The Winter Stockpile
Every year it’s a fight against freezing temps to get everything cleaned up and put away in time. It’s always a little stressful because you don’t know WHEN winter will be here, so you have to get the work done and just be prepared. Every year I feel like we get more prepared than the year previous and this year winter prep was about as smooth as it ever has. No longer having laying hens on the farm has definitely helped that too!
Right now, the only animals we have on the farm are our cattle so that means there’s a lot of hay feeding going on. We’ve been having a milder start to winter so right now they’re still eating hay when in years past we might have them back on pasture for a bit longer. Something that we like to do once the ground freezes is turn the herd out on the pasture and let them “clean up” the leftover grasses and forages. Most people are surprised to know that just because the grasses may be brown and hibernating it does not mean that there isn’t any nutritional value there. This type of grazing is called stockpile or winter grazing… the only difference between stockpiled forage in the pasture and a hay bale is probably a minor nutritional value and the cost of our labor to make the hay. The key for this grazing is for the ground to be frozen though, if the ground is still soft then the cattle will do a lot of damage to the plants and soil, so the timing is crucial. We’re hoping to have the herd out winter grazing by Christmas, but we’ll have to see how the weather goes! My farmer gut tells me we’ll be in for a very cold, snowy winter but we shall see.
We’re always having to adjust to SOMETHING on the farm and this year is no different. We’re in the middle of a big transition on the farm as we’ve begun rebuilding a new breeding herd this year. That herd is strictly moms and calves maintained for breeding. The other herd that we run separately is our stocker herd… these are all the matured yearlings that will be finished and processed for meat. Normally we purchase spring stockers (that way we don’t have any hay costs in them) but this year we’re having to bring the stockers in by Christmas instead. The beef market has been at an all-time high for most of 2023 and the repercussions of that is most farmers are taking cattle into the sale barns to capitalize on the high prices. The Organic farm that we work with to buy our stockers from is in the same boat, so he told us that if we wanted his cattle next year then we’d have to buy them early. It’s really not great for us because it adds quite a bit of workload and hay cost that we didn’t anticipate but sourcing Organic, grass-fed stockers is difficult and we like the animals that he raises. Luckily we have a lot of stockpiled forage at our one farm so we can take them there, but it hasn’t been an easy few weeks as Ethan has had to get the property prepped for wintering cattle!
Needless to say… we prepare, we adjust and soon we’ll be in our winter rhythm of hay bales, snow and farm planning.