The Cattle Connection

When farm guests arrive to tour Elmwood Stock Farm, they see our large, rectangular, darker-green alfalfa fields, lots of grass, a few vegetables, and some cows out in a field—or evidence that cows have been in the area recently. Without really thinking about our farm as a whole system, these elements seem unrelated.

Our various groups of cattle are moved from field to field, avoiding the vegetable and crop fields—even the alfalfa hay fields. The alfalfa fields are cut for hay three or four times per year, yielding tons of nutritious cattle feed for winter. As a legume, alfalfa has a symbiotic relationship with a strain of bacterium that pulls nitrogen from the air and deposits it into the soil around the plant’s roots. This natural fertilizer is what gives the plants that darker green color. When properly dried by the sun, the nutrients are captured in a stable condition, known as hay, for long-term storage. This hay is then fed to the various herds of cattle in the winter on the land that will be cropped the following spring. This is an effective way to move nutrients from one area of the farm to a field where they nurture the animals and then contribute to soil fertility. The large, round hay bales are unrolled so all animals can eat at once, and each feeding is in a different section of the field to uniformly deposit the nutrients as they pass through the animals. In this way, the cattle are working to build fertility in a system that requires few off-farm inputs other than tractor fuel.

Cattle are also a critical component of our weed-control strategy. Cattle selectively graze plants they desire and leave others behind. As the animal groups move about the farm through the season, they encounter weeds at various stages of maturity. Some weeds they really like when young and tender but not when they become tall and tough or grow spines; however, they are often seen stripping seeds off the tips of the plants as they ripen. There are times we have seen them devour spiny thistles, much to our liking, but other times, they avoid them. Cattle instinctively know what they need to meet their energy or protein requirements, so by offering them a nice mix of plants, each with differing nutrient profiles, we allow them to selectively graze what they need. Even some weeds considered poisonous get eaten in small doses—we think a way of naturally purging parasites from their system, but we are just guessing on that one. Even some of the rough weeds they don’t eat get trampled in the process of them eating the good ones. All this helps keep the weeds in check. We also employ them to consume or trample weeds in the crop fields in the fall, after all the crops have been harvested.

While each farm element looks like its own, separate entity, they’re actually all inter-related, with the cattle being a major connecting point.  – Mac Stone