Growing Better Pastures: What We're Learning About Hay, Seeding, and Soil Health

If you have been following along on social media or if you read last week’s blog, you know that my #pastureproject this year is to identify all the plants in our pastures (or as many as I can). Along with identifying what’s already in our pastures, I’ve also been learning more about pasture plants in general. Over the years, I noticed some fields were sparse or overrun by things I was pretty sure shouldn't be there. For example, one area is practically a field of daisies, we have large patches of cow vetch in one of our hay fields and a small hill is thick with dandelions. Even though our pastures are perennial (meaning the plants return each year), we still lose some to winterkill or competition which can both create the spareness I mentioned as well as the opportunity for undesirables to spread.

When I started looking into reseeding a couple of summers ago, I hit a few roadblocks. First, seed is expensive when you factor in the scale at which we would need to seed at. Second, we’d need special equipment successfully seed, which would add even more cost. Then I discovered that local suppliers didn’t seem to carry a good sheep-specific pasture mix. All of these discoveries froze the reseeding ideas until a construction project cleared a new area of land. I decided to turn it into a small pasture we could add to our rotational grazing system and began researching what grasses and legumes to plant as the small amounts needed gave me more flexibility with sourcing. But I realized I couldn’t confidently identify all the recommended plants, which led back to my summer plant ID project.

When I started researching what we should be growing, I quickly realized I needed to better understand the difference between grasses and legumes. Grasses are usually the backbone of a pasture plant mix because they’re hardy, high-yielding, and provide what people often refer to as “structure and bulk.” What that really means is that grasses give the pasture physical form and height (structure), and they produce a large volume of forage (bulk) for the animal to eat. They grow upright, hold up well to grazing or cutting, and make up the majority of what gets harvested for hay. Common grasses you might see in pastures include timothy, bromegrass, orchard grass, and ryegrass.

Legumes, on the other hand, are more nutrient-dense and help naturally fix nitrogen in the soil, which benefits the entire pasture over time. Clover (both red and white), birdsfoot trefoil, and alfalfa are some of the more common ones. A healthy pasture ideally includes a mix of both grasses and legumes. That sounds simple enough until you’re standing in the field trying to figure out what’s actually growing. This is where the #pastureproject comes in. It makes sense to me to figure out what is already growing before adding anything else.

Fertilizing and seeding seem to go hand-in-hand, so I am happy to report that we do support our existing fields where we can. Fertilizer is one way, although this is another thing that has turned out to be surprisingly expensive. We can’t afford to apply synthetic fertilizer to every pasture every year. We prioritize our hay fields since that’s where we’ll be cutting for winter feed. The sheep gives us another fertilizer in the form of sheep manure. We also use a manure spreader to spread our sheep manure (some of it goes on the hay fields, the rest to the garlic/sunflower plot). Fertilizing makes sense as it helps replace what we remove when we hay or when the sheep graze. Cutting the plant removes nutrients and stored energy from both the plant and the system, which need to be replaced to support strong regrowth.

As we move forward, we will get better at this. Making hay isn’t the thing we spend the most time on but in our climate and for our farm, it’s absolutely essential that its well-managed. Making sure we can produce enough quality hay to feed our sheep through the winter is probably one of the most important jobs we have here on the farm.

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