Drought, cell grazing and Chooks.

Recently a friend said “this cell grazing doesn’t work, it doesn’t stop droughts” and he’s right on one point it doesn’t stop droughts, but it does work.  If cell grazing is done right it can put you in a better position when a dry period turns into a drought. I’m not sure where we’d be today without cell grazing and leauceana.

We are in drought and have halved our stocking rate. If we hadn’t been lucky enough to get some rain we probably wouldn’t have any cattle left at all. When you do cell grazing properly, you keep what’s called a grazing chart. You record cattle numbers in each paddock, and for how many days they are in each paddock. As well as this you record rainfall. The calculations you make show your rainfall use or water use efficiency. When you use the information and calculations correctly (monitor) it allows you to plan how to manage it. In a good season it shows you when you can increase numbers and in a dry season it shows you when to decrease. And as the season gets dryer, you just keep decreasing numbers.

So we’re lucky that we’ve had a few storms and we’re also lucky that we have leauceana. It is an amazing plant and really comes into its own when there’s storms around. It’s doesn’t look like it has much feed on it, but it’s enough for a small mob to go around and hopefully we’ll finish them off for when the meatworks open in January.

The leauceana doesn't have a lot of green left on it, but every shower of rain helps to keep it going.

We only have a small mob on the leauceana paddocks to eat the leaf before the heat burns it off!

We moved these cattle into this paddock. This end of the property did get a bit more rain.

The cattle are doing okay, just.

You can see the yellow colour of the grass - this paddock has managed to keep growing grass, because we removed the stock after a grazing. This is the only way that you can make the most of the small falls of rain that we do get.

We've had a lot of "pasture dieback" in our buffle grass country. This photo shows the dead buffle grass with weeds starting to grow. Weeds are an early succession plant and hopefully the next thing to grow will be pasture grasses - hopefully some natives might come back.

We have 3 dams on the place and they are dry or all but dry. Luckily we have an annabranch of the Dawson River running through our place. Although it too has almost stopped running as the river has gotten too low. 

We've started a rotation for our chooks too. Fortunately we can water this small area to give them good green grass. They were so happy to be moved the other day. We used to have one really big chook yard, however it was starting to fall down, so we thought we'd just divide it up with gates left over from our pig farming days. 

It's really hard to stay positive when you go out to the paddocks and it's so dry and when storms build up and they go around! Although I do wonder if they are mostly dry storms. I haven't heard that many people have had good rain. Well, looking at the positives, we still have some grass, the cattle are holding and we don't have bush fires anywhere near us. (touch wood)