Grasses and Grazing

When I teach my course on pasture management to livestock producers and get to the topic of grazing, the ranchers ask very practical questions, such as: When should I open the gate to let the animals into a field?

Livestock producers whose cattle rotationally graze permanent pasture or reseeded leys have the opportunity to cash in on the multiple benefits legumes have to offer by adding them to their forage systems, says Jerry Hall, director of research for Grassland Oregon.

Crabgrass is a hated weed in the world of turf grass management and is often seen as a plague in lawns and on sports fields.

“Even though it just seems like dirt, it’s a very complex and intricate system. And the more we study it, the less it seems like we know,” says Keith Berns of Green Cover Seed.

Like a lot of their neighbors, the Seymours raised beef and tobacco – and just for good measure, they did a bit of tree farming and logging. But changing times brought about a new vision for Randy Seymour, his son John and their operation, which had been in the family since the 1860s.

It’s no surprise that soil health is still a buzzword. Though the idea of soil health is an old one, there has never been a quantifiable measure of what one would call a “healthy soil.” Many top researchers have been working on developing this measure for decades.