Many years ago, Joe Bontrager of Holton, MI did a demonstration of winter bale grazing on his organic dairy farm. Instead of piling up manure in his barns, the cattle will fed mostly outside on round bales unrolled in strips across pastures.
While cows were out there, it just seemed to many of us that a lot of hay waste went on doing this. Cows ate most of the hay, slept on the rest, and litter from manuring and urination was scattered over hay as they moved about.
But Joe’s farm, like so many in Michigan, had sandier soils that could dry out if it did not rain regularly in the grazing season. How did the bale grazing affect this?
On a return visit to Joe’s the following spring, we noted that the pasture where he had unrolled bales had darker green strips where the hay had lain in the winter, vs a “normal” light green between the strips. Obviously, hay not consumed by the cows was “consumed” by soil biology which drew it into the topsoil and added to beneficial organic matter content.
The biggest benefits to higher organic matter soils is (1) they hold water better, as a capture of both snow melt and rain; (2) the topsoil can “feed” more microbial life, which provides nutrient transport from soil into the plant root zones (to feed the root systems); (3) the topsoil will attract more worms and will have more root channels, which aid in maintaining aerobic (air feed) activity in the soil.
Because you have cattle, you have many options to build up lighter soils.
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