I realize I’ve been a delinquent contributor to the YPC blog lately.  Calving season has been moving along and we haven’t really had too much excitement.  After a branding two weeks ago my mare stepped on my foot and broke a toe.  While quite painful, I’m not sure even that could count as excitement.  The weather has varied from sunny and in the seventies to snow.  I sold half a load of feeder calves and bought their replacements at a healthy profit.  We are leasing some new pasture and rangeland and I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on improving a few things. 

All my life I’ve seen the forage on the ranch across the road overgrazed and overstocked.  Cattle were shipped in and set stocked in the spring to calf and shipped out a few months later after grazing everything down to nearly nothing.  Bare ground slowly increased a little each year and sagebrush edged out forage that had been overgrazed.  Our first task this spring was to install some permanent electric fencing to divide the pastures into paddocks so we could practice planned rotational grazing with adequate recovery periods. 

Being that this property is not ours and it’s very unlikely that any of our rent would be put into improvements, it was up to us to find economical ways to install this fencing.  There are a number of very large stumps around a grove of Cottonwood trees.  Using a backhoe, I moved stumps into place to form braces.  High tensile wire was strung up and tightened.  I used up all available stumps on the first fence.  The next fence I used pallets for braces.  Plywood scraps were nailed to one side of three pallets.  The three pallets were then wired together to form a triangle.  I then filled each triangle brace with dirt.  This formed a simple yet strong brace with no cost for materials.  Old copper telephone wire was used in place of high tensile wire on this stretch.  

I’m very excited to see how this rental pasture reacts to planned grazing.  My expectations are high.  Next fall we will broadcast grass seed then feed hay over the top to promote new grass grown in bare ground.