Problems, Problems, Problems

In all my years as a police officer, and later a police detective, trying to solve crimes, wade through lies, uncover cover-ups, put back together crime scenes, etc., etc. I became very fond of Occam's Razor.  Now, if you are not familiar with Occam's Razor, it is a philosophy that states when you are presented with multiple explanations for an occurrence, the simplest or least complex one is probably correct.

In all those years of police work when we looked at incidents that appeared to be extremely complex, usually because the suspects or witnesses were lying, it all boiled down to the most simple of answers.  Well, that was proved true again on my farm with the mystery killing of our chickens.

If you tuned into my last Tuesday episode, then you heard about my problems.  A mystery animal was killing my chickens.  Well, it turned out to not be much of a mystery at all.  It was the most obvious things possible, a fox.  And I was able to stop her chicken stealing days just one day after I released that episode.

Good Problems

This week I am talking about problems again.  But this time they are good problems.

Our alfalfa stand is getting old.  It was planted in 2012, so this was its 8th season.  It has been thinning and becoming less productive the last couple of seasons.  In combination with that, leasing ground for our cattle has become more difficult.  As farms in our area get split into ranchettes and people from the city purchase them, their tolerance (and their neighbor's tolerance) for having cattle on their land grows less and less.

So, after last year I decided to flip things on their head.  I decided that it would be easier to bring all of our cattle home and start purchase our hay instead of growing it.  My logic went like this:

There are plenty of people growing hay both in our area and around the West that I can purchase from.

My stand of hay is yielding less and less.

I can plant grass into my hay and start grazing it.

This will allow me to expand my cattle herd.

I will have my eye on my cattle every day.

I won't have to deal with complaints from my landlords or their neighbors.

Based on this thinking I canceled my pasture leases and decided to keep all of my cattle home this summer, yearlings and all.  I also found a farmer who was putting in a new stand of alfalfa and bringing it up with oats.  So, he contracted with me to buy all of his oat hay at a good price.  Then, I planted a pasture mix into my alfalfa with the hopes of grazing this ground by mid-summer.

Up to this point, everything was going well.

First Cutting:

At the time of my first cutting of hay I definitely was not ready to graze in my hay field.  Even though my alfalfa was thinning, it still dominated the new grass.  I was concerned about two main things.  First, that there was not enough species diversification and the cattle would still have a high risk of bloat.  Second, that the pasture grasses, still dominated by the alfalfa, would be shallow rooted and would be ripped out by grazing the cows out there.

So, we took a cutting of hay.  I had suspected that we would but was kind of hoping that we would be able to be grazing by late May.

Second Cutting:

My alfalfa always comes on really strong for the second cutting, which is probably true for you as well.  So, when we were reaching that time I was seeing stronger growth and more competitiveness from my pasture mix, but my alfalfa had seemed to have stepped it up.  It was almost like the competition with the new pasture mix caused it to step up a level.  So, I was still concerned about bloat because I had so much alfalfa.

So, we took a second cutting.  I was really hoping to be grazing by July, but it just was not in the cards.