Feeding My 64 Employees

There are a few humans employed on this farm, but there are a whole lot of employees who walk on 4, 6, even 8 legs. Some slither, some burrow and others even fly!

Most of them work for food, and as long as they get an exchange that satisfies their nutritional needs they're quite happy.

The cows are some of the most obvious employees and as we regularly give them fresh strips of pasture each day, they in turn prune the plants, add fertilizer, create mulch on the soil surface from plant litter, and catalyze numerous processes between roots and soil life below ground.

Rolling up a portable fence for the cows is something I often do multiple times a day. 

It's a routine.

But sometimes it's good to stop and appreciate the details of creation functioning in a healthy manner!

On this particular day, I had the thought that I could attach my phone to the tractor and record the process of giving the cows their next break.

They were loving this pasture, which had a good stand of a summer annual cover crop mix we had drilled into it this spring.

For reference, in the photo below you can see in the background (in front of the trees) a line of very tall forage. That's where the 64 cows in this group were hanging out after I rolled up the fence. The foreground shows what those 64 cows ate and trampled in the previous 3 hours!

The video is over 3 minutes long, partly because you get to just look at grass for several seconds while waiting for me to walk to the fence :D

Then the herd comes on the scene and it's munch, munch, munch! They voraciously strip the leaves off the plants as their bodies continue the miraculous process of turning grass to milk (or meat).

And yes, it really is that loud when they're eating sorghum sudangrass!

As an epilogue to the video, this is what that pasture looked like the next morning.

And such is a little snapshot of a day in the life on the farm!

P.S. If you're wondering about those calves in the video with the orange rings in their noses, those are weaning rings. We put them in their noses and they are pretty effective at keeping them from nursing while allowing them to stay at mama's side for a few more days. This eases the stress of the weaning process especially for the youngsters.

 I had already weaned the heifer calves last month and separated them into the heifer group. The bull calves got to nurse for a few more weeks and for now they're still hanging out with mama.