Fall Pasture Management Extends Feed and Forage

Bale grazing, stockpiling, and interseeding can improve resources for feeding livestock.

By Oscar H. Will III
Updated on September 11, 2023
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by AdobeStock/pimmimemom
Bale grazing allows livestock to return excess nutrients to the soil.

Reduce your feed bill and maximize grazing days by incorporating bale grazing, interseeding, and other fall pasture management techniques into your routine.

Managing your pastures and hay meadows can be as daunting as flying a jet at supersonic speeds. And, in both cases, it’s crucial you focus on where you’ll be in a few seconds, days, and months — not where you are now. With careful foresight and planning, fall can be one of your more productive grazing periods, depending on moisture and the plant matrix you have at your disposal.

In some locations, it’s common to have a healthy distribution of both warm- and cool-season perennial species that produce quality forage during the entire growing season and that might offer good feed potential through winter. In other areas, your matrices might be warm-season dominant or cool-season dominant. In these situations, strategies for maximizing grazing days are still possible. Year-round grazing is attainable in some locations under careful management; even reducing your animal days on feed by a week will significantly add to your business’s bottom line. When managed effectively, you’ll improve your soils and productivity in the process. Most of what follows assumes you understand and employ the basic principles of management-intensive grazing, where stock density, grazing duration, and paddock rotation are integral to the program (search for “management-intensive grazing” at Sustainable Agriculture at UGA for more information).

Fall Pasture Management Strategies

Bale Grazing

During periods of excess pasture growth, preserve some of that bounty for later use by simply baling it as dry hay and dropping the bales where they’re made. For example, if your herd only utilized half of your warm-season pasture, bale the rest while it’s still got good feed value. If you leave that bale in the field, you can use temporary electric fencing to ration out the bales in early fall before the cool season pastures have grown sufficiently. By feeding on the hay where you made it, the animals will return excess nutrients to those fields. Employ this approach for using excess spring forage in your cool-season areas to supply bale grazing for your herd during the “summer slump” in forage growth in areas with predominantly cool-season pasture matrices. You can also use this strategy for feeding hay in winter, depending on your snow loads and the animals’ access to suitable wind protection.

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