Maintenance Crew: Cattle and Goats Grazing Internal Roads & Ditches
Despite all the lush forage this time of year, this week we gave both the goats and the cattle access to internal roads and ditches for some brush maintenance and lawn mowing!
The majority of our farm land is a failed post-Katrina subdivision. Before Katrina, it had been row cropped for decades and after, it was subdivided into 1-2 acre lots and an internal road was put in with all the proper ditch and drainage work. There is even a cul-de-sac at the end of the road.
About 11 houses were built in the subdivision, but all of them are off the blacktop road and two lane highway, none on the internal road. And after the second developer gave up on it, it was never paved. The road and the drainage work done to build it have actually come in extremely handy as much of the land is fairly low, so we often cannot drive equipment into the fields. Being able to have many access points off the internal road makes daily work like collecting eggs much easier.
We also keep a hedge row along the field side of the road to wildlife habitat and shade. Therefore, the land outside of the internal fence in each pasture constitutes several acres!
And because of that, we periodic graze the goats and now the cattle, too, in these road and ditch paddocks.
The goats’ main purpose with this is to eat the brush and fences and help things from becoming too unwieldy. They’re part of our maintenance crew, essentially!
But the cattle tend to favor more grasses, so what is the point of letting them graze in the internal road paddocks?
Well, we want all of our soil to improve to increase its water holding capacity, reduce runoff and even sequester more carbon. So there is no reason not to have the cattle graze and drop manure on the road to help begin to break up the hard clay pan along the road acreage, just as they’ve done in our fields.
Both the goats and the cattle currently have access to a field they’ve rotated through and a portion of the road. In another few days, they’ll both move on to their next field, but it is fun to have them do this cleanup work!
The chickens are plugging along on their rotations and we’re about to be doing quite a bit of shuffling with both the hens, the young pullets who are about to start laying eggs and the mama sows, feeder pigs and piglets.
There are still some senior hens in Flock 2 although we sold the majority of them in the spring. We had been torn about whether to keep them in the coop to train the young birds or not.
After rotating around one field for three years, we are about to move the Flock 2 coop back to some of our original acreage that hasn’t had chickens on it since 2021 and give that field a rest. So we will be catching up all the remaining birds in poultry crates, moving the coop to the other field and then moving the pullets out!
The piglets are just about ready to be weaned so we need to get the hoophouse ready by mucking it out and adding more bedding and the midsize feeder pigs need some shifting around, too! There is certainly never a dull moment with all the animal moves.