#78 How Leafy Pastures Supercharge Livestock Performance and Accelerate Soil Improvement

Greetings, fellow ranchers and land enthusiasts! Today, we embark on a journey that unveils the extraordinary benefits of creating leafy pastures by managing our livestock. Beyond their picturesque charm, these verdant landscapes hold the potential to revolutionize your ranch's success. Join me as we dive into the symbiotic relationship between leafy pastures, livestock performance, and soil health, uncovering a harmonious cycle that propels your operation forward.

Before we start, I want to let you know that I have created a new guide for you showing you how to improve your pastures long term in 2 easy steps that you can implement right away and that will produce results almost immediately. Avoid overgrazing!

This free guide is in PDF format and I made it very actionable and added several things to consider when you start implementing it. I really want you to check it out and let me know what you think! Download it now at www.rwranching.com/pastures. If you are ready we are going to start!

Unveiling Leafy Pastures.

Leafy pastures are not just a visual delight; they're the key to unlocking optimal livestock performance and soil vitality. We'll delve into the science behind their rich nutrient profile and explore why they are an essential component of a thriving ranching ecosystem.

Green leaves produce energy through photosynthesis while stems consume energy through respiration. The difference between the energy that green leaves produce and stems consume, is the energy available for grass growth and soil transforming via roots. We absolutely need our best forage species to have strong and deep roots!

The Leafy vs. Stemmy argument.

To understand the benefits of leafy pastures, we must contrast them with their stemmy counterparts. We'll dissect the critical distinctions in nutrient content, digestibility, and overall advantages, setting the stage for comprehending why leafy pastures are at the forefront of ranching excellence.

We need to know green leaves are much higher in quality than stems and livestock do much better on a leafy pasture than on a stemmy pasture.

This means leafy pastures have a double role: to offer higher quality feed to your livestock and to transform your soil with their strong and deep roots.

Livestock Performance improves. 

Leafy pastures offer a cornucopia of nutrients tailor-made for your livestock's dietary needs. We'll delve into how these nutrient-rich forages translate into accelerated growth, improved health, and elevated product quality, all contributing to overall enhanced livestock performance.

While green leaves have a digestibility of around 67%, the stems would have around 40% digestibility which explains the better animal performance we observe on leafy pastures.

Leafy pastures aren't just nutritious; they're also more palatable to livestock. We'll explore how providing your animals with a delectable dining experience leads to heightened feed consumption and, consequently, amplified weight gain and productivity.

When it gets hot, our livestock will suffer from the heat and fiber in their feed will generate more heat in their rumen when digested. This is the reason a leafy pasture gives even higher productivity than a stemmy pasture when temperatures rise.

Soil's Best Friend: Leafy Pastures and Soil Improvement.

Leafy pastures are not just beneficial for livestock; they're ecological allies that enhance soil health. We'll delve into how these vibrant fields excel at carbon sequestration, contributing to healthier soils and mitigating environmental impacts.

Green leaves help improve your soil through the magic of photosynthesis which enables them to create food for soil microorganisms, food that is returned to the soil through root exudates where the microorganisms feed on them and in return make nutrients available to your plants, nutrients that were not previously available! This is what drives soil improvement and soil creation! The best soils in the world were created by green forages capturing carbon through photosynthesis and with herbivores grazing them down to repeat the cycle after a long enough recovery period. Very neat and interesting!

Root Mass and Microbial Action.

The root systems of leafy pastures are more than just anchors; they're architects of healthy soil. We'll uncover how these robust roots foster microbial activity, enhance soil structure, and increase water retention, creating an ideal environment for plant growth.

Your best forage species roots need to be strong and fat so that the microorganisms fed by their root exudates also get fat and can be transformed into new HUMUS or slow-cycling carbon, which is our soil's real fertility. Humus helps your soil by holding much more water and your pastures start to produce as if you received more rain and some fertilizer, but without the cost of synthetic fertilizers!

Nurturing the Cycle: Promoting Leafy Pastures.

Creating and maintaining leafy pastures requires thoughtful grazing practices. We'll explore how these strategies promote regrowth, prevent overgrazing, and ensure a continuous supply of nutrient-dense forages.

By always doing a high harvest efficiency grazing we make sure we are mimicking nature and how plants actually work. This simple strategy allows your plants to achieve their growth potential, then be efficiently harvested by your livestock, and then allowed a long enough recovery period to fully recover, before being grazed again.

Consider the regrowth after mowing your lawn or cutting a pasture to make hay.

What really determines the speed of regrowth and its vigor is the rest period your lawn or hay field has between cuttings. This means that it is the energy reserves in the crowns and roots of your grass which determine regrowth!

Managed Grazing: The Key to Sustaining Leafy Pastures.

Effective grazing management is the linchpin of sustaining lush pastures. We'll discuss the art of timing and movement, ensuring your livestock have access to fresh, leafy growth while avoiding degradation.

We need a  grazing program where harvest efficiency is enhanced while maintaining good body condition in our livestock, and that recognizes the importance of roots and crowns energy reserves in regrowth and in new humus creation. A program that includes the whole year and multi years and regenerates the land by avoiding overgrazing, even at very high stocking rates, and creates leafy pastures.

When we avoid grazing a pasture until it has fully recovered, we make sure we do not overgraze, but here is the secret: the closest to the ground your livestock can harvest by grazing a fully recovered plant, the leafier its regrowth will be. Just look at what regrows after you mow a lawn, green leaves? Or stems? We need leafy pastures!

Leafy pastures aren't immune to environmental fluctuations. We'll dive into strategies for adapting to changing seasons, optimizing our grazing plan, and ensuring consistent nourishment for your livestock.

We know our forages grow at different rates throughout the different seasons of the year, we also know that our livestock require different quantities of nutrients depending on their physiological state: for example when they start lactating their nutrient demand almost doubles. We can tailor our calving season to what our land naturally produces.

To reap the full benefits of leafy pastures, resilience is key. By making our pastures leafier through high harvest efficiency grazing we will also enhance roots and crown reserves which will help your best forage plants to successfully weather any short-term difficult time. We know the importance of adjusting strategies, embracing innovation, and fostering adaptability to overcome challenges and maximize success.

Conclusion: When it comes to ranching and taking care of the land, those leafy pastures are way more important than you would think. So, as we wrap up this eye-opening topic, just remember that nurturing your pastures starts a great awesome cycle. It makes your animals do their best, keeps the soil happy, and helps make the future brighter for your farm and the planet.

Before I leave, I would like you to get your hands on this new and very useful PDF on improving your pastures now and for the future.  In it, I explain step by step, how to use the mower to transform your landscape and how to avoid overgrazing your best forage species. We want to make the weeds and brush weaker and our best forage species stronger so that they in turn, transform your soils. You can download it at www.rwranching.com/pastures.

Until next time! Thank you for joining this in-depth conversation. Here's to vibrant pastures, thriving livestock, and a much better legacy that spans generations!