Silvopasture & More Cogon Grass Eradication for Pigs, Fairytale Vibes for the Goats, Thick Forage for Cattle, Chickens & Ducklings

The farm and all the livestock are looking so great right now. Summer can be a tough time with the oppressive heat, threats from the tropics and often a lot of rain, but lately we’ve been dodging deluges (we could honestly use some rain) and everything has been clicking into place. Years of installing infrastructure and systems and learning are really feeling like they’re paying off!

Our three sows and their boar suitor are back in our house field now, ready to root up more invasive cogon grass and help us coax some wooded areas into a more functioning silvopasture ecosystem.

Their paddock starts just 50 feet from the house itself and just like when the cattle or the goats are rotating through this field, there’s nothing better than seeing content animals doing their thing from our windows.

This field is one of the thickest cogon grass, a non-native grass that was brought into the Southeast U.S. in the early 1900s as a shipping material. Before it was deemed invasive, there were attempts to cultivate it as fodder for livestock and for erosion control, but most ruminants do not eat it in most forms and we can attest to this in our experience. The cattle and goats will occasionally nibble on the young growth, but they do not prefer it.

Cogon grass is now deemed a Federal Noxious Weed in many Southeastern states, but the containment methods recommended are pretty much strictly herbicides. Burn offs are seldom successful and it burns at a very high temperature, so damage to trees is too great a risk.

Like lots of invasive species, cogon grass has allelopathic tendencies, meaning it releases biochemicals that inhibit the germination and growth of other plants. Finally, its rhizome root structure can grow as deep as four feet!

That’s where the pigs come in! In our heavy clay loam soil type, when mature pigs root, they really make a deep impact and their wallows and holes don’t bounce back like a sandier soil type. And in areas we’ve let them go to town and do their thing rooting, they will make lots of wallows and even root up and eat the rhizome roots of the cogon grass.

It isn’t a turnkey solution, but in areas we’ve had a heavy pig footprint and followed with applying compost and bale grazing the ruminants, we have seen a major reduction in cogon grass.

So while these three sows grow their next litters of piglets (due sometime in October), they’re doing a really important job in this paddock at the same time!

Meanwhile their piglets are in another tree line section of the farm continuing to grow like crazy. It’s hard to believe they’re just a little over three months old.

And despite lots of daily afternoon rain in the region, we’ve been dodging the rain almost entirely, with just a little over .10 inches since July 1st.

The week prior to that we got about 4 inches and I could stop worrying about the pigs having wallows to cool off in (in addition to their on demand water tank for drinking) and then of course it bordered on turning into a slop fest.

But just like that, it dried up and we have to make sure to fill wallows for them with a hose. As is commonly known, pigs don’t sweat, so rolling in water and mud helps them cool off. Like dogs and other animals, panting is another cooling off strategy, but you really prefer to not see that regularly because you know they’re getting too hot if that’s the case.

Of course, natural shade in the form of trees is very helpful, too, which is why we only keep pigs in wooded areas in the summer.

It was the goats’ turn to rotate through this former pine monoculture that a Wildlife and Fisheries Biologist once called essentially ecologically dead years ago. I wrote more about when the cattle where in this paddock last time.

While there’s grasses the cattle eat growing in this section now, it was a surviving versus thriving kind of vibe for the cattle and they were happy to move back to other sections with thicker grasses they like.

But this wooded section is absolutely perfect for the goats in the summer. There’s so many shrubs and vines and browse they love and the dense canopy provides tons of shade.

There’s mini ponds created by the pigs wallowing, lots of downed trees we’ve let rot to create habitat and food for beetles, soil microbes and other decomposers. Seeing the goats frolic around, jumping on the downed logs and stretching up on small trees to eat the leaves, with birds and dragonflies swooping around them felt a little like a fairy tale in a way.

And after years of clearing fence lines to install and maintain fence, adding water lines and rotating pigs, cattle and goats through, it’s so satisfying to see the land come back to life with a functioning ecosystem.

The following week, the goats moved to the field next to the piglets. They have plenty of shade throughout the field thanks to some fast growing willows and in the adjacent tree line, as well, with a big variety of plants growing on the pasture and in the wooded strips.

They have a trough with a float valve in their smaller area we corral them at night, but sometimes they are so spastic it’s like they forget and try to drink out of anything they come across. So one morning since I was hot, I filled two large troughs they had access to just in case!

The new flock keeps ramping up! They’re now at about a 63 percent laying rate, so I think we’ll still see them increase another 5 to 8 dozen eggs per day before hitting their peak production.

They’ve even surpassed the production in the other two main flocks combined now, as well.

So we have plenty of eggs available at the shop now and have been able to drop the price back down a bit accordingly and we’re working on adding more of our wholesale egg customers back that we scaled back on when production was down.

We also filled up the incubator with another round of eggs from our Barred Rock breeding flock to keep hatching birds to start laying this winter when the older hens’ production will decline with low daylight.

The cattle are sleek and fat with all of our lush summer forage and not very many of them!

We’ve held off on buying more steers to finish and held off on processing because beef prices are so high.

Unlike hogs, chickens or even small ruminants like goats, the commodity beef market and prices do effect a small regenerative operation like ours because most producers tend to charge by the commodity rate for live animals.

And we are not breeding cattle because the costs to entry in a cow-calf operation are pretty exorbitant and the pay off comes so much later down the road. We simply do not have the capital at this time to invest in breeding stock and you need three times the amount of land for a breeding operation than just a beef operation where you are finishing cattle because you need to feed the momma cow, the calf and her last' year’s calf you are finishing for beef. Not to mention steers grow much faster than heifers and often you may keep heifers as future momma cows.

There are a slew of factors causing these high cattle/beef prices, but a major one is years of recent droughts in many regions of the country caused major herd sell offs and reductions. While basic supply and demand means ranchers are now incentivized to rebuild herds, cattle take much longer to grow and reach breeding and slaughter each than other livestock, so the process is long.

Because we have so much grass right now, we hoped to possibly find some finished beef from other producers to fill our gaps and sell under their brand in our store and hold off on processing the steers we do have. But we have struck out so far, so we are likely to give the herd one more rotation around the farm, which will take about a month or so, and then bring five of them in for beef then.

We also hoped to hold off on buying more animals so we didn’t ultimately have to increase beef prices very much, but its anyone’s guess when prices will start to drop again, so we likely will not be able to hold out much longer.

And finally the ducklings. They’re just three weeks old today and the pictures of them on grass were taken on Monday. It’s absolutely crazy how much faster they grow than chickens!

They’re also extremely messy with their water since they like to dunk their heads at minimum and bathe their whole bodies if they can.

So after two weeks in the brooder stall next to the chicks, we moved them to one of the pig farrowing stalls right by our house to give them more space and fresh bedding. We put a bunch of electric net fence and live traps around them and trimmed the branches closest to the barn to avoid predators climbing down from the trees to get to them and then we dropped shade cloth around the sides and clamped it in at night to prevent owls or hawks from swooping in. So far, so good!

And by Monday, we were ready to let them out on grass and boy, are they loving it!