Healthy Farming Healthy Food: Trying to manage grazing on Serenity

Serenity, this beautiful piece of dirt that we call home was already set up for rotational grazing when we bought it. We kind of fell in love with the place and had bought it and moved here before we really took stock of what development there actually was. We knew it had been looked after, there were few weeds, and at least 20 paddocks on 50 hectares. What we didn't really think about was that yes it was weed free, but it was also pretty much tree free. That's not quite correct, as there are quite a lot of trees, but not as many as we'd like and in the places that we'd like. Especially when we start splitting up the milker paddocks with electric fencing. It's been hard to make sure there is enough shade for the poor girls!

The other problem we have is the water system - or lack there of. There are a couple of dams - fenced into separate paddocks and just about every paddock feeds into one of these dams. So the main mob of cows have to walk down the hill to the dam for water. There's a few problems with this, that have really come to light over the summer.

1. Ticks - we can't get enough rest around the dams to break the tick cycle, so we've had to resort to chemical treatment to get rid of them. Not what we want to do at all, but if we don't it then becomes an animal welfare issue.

2. Wet/muddy ground - we have hills, that have water flowing out of them. I'm not sure if it's just that we've had an exceptionally wet summer or whether it's always like this, but there are springs just flowing out of the ground. Lovely, but messy when it's where the cattle need to constantly walk to get to water.

3. Cows are lazy and won't walk to far, so when they come down the hill to the dam for a drink around mid morning, they hang around until mid afternoon before going back out. In this time, they just graze around the dam. The paddocks around the dams are too large and so this also encourages them to overgraze.

We have now set up temporary electric fencing around the dams and will only allow the cattle into sections, which means that when we move them to the next paddock, they then have a fresh area to go down to drink. One thing that has made this so much easier is kiwi tech fencing. It's an amazing portable electric fencing system. We use it to section off the dam, for the milking cows to break up the paddocks smaller, and for the sheep and goats - we've somehow managed to train them to stay behind 2 electric wires.

We are currently working on a farm plan, which I'll discuss when it's finalised, but we will put in a solar pump on the dam and then pipe the water to a high point and then reticulate back to each paddock with it's own trough. We will also do some Natural Sequence Farming work to hopefully stop some of the springs from just running down into the creek. The contours will spread the water out along the paddock. This will be a little tricky due to the steepness of the hills, but we'll do what we can where we can.

The idea will be to make the contours wide enough that we can drive a buggy along, which will give us a lot more access over the property. Trees will be planted along the contour also. As we'll have to fence these off, this will effectively break up the paddocks so that we will get a far better rotation.

I like the idea of planting a mix of trees - timber trees, fruit and nut trees and fodder trees for the animals. Hopefully we'll get started on some of this over the winter, although we need to start propagating some trees asap. I'll share our activities on here and through my instagram @healthyfarminghealthyfood.