The Contrary Farmer by Logsdon Gene

Author:Logsdon, Gene
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

Major Pasture Plants

Listing the most important grasses and legumes for the graziers' purposes sounds like an altogether straightforward proposition. Instead, wherever two or more graziers gather together, expect a loud argument. This is because no two farms are alike, and certainly no two counties, states, or regions. I am going to list the plants that work best for me, and that I think are the best for a cottage farm in the Cornbelt, mid-Appalachian piedmont, and New England. Others may argue for their favorites, and I will try to mention some of them too.

Bluegrass. It seems to be a penchant with pasture specialists in agricultural colleges to knock bluegrass in favor of some higher-yielding, coarser grass. These other grasses come in and out of fashion, like hemlines, but bluegrass is the blue jeans of the turf world. Over the long haul, it is the most dependable, manageable, and permanent of the coolseason grasses. It needs to be limed, two tons to the acre, every five years or so, unless you are blessed with natural lime in your soil like that paradise of horse farm meadows around Lexington, Kentucky. Bluegrass makes a solid turf, one that sheep can walk on even in early spring thaw if necessary, and cows and horses can be turned on it as soon as the ground is reasonably dry and solid without making deep hoof prints. If mowed occasionally in addition to grazing so that it does not go heavily to seed, and if rain is plentiful, and if grazing animals have generously fertilized it with their manure, bluegrass will provide pasture all through the growing season except in the heat of late summer. In 1992, with continuous rains, the bluegrass never went through its customary rest period in August at all.

The other wonderful thing about bluegrass is that in the region where we farm, it will volunteer. Take any field and start mowing it regularly and within two or three years, with lime and perhaps some fertilizer, bluegrass will slowly take over. This characteristic seems almost miraculous until you try to keep bluegrass out of a raspberry or strawberry patch and learn how tenaciously it can grow. Contrary to what is often said, succulent new-growth bluegrass has almost as much protein content as legumes. Wendell Berry, the original contrary farmer, tells me that cattle can be fattened on good Kentucky bluegrass pasture just about as readily as on corn-and he's talking about land that is too steep to cultivate and that formerly had eroded to near wasteland because it was cultivated.

When we bought our farm, the part of the acreage that would eventually be pastured had been haphazardly cultivated to corn and soybeans and then just let lay in some miscreant government subsidy program. It was growing rankly with giant ragweed above a soil surface that was otherwise mostly bare. I ran the disk lightly over the soil and the dead weed stalks, limed it, and then scattered ladino clover seed over the surface with a hand-held broadcast seeder.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.