I’d quickly take one of the hottest weeks in the summer over some of the frigid weather we have seen this winter. My wife just hopes that the long, icy-cold period was long enough to set back the stink bugs still hanging around.
Cold weather can have some advantages, especially after some of the rains we received lately. If you are having to concentrate livestock or are wanting to graze wet or saturated ground, frozen ground or free concrete has some advantages.
If you are still grazing stockpiled forage, frozen ground helps to protect the soil surface and reduce compaction from hooves. In reality, if you have a good stand of stockpile, it has to get almost bitter cold to freeze that ground. The blanket of forage serves as pretty good insulation. Like I’ve said before, if I have to dig a hole in the wintertime, I’m for sure going to dig where I have heavy sod, it is most likely not frozen.
On the contrary, ground that has little cover left will freeze quicker and deeper. It will also be more susceptible to pugging and compaction when grazed or walked on when thawed out and wet.
I’ve had a few people asking if they should go ahead and graze some stockpile that they were not able to graze earlier. This invokes the questions, “How much forage is there and how will it be managed?” If the soil is saturated with water and you don’t have an enormous amount of grazable vegetation present, you will probably do more harm than good.
If the soil is frozen, then perhaps even a meager amount of 3,000 pounds of forage per acre might be worth pursuing, but it would also make a great field to possibly graze early in the rotation in the spring because it will certainly rebound quickly and have ample amounts of soil protection and dry matter after the initial green-up. You won’t get that from fields that were grazed tighter - they will be slower to rebound.
Fields with quite a bit more than 3,000 pounds of stockpile per acre are pretty rare this time around. But, if you did have some, the more vegetative cover that you have, the more resilient the field will be. Heavy stockpile will have more and deeper root systems, helping to create more resilient structure and more soil surface protection unless under very saturated conditions.
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Categories: Indiana, Livestock, Weather