it coming out of dormancy and we wanted to let the cool seasons get up as much as they possibly can and then go in there and graze them and knock them back so that when the blue stem comes out of dormancy it's just got that much more of an advantage. And so we wrote up a grant proposal and Sarah gave us the grant to go ahead and do some studying about how this would go. So that was nice and this was a lot of fun. So in 2011, 12 and 13 we went out there in late, late April, usually the early part of May and we would graze it. Well so what we did, there's the perimeter of the fields and now we've got two, we installed two interior one wire fences that we can hook our polywires across to. And this is our control area that I guess I'll cover again in a later slide but that's the one we did not graze. So when we subdivide it and start coming through it, you know, we do it like that. So we just run across with the polywires and hook them to that other wire and we have spring gates at the ends. So when we first put the cows out there, they had been eating hay. They really hadn't been grazing yet but they stood around and wondered if we'd made a big mistake and put them in the rock pasture. So they stood around until they got hungry enough to start looking around. You wouldn't think at first there's much out there, but there is. And they sort of had to make an adjustment to getting them all full of that dead grass. They kind of wanted to at first just go pick for every little bit of green they could get and just not get the dead grass but they started to see that in order to get anything much to eat. They were going to have to eat it both all at once. These are the type of, I'm going to call them weeds. You know, they're not all weeds, some of them, for lack of a better word. They're just, they're invading and we don't really want that much of them in there. So this is what the cows had to eat when they went out there. So we had, we've got one called wild parsnip. I don't know if you guys have it out here but it'll burn your skin and it's, it is a wild parsnip. We have Canada Goldenrod, a lot of asters, many types of asters seems like. We have aspen saplings, Canadian thistles, red, white clover, lots of dandelions, a crown vetch which is a real pesky one, lots of Kentucky bluegrass but mostly the Canada Goldenrod and Kentucky bluegrass coming around into the paddocks we were measuring. This is about how it looked the first year we went through so we'd say we came in on a Friday and then, so we get in here on Saturday and then we realize there's not that much to eat in there. Gaging how long they could stay in these paddocks was a little difficult because they're so hard to tell what you can actually see buried in all that grass. So we'd come along and move them, you know, first we're 63 feet, so we can give them more, so we give them 75 feet and then, well, now we're running into the control so then they only had 47 feet so then, you know, but so you just adjust it and keep checking and see how it goes. So it took about five, five and a half days to get 16 cows through that two and a half acres of what looks like dead grass. So I think the water, they run along, the water line runs along those two interior fences. So we've installed that black three-quarter inch water line and then periodically I'm thinking around these red dots, that's probably what those are. We've got a break in the line, a Pat Plassen valve so you can pop your hose into that and then throw a tank right there. I feel like that third paddock has no dot. Yep, exactly. Fifty hundred foot hose depending on what you want to do. 16 of them, 16 or 17, pretty much for this experiment. So that's the same 16. We've come around the corner, we're about in the middle of the south end and they're on the paddock and we got some rain that night and there was a couple of heifers in heat so there was a lot of milling and pushing and shoving going on all night and this is how well they mixed all that dead grass in with the soil, which is what we want. You know, it's the same stuff that you burn but we really like the idea of getting it all incorporated and this farm is real low on organic matter so anytime we can turn it down into the topsoil we're happy about it. So that's what it looked like before they went on. That's just them finding their grass. She's got some dead grass there. It seems to be a good balanced diet. They're happy out there. Here's probably the most elder cows on the longest little bit of grass in that paddock. They immediately find that and figure out who's going to get it. What time of the year was this? Like first week in May. Actually, elder berries. We have those here and there. Not that we were necessarily trying to get them out of there but they took a few leaves off of them. Here they're pretty well-leaved. Here they must have nibbled some here and there. They really didn't do much to the elder berries but they did a beautiful job of getting all the quack and Kentucky bluegrass out from under them, I would say. So May 3rd is when we were in the middle of that. We learned that your timing isn't necessarily dependent on the calendar. And so I like doing things like keeping a memory of photographs, a lot of photographs of, you know, that the trees were just starting to leaf out. So the aspens at the pond were leafing out last time we were out there. Those phenology is a hobby that some people are pretty good at. So we just don't go by the calendar. We go by the ground. So now we've finished the flat slope and we're moving on to a south slope which warms up quicker and it's predominantly Kentucky bluegrass in there with the blue stem. The broadleafs are not anywhere near as pervasive. So there's the girls eating some more and they're really quite content. So they're getting enough to eat and they're happy. There's just halfway across. I like these pictures with the brown and the green contrast. That's just them. This is what we wanted them to do was clean out all the grass, all the cool season. You can see again just how well they do getting all that. And that's fine grass and they just get it all out of there. Here they've come along the far edge of the woods. There was goldenrod all here. Now that's a species that they did not eat the first couple years out. But as an aspect of this, the first year they weren't all that interested in eating strange weeds. They ate the dandelions pretty readily but the goldenrod they pretty much didn't eat it but as the years progressed they did. They started to eat it and they went as far as one greedier cow that we have got so good at eating goldenrod. We came into this paddock and I watched her come right along. She prioritized this right along this edge. She came right along, shoved her head between the water tank and the hot wire and cleaned out all the goldenrod from behind there and kept right on going. She was going for the biggest leaf first, I guess, looking at survival. We finished up. We've hit the west end of that pasture and now we can go on to our cool season pastures but they've also had a little more chance to get growth on them. This crown vetch is a real problematic weed. We got it in our, well we suspect we got it in our blue stem seed because the place we got it from also does a lot of highway department stuff and we think maybe just as much as one seed of that was in there and it's very early, it's very aggressive, it's leafy but it's very palatable. So that worked in our favor, eventually. So here's what this patch of crown vetch has spread to be like. It's a legume and then after it's been reduced to one pile they just love it. But it does grow back again shortly after they do that in May. We had a collaborator work with us, Howard Mechnick. He's a long time grazing specialist and then he's retired and he's gone on to doing it for consulting and he's helped us with some of our other pastures getting them in better shape and things. So we asked him to help us. He knew how to set up experiments better than we did and he knew his plant identification and so we liked having him help us with the details that way. So he came out and we set up, we walked around and decided the best place to set it up. So here's where we set the control and then right next to the control then is where the other comparison measurement was done. The transects are designed on the eight points of the compass. He put one steel T-post in the middle of each one and then the fiberglass posts out here at the eight points. Surprisingly the cows never, the posts stayed put through the whole thing. They would get tipped in that but they stayed put so that worked well. Okay so then when he's going to identify plants in these areas that's done at a one foot interval all along these tapes as they're pulled out. Let's see. So there's the work that's done when you want to record every single plant that's out in your pasture growing at one foot intervals and that takes patience and it takes a scientific mind. Howard transferred that work on to spreadsheets. He also did this clipping where he would clip it, dry it, separate it by species, weigh them so that you could get an idea of what your yield per acre theoretically would have been. Obviously you're only three by three so you're extrapolating that little three by three into acre numbers so there's room for error I guess. We have plenty of different plants for a person to survey along the tape. There's at least six of them here out in our blue stem. This one, that's that mullin. That one's black eyed susan. This looks like bee balm. I don't, monarda. That's an aspen tree. And this is the, we have a lot of these three or four species of these pesky asters so this is probably like a heath aster or some type of an aster. A lot of goldenrod and the occasional really big thistle. Howard found one that he determined he had a hard time identifying it but after some research he came to the conclusion that it was a plat thistle. He felt it was a native thistle so here's some of the data but I'm going to look at, the transact data, this would be counting the plants. The one I'm most interested in is the big blue stem. I guess my big blue stem, goldenrod and Kentucky bluegrass are probably the three that I'm most interested in. In the ungrazed area on the left the Kentucky bluegrass did well and doubled. The big blue stem was shown to have actually declined a little bit in the ungrazed area. Indian grass, who's to say, I mean it went from 12 to 52 to 10. So my guess is it's still around 10. In the grazed area he didn't count any Kentucky bluegrass at the end and the big blue stem did go up slightly in the grazed area and so did Indian grass. Indian grass came in somewhere along the line. We had over seeded one fall and then with some more of the blue stem seed and suddenly we got some Indian grass showing up. So that was the planting plant count. Now this is the clipping and weighing where what... In the control big blue stem went down. So it didn't do well just to sit there with being left alone. Kentucky bluegrass went up. Goldenrod went down. But what I'm really happy about is in the grazed area the blue stem almost doubled. So the blue stem really responded favorably to the mixing of the soil in the spring and the tillering and the manure and the urine and all of that it really responded well. And we've also seen it just walking around the difference between where a cow patty had landed and over here and the grasses literally twice the height and that's what the research also showed. So the blue stem responded very well to grazing. I think when we bought the seed everybody told us well you can't really graze it and it's touchy and it's this and it's that and yeah our helper said he'd never do it you know but I'm glad we did. So Goldenrod also, oh yeah, the other bright spot since I was successful at training my cows to eat Goldenrod which was partly really a mission of mine it's gone out of there and actually there's another area outside of our experiment where we put them in say late July and there was all kinds of Goldenrod in there and I wondered, well I figured they wouldn't touch it it was already just starting to be in boot say and they ate it all. They were eating mature gold or nearly mature Goldenrod also. So the conclusions are the grazing is thickening the stand of blue stem and the Indian grass along with it Canada Goldenrod declined in the grazed versus the control. Kentucky bluegrass did well either way no grazing pressure on the crown Vetch was allowing it to continue its spread and the broadcast seeding of oh we also part of our experiment was to broadcast seed some legume seeds and they native legumes we did purple prairie clover and an Illinois bundle flower thinking that I could broadcast them and then we could trample it all and they would germinate and we never saw any trace of any of those plants ever germinating yet I did test them when I got the seed same time I broadcast them I planted them and they germinated beautifully so it was not the seed was good. Well that would have been eleven yeah at the beginning yeah before we ever went out there the first time we broadcast that seed and I sure thought that it would work and it didn't this is just we blue stem in general we really like it it's a neat grass it's fun to go out there and have a seed head that's as tall as you can reach it's fun to walk through grass that you're just looking straight ahead into things like that sometimes it gets tangled up in your fence reel though so it's it's not all you know our heifers love it they graze they pig out and they lay down and take a nap um this is you know the area that was muddied up in that earlier slide you might think that that was a bad idea but she's in there grazing the blue stem that grew up later this is like a July shot now so that's what grows up later and that grass is over forty eight inches tall it's just it's just really neat you go out there and it's like this I put the polywire up and then I have to walk down a trail so that as the cows come across they can see that wire in there and calves like it a lot because they like to hide so there's one there and there's one there and I don't know if there's any more in there seems like I would have got more than two but so they like it and that's the end of our presentation he wanted to know how many times per season we do graze it and we go in in July late July and graze it once you could maybe go back in September but I'm thinking it might be pushing it a little bit much depending on how hard you'd want to oh it's really neat I mean they just go in they walk through and they take it to about 12-14 inches that picture of the heifers laying there that's a good example 12-14 inches and again like a lot of the NRCS people or whatever they'll say stuff like 6 and 8 but if you were 6 and 8 you'd be so far down past the first growing point so that's where they clip it off to and it's just like a good height 2 and a half just just 5 and a quarter we had 5 and a quarter total acres mm-hmm well we were only using 16 cows and at 16 cows in those little paddocks if anybody follows the density or the we were between 100,000 and 180,000 pounds per acre animal pressure when we went through there they did go down but there was also a note that Howard felt that some of these smaller forbes like those out there was not very many to start with there was only like 4 or 5 on the count he felt that the smaller forbes were just there present in such small numbers it was a little hard to determine actually we went to a third year usually these are two year projects and we asked for an extension and did a third year to try and get a better idea this kind of thing could probably be a better for a 10 year study so I believe in the May we were out there about 10 days to get across it and then I looked at a note and back in July again we went across it thought it said 18 days and then there was almost a note like we had stuck somebody else in there for 3, 4, 5 days so probably close to 30 days yeah and yeah we used it we had two years of drought in here 12 and 13 were both real bad drought at our place but the 2012 ran through July it was the perfect time to use that you'd never known there was a drought out in that stuff it was just beautiful and lush and thick and we depended on it and we really like the grass a lot and I haven't really ever calculated yet like what you're asking what its holding capacity is when we were not on the blue stem then where we are is on a bunch of cool season pastures around the farm orchard grass clover we have a group of bulls too usually on another part of the farm but to go out, just this for example I guess to go out and move them move their water tank, move them that's probably about a 45 minute thing and that's me walking around probably scratching everybody and checking, I'm checking them so it's not too bad that's a small group, now you get into longer areas that takes more time maybe it's more of an hour if you have a bigger group but once a day moving well, that's what we try to do yeah, I like moving them once a day in the afternoon just on a regular basis but this, we did have we moved them more than once a day because here we were trying we could not guess at first how much feed they were going to have sending them out on what looked like a bunch of dead grass did you figure out that? yes, and some paddocks had a lot more than others, there had been a waterway running through that field that one we planted, it always came up with all kinds of quack grass and bromine stuff