There are a lot of mushrooms in our fields. The locals call these rosé des prés, which usually means the regular old field mushrooms but there are at least two distinct species that I see. The ones below are in a fairy ring several meters across and I think they are horse mushrooms. They areContinue reading "Mushrooms, oats, grass and a hungry retriever"

Australians don’t say corral, they say cattle yards. And when you link Australia and a Bud Box you get this example of loading cattle onto a truck from Grahame Rees where they cram themselves in. He calls it a Bud Pen instead of a Bud Box. Low-stress stockmanship also made it onto the Landline showContinue reading "Farming links with a focus on cattle yards"

I’d heard of a farmer with a herd of Galloway cattle not far from me, so I called him up and went over to check out their farm. Stefanie and Andreas Roth are German, a fact that you could work out on arriving at the farm from the German cars, German MB-Trac tractors and thisContinue reading "Andreas Roth’s herd of Galloways"

I am jealous of Zephyr Hill’s headgate. Matron of Husbandry looking at her year of rotational grazing. I really like her posts on grazing on her farm. We’re designing a very simple pen system (with a chute and a headgate) and the best of the documents we have looked at is this one on low-stressContinue reading "Farm links with an emphasis on cattle pens"

My cows don’t like to break the rules. They respect the polywire even if it is lying on the ground, although that might have something to do with the 6-10 thousand volts we pump through it. If the fence charger goes flat they still sit inside their boundaries. If there ever is a fence downContinue reading "The grass is always greener…"

Summer here is hot and dry and there are not many plants that grow in those conditions. Lucerne was the legume that kept growing throughout the summer providing fresh fodder for our herd. There were also some grasses that did well relative to the rest, notably the chiendent (couch grass) and yellow foxtail. Each ofContinue reading "Fall growth started with legumes"

Lucy Jean learned how to drive the tractor, or at least the steering wheel part. Her legs are too short to reach the pedals. Here she is discing the Alaska paddock. She spent a good hour driving it alongside the previous line with only a few wobbles. Little kids get very focused. The picture belowContinue reading "It’s Fall seeding time"

Our farm gets buzzed by the French air force (armée de l’air francaise). Often we get several visits in a day, or a couple of planes flying together. They are based at Mont-de-Marsan which is about an hour’s drive away in my Toyota, but a much quicker trip by Mirage. We also get visited byContinue reading "The farm gets buzzed"

We have two cow breeds on the farm: a herd of Salers and five Mirandaise heifers. These cow breeds have some differences. Mirandaise are plains cows that like the hot sun and grow large and strong to work the ground under the vines, whereas Salers are mountain cows that give a fair amount of milkContinue reading "Some well-fed heifers on our farm"

We’ve been running a system somewhat like Tall Grazing, where you give the cow herd a new section of grass each day and then let the pasture rest for a long while between grazings. Our original plan was to run through the farm each three months, and we’d see what happened. Well this wasn’t aContinue reading "Grass with a long rest"