Sterling Day 5

Today was a pretty good day. I had an Intro to Grazing Class at 6:15am. I must be getting on farmer's hours because I woke up before my alarm clock for the 5th time this week. We covered livestock pasture grazing disadvantages when compared to confinement feeding on grain. Some of them include: you don't get to ride a loud expensive fuel-sucking tractor anymore, you only get to experience the joy of cleaning out a barn for half the year, no more recreational manure spreading because the animals do it on their own, you don't get to buy new livestock every 5 years like you do with confinement feeding, etc. So really the lesson is better titled as "grazing advantages." One thing to remember: the first day of paddock feedding is in the kitchen, the second day is in the bedroom, and the third day is in the bathroom... Rotate! Rotating is exactly what we did this morning by setting up portable electric fencing in a new spot and moving 4 heffers from one pasture to a fresh one. The process involves a combination of luring the animals with a grain bucket, using a "yum, yum" call, blocking their path to adjacent pastures, and tugging them along with a rope. It went fairly smooth. Here is our farm manager Stuart leading the animals along while we block their retreat from behind.


Next I had a tractor lab. We covered the Japanese made Kubota, a diesel 50 horse power combination front end loader/tractor. It is owned by the school and is fairly new so it has simple controls and works great. Mark Dunbar who teaches the course is wearing the denim jacket and his son John is in the yellow shirt.


The end of the day I had Livestock Systems. We took soil and pasture samples and did some pasture plant identification. On the way back from class I saw 4 of the 5 common modes of northern VT summer transport in one place: walking, pickup truck, horse-drawn buggy, and tractor. The only thing missing is a bicycle.