The Bovine Bugle

Lush, nutritious grass keeps the cows happy

This morning I needed to head over to Doug Flack's for some electrical fencing supplies. Doug sold me my first supplies that started me in rotational grazing 17 years ago. Grazing is so important on our farm, as it is on all organic farms. The majority of conventional farms does not graze at all and often do not let their cows out of the barn at all. This boggles my mind when you have a cow that is designed and made to go out to eat grass and farmers keep them shut up in a barn, haul the feed in, haul the manure out, and they call that progress!

Rotational grazing is a system designed by Andre Voisin, a French biologist, chemist, and farmer. The system takes into account the needs of both the plant and the animal, not the animal alone. The Voisin system divides the pastures into small areas (paddocks) and rotates animals through them. The system provides the cows with lush, nutritious grass, and then allows the plants time to regrow before they are grazed again. With the electric fencing system we use, we have great flexibility to take the 45 acres of grazing land we have and divide it into paddocks for our milking cows, heifers, beef animals, and poultry.

Grazing our animals with the Voisin system provides our animals with the very best forage possible, keeps our animals healthy by giving them exercise and sunshine, and give us--the farmers--a break by reducing the amount of labor needed to care for the cows. After a long, hard winter we love to see the cows go out to pasture!!

--Jonathan, Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont

Posted by Blogger Chris at May 20, 2004 09:05 AM