A must-read before venturing...

All Cows Eat Grass In our first music class, the teacher was trying to introduce us to the fundamentals of music notes and composition. Those horizontal lines were labelled A, C, E, G. And for those who were not observant enough to see the sequence, teacher blurted out: ‘To remember this, all you have to know is All Cows Eat Grass’!

How true! So true!

There is no ruminant, large or small, that does not eat grass. In fact, fresh grass from the fields is the best and preferred option. Everything else we feed with comes to be in the absence of fresh grass or because we are limited by circumstances. These animals are classified herbivores for a reason – they are created to eat, digest and generate energy from grass.

Fresh grass is best, no doubt. But is it best at all times?

Green is good. But really?

One of the best sceneries I can think of is seeing animals grazing a lush green field. It has been proven to be healing and therapeutic for humans. It is such a beautiful scene to behold but there is more to it. While it appears that the fields are green during the rainy season, and that this is the best time to graze animals, it is actually the time animals should stay off the fields. I’ll explain!

In the dry season, when the rains have ‘gone’ and dryness has set in, edible, perennial grass on the fields dries up and hibernates (for want of a better word to use). This is called dormancy. At this time, the accompanying worms and nematodes also go into obscurity, somehow, abandoning the plant and burrowing deep into the earth for survival. The field looks banished, brown and abandoned. When the rains come, in no time the grass is green again and the inexperienced farmer can’t wait to flood the fields with the herd but soon enough he starts to witness a decline in flock health; from watery poop to loss of weight, and eventually to the famous limp, especially in the case of small ruminants (sheep and goats).

What is going on?

No surprise! When the rains come, life springs up again and the grasses come alive; and so do the accompanying nematodes and pests. The worms come back to life and find their way to the root, stem and leaves of the grass stands. The animals come in to graze and pick up a bit here, a bit there. They drop them back to the earth as fecal waste and the cycle continues. When the worm load becomes higher than an animal’s digestive system can handle, the worms take control and this manifests in the animals as ‘sickness’.

There is also the common case of animals getting bloated after grazing, especially leguminous plants. This is a condition known as bloat; it is caused by chemical reactions taking place in the digestive system of the ruminant producing excessive gas in reaction to wet legumes. This is a deal breaker and should be avoided at all cost.

So, what to do? We will discuss later. But first, let’s take a look at feeding modes in practice.

Intensive, Semi intensive, Extensive Feeding modes

The extensive mode? is good for animals on a long range. It provides fresh, free range pasture for animals, and in some cases, quite a bit of variety. In this mode, animals graze free-range and are exposed to all sorts of disease vectors, and while this could be a neck-jerker for the reader, it actually helps the animals develop a strong immune system to combat all that may come their way. It also provides a cheap source of feeding flock. Well…. Almost. (These days the country has paid a lot to keep these animals fed. This will come someday in another post.) The main drawbacks of this method are:
a. The farmer/herdsman has no control of the quality and type of grass being fed to the flock.
b. While the animals actually do enjoy being out in the open, a lot of energy is expended in the movement (and sometimes migration), leading to a slower rate of development than the animals’ natural capability.

The intensive mode keeps animals indoors with controlled exposure to the sun and the elements. This also means keeping animals away from most of the potential disease vectors. While this sounds good, it actually leaves the immune system unchallenged and invariably weak. Animals grown here tend to grow very quickly and accumulate a lot of fat. Little wonder cattle feedlots and fattening programs employ this method.

The semi-intensive mode is a combination of the intensive and the extensive, only that in this case, the grass being grazed is owned and controlled. So, animals are grazed some, and fed some. This mode is ingenious as it enjoys the advantages of the intensive and extensive modes while avoiding the disadvantages of both modes.

So, as a farmer, or a rancher, what is the way to go? We chose the semi-intensive grazing method. And we will explain more, the challenges, the obstacles and how we overcome them.

Rotational grazing

Let us assume we have one hectare of grazing land. This is actually the size of land required to take care of 4 heads of cattle (or 40 goats) for a year. With a bit of planning and thinking outside of the conventional box, it is possible to achieve 4 times that on the same parcel of land using a technique called rotational grazing.

In rotational grazing a piece of grazing land is divided into potions. For this case, let us assume 1 hectare is divided into 4 equal portions, all ready to graze. If all the animals are allowed to graze the whole hectare at once, the following will happen:
a. Abundance mentality kicks in. The animals see a lot of food before them and are suddenly not so eager to eat anymore. The food is there anyway, they’ll eat on their own terms.
b. While this is going on, they graze and drop feces on the fields, and because the field is large and there is plenty, they just abandon the spot and move on to the next.
c. In cases where you have more than one grass planted on the field, the animals simply pick out the one grass that they find most palatable to them and ignore the rest.
So, in no time at all, the field is ‘messed up’, the animals do not want to graze anymore even though there is still plenty of grass on the parcel.

Now let us compare to a situation where we split the hectare into 4 quadrants using electric sheep fence; same number of animals.
a. Scarcity mentality kicks in. More animals per square meter. Although animals like to graze together in groups, these jokers now want to out-graze one another and so they eat more purposefully.
b. The type and specie of the grass becomes of secondary consideration. Priority is given to eating as much grass as possible.
c. The animals will graze closer to their droppings than they would have done in the case of a larger parcel of land. In practice, the farmer should know when to stop because overgrazing is another devil entirely.

So, with rotational grazing, given smaller land parcels, animals graze, drop manure and inadvertently work the manure into the soil when they step on it. The urine also feed the soil with a good doze of urea and water, essentially reducing the irrigation needs and almost completely eliminating the needs of the application of fertilizers. At the right time, the animals are moved from Parcel 1 to Parcel 2 while Parcel 1 is left to recover (maybe with some irrigation as the case demands). The rotation goes on and by the time it gets back to Parcel 1, the grass is grown and the field is ready again.

That simple? Yes it can be.

Grasses typically grown in an ‘’S’’ curve. From the root, it takes a while for the grass to sprout to the bottom of the ‘S’ which marks the STOP point. Past the bottom of the S, the grass goes through a rapid growth stage through to the top of the ‘‘S’’ after which it slows down and begins to wilt. The top of ‘‘S’’ represents an age of non-useful maturity at which point the grass is over-grown and should be cut. So, grasses should be grazed between the top part and the bottom part of the ‘’S’’ curve, which is at a time when they are most fresh and most nutritional. The worms and disease vectors tend to settle at the bottom of the curve and grazing to that point is OVERGRAZING, a no-no for the flock. This is when the animals start falling ill and presenting with all sorts of symptoms. It is also the point beyond which continuous grazing can actually kill the pasture.

It all comes down to careful planning!

Cost is key in planning of a feeding regimen for cattle, sheep and goats. You really don’t want to spend money where you can avoid doing so. Every dime spent on feeding cuts into your margins. And although, the focus should be on producing healthy, top grade show stoppers, the farmer wants to do this using the least cost approach.

All cows still love to eat grass!

Please keep an eye out for our next post as we try to document our experiences.