Don’t Put the Cart before the Yak – Preparation is Key

By Sandra Matheson, DVM

Part Three
Too often people get excited about getting livestock and dive in without enough preparation. The stories I hear most often are about people getting the animals but don’t have a place to catch them when they need to. Adequate facilities may mean the difference between life and death – theirs or yours.  

If the animal has a birthing problem or becomes ill, it may require veterinary assistance. I cringe when I hear of people who let an animal suffer or die because they don’t have a way to or don’t know how to catch it for the vet. Or they endanger their own safety because they don’t know how to handle the animals or have inadequate facilities. 

If you have the funds, a used or new chute system is ideal. You may design and build your own. A setup may consist of simply a few livestock panels that allow you to restrain the animal while keeping you out of harm’s way. Do the research to find out what works and what options you have available to you. Temple Grandin is the guru of low-stress animal handling and facilities. She sees things from an animal’s perspective. She has several books and videos that are excellent resources. This is the number one resource when preparing your facilities. The point is to study and construct facilities before the animals arrive. 

When it comes to handling animals Dr. Grandin and the late Bud Williams are my favorites. I have learned so much from both of them over the years. Knowing how to move your animals in a low-stress manner makes all of us happy and our jobs easier. Screaming and terrorizing your animals does no one any good. You must make the animal think it is their idea to go where you want them to!

Know what their nutritional requirements are. Different species may have radical differences. Sheep may die from eating the high level of copper that a goat, yak or beef cow needs. Geographical differences in mineral levels may require supplementation. In northwest Washington State, we are low in Selenium and must supplement it. Yaks tend to be copper deficient here and in many parts of the country. Know what needs to be supplemented in your area for your species and how to provide it. 

Also, nutritional needs change depending on the life stage. A growing, pregnant, or lactating animal needs higher quality feed than an animal that is no longer growing or not feeding a baby. When it is cold, animals need to eat more to keep their body temperature stable. Also, study how to determine if the forage is high or low quality. I have had animals die from eating low-quality wrapped silage that I did not open to look at when I was assured it was high quality.  I bought it and told my employees to feed it when I was out of town. They did not know the difference. Yaks died. That was a hard lesson.

In the next installment, we will cover disease, parasites, vaccination, and tools of the trade for your new livestock. Too often people get excited about getting livestock and dive in without enough preparation. The stories I hear most often are about people getting the animals but don’t have a place to catch them when they need to. Adequate facilities may mean the difference between life and death – theirs or yours.  

Capturing Nitrogen from the Atmosphere to Feed your Crop

By Craig Madsen

Understanding and managing the nutrient levels in your soils is an important role whether you are managing 1,000 acres or a backyard garden.  In this article, we’ll focus on the role of nitrogen in the nutrient cycle.

Nitrogen plays a critical role in plant production. Nitrogen is a key component of proteins, enzymes, and chlorophyll which is essential for photosynthesis. Too little nitrogen will impact plant production and too much nitrogen can cause problems as well.  Excess nitrogen 1) can be lost to the environment, released into the air, or leached out of the soil into surface and groundwater;  2) reduces organic matter in the soil – there is always a balance between the carbon (organic matter) and nitrogen, and nitrogen not used by the plants will be used by the microbes to break down organic matter; 3) excess nitrogen in the plant and soil will result in weed, insect and disease pressure; and  4) excess nitrogen in the plant and water can negatively impact human and animal health.

The atmosphere is comprised of 75% nitrogen which translates to 2000 pounds of nitrogen per foot of atmosphere over every acre of land. How can we convert this free nitrogen to a form that can be utilized by plants? Another question is how can we make the nitrogen we apply more effective?

One of the best ways to make atmospheric nitrogen plant-available is to grow a legume. The rhizobium, nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in the nodules on the roots of the legumes, are responsible for fixing nitrogen. Two important items must in be place for the legumes to fix nitrogen 1) the seed must be inoculated with the specific rhizobia and 2) there must be adequate levels of sulfur, boron, and molybdenum. Sulfur is necessary for good nodulation and adequate levels of all three are necessary for the proper functioning of the nodules. How do you tell if your legume is fixing nitrogen? Get a shovel, dig up some plants, and look at the roots. Do you have nodules? If yes, cut the nodule open and look at the color of the inside of the nodule. If they are pinkish red, then they are fixing nitrogen. If not, then you need to check for mineral deficiencies.

Rhizobium nodules on alfalfa roots

Well-aggregated soils provide habitat for free-living nitrogen fixing bacteria. Well-aggregated soils have areas within the soil colloid that have lower oxygen levels which provides the right habitat for the free-living nitrogen fixing bacteria. How good of soil aggregation do you have? Do a slake test. Allow the samples to dry for 24 hours before conducting the test. https://www.asec.purdue.edu/soilhealth/downloads/SlakeTest,NRCS.pdf

A well-functioning food web is one of the ways natural systems provide nitrogen to plants. It is all about the math. Bacteria are little bags of nitrogen fertilizer. Bacteria have a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 5:1. Protozoa that eat bacteria have a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 30:1. Thus, a protozoa has to eat 6 bacteria to get its 30 carbons but only needs one nitrogen. It releases the 5 nitrogen into the soil and that nitrogen is now available to the plant. Protozoa are often low in numbers in cropland soils. You can grow your own protozoa by making a protozoa tea and applying it to your fields to enhance the nitrogen cycle. http://traceandsave.com/protozoa-and-protozoa-tea/

Different types of nematodes feed on a variety of different foods such as bacteria, fungi, plant, and some are predators.  When nematodes with a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 100:1 feed on bacteria they release the extra 19 nitrogen into the soil.  A diverse soil food web is important for nutrient cycling.

Worms are also a great source of nutrients for the soil.  Worm castings have 5 times more plant available nitrogen than undigested soil and 3 to 7 times more phosphorous, and the list goes on. The worms themselves are also a source of nitrogen when they die.  30 earthworms per 8-inch cube could release up to 30 pounds of nitrogen/acre. Earthworms have the potential to increase pasture production from 10% to 30%.

Another option is to plant a green manure cover crop to provide nitrogen for the next crop. It can be either a legume or a young cereal crop that is incorporated before flowering. https://attra.ncat.org/publication/overview-of-cover-crops-and-green-manures/

There are ways to improve the efficiency of applied nitrogen, a topic for another article.

Pseudo Hugelkultur

By Maurice Robinette

One of the principles of holistic management financial planning is to control expenses.   I constantly try to figure ways to be more efficient when I’m working in the woods. Using the slash for the Department of Natural Resources fuel reduction program to create an orchard is my latest effort.

Since 2016, I have participated in the DNR’s fuel reduction program.  This program is designed to reduce ladder fuels and the damage done by wildfires. I completed my fifth project this June.   

In the first project, I disposed of small trees and limbs by renting a large chipper and stockpiling the chips for my large animal compost effort. In the second project, I stacked and burned small piles of slash.  

For the third project, I bought a chipper and hauled the chips to my central location.  The fourth time, we chipped in place to replace the biomass I had cut.   We were also logging in the same area and had additional slash to deal with.

A few years ago I became aware of the work of Sepp Holzer, a permaculture advocate from Austria.   He developed a technique of piling logs sticks leaves compost manure and topsoil into a mound and called it Hugelkultur. The idea is to let the logs decompose and become a sponge that self-irrigates the mound and provides a good base for a garden.

I decided to try it on a very large scale by piling slash in a row about ten feet wide and four feet high.  During the fourth project we tried stacking the limbs by hand on top of logs that were placed by my tractor.  This worked well but was still labor intensive.   

 For the fifth project, I did all of the stacking with the new grapple.   We also discovered that a small pile of small trees (less than three inches in diameter) could be skidded behind an ATV with a chain or chocker cable. This was much faster than using the grapple to transport slash a quarter mile to the hugelkultur.  Once the pile was built, a foot of topsoil was placed on top of the pile, dug from the adjacent rich meadow soil.  

The first hugelstrip is 430 feet long.  The second one is currently 1,250 feet and growing.

My long term plans are to keep adding topsoil and compost until a good seedbed is developed. Then, a variety of trees, including aspen, willow, apple, pear, cherry, and chestnuts will be tried.   

We had the unfortunate occasion of testing two of these projects last month with the Gray Road fire.  The good news is they worked to prevent the fire from getting into the tops of trees, The bad news is it didn’t matter much as the fire was so hot many of the trees were killed anyway.

 For more on hugelkulter, see this article from Sunshine Farms in upper New York State. It discusses hugekultur from a gardening perspective. A well-done video is included in the article.