Pasture Disking

The pasture has finally been disked!  Since the fields have not been plowed up in at least 50 years it took three times over with the disk to break all the sod.  We also had giant ant hills in this pasture that got broken down with the disk.  This field looks really great now with no trees, no big clumps in it and all the junk grass dead!  This process took about 4 hours for roughly 10 acres.  The average price per acre in this area is $10-20 for disking. 

There is now only one process left for this section:  PLANTING THE SEED.  I will be extremely excited to get this part completed and be done worrying about it for the year.  Then in the spring I can begin worrying again about it coming up!  Our seed is ready at the seed dealer and we can plant anytime after November 15th and before the ground freezes -called frost seeding.  It will just be a matter of which day our guy can plant it and throw the fertilizer on.  He will broadcast seed it then pull the harrow over it so it goes in the soil.  This method is less time consuming and less costly than seed drilling due to the different sizes of seed and the need to plant them separately with the drill.

This has been a long and time consuming process and I'm not really looking forward to doing the larger field next year, but I am looking forward to a beautiful pasture that can sustain lots more animals than we currently have and give us our own hay for winter! I am sure my husband will want to purchase a hay baler next so we don't have to pay someone to do that!  

Anyway, progress is being made and soon it will be completed.  I have learned a lot of things while trying to get this first section completed and will already be aware of the in's and out's of the next section so it shouldn't be near as time consuming.  In the end it should make for some happy cows, horses and goats! 

An Adventure in Pasture Reseeding

As anyone can see, our pasture is greatly lacking in superbness.  It is covered with weeds that no animal will eat and spotted with millions of those nasty, thorny hedge trees.  It works for the amount of animals that we have now, but will not support the animals we hope to have someday.  We were told of a program with the USDA that would assist us to improve our pastures by reseeding them.  Our main goal when this all began was to have great pastures for the animals without costing us a fortune.

We are a very small farm with no "farm operating" account to do all of this out of, so some help with the cost would be greatly appreciated.  The USDA people came out to take a look at what we wanted to do and give their advice on what we should do.  There was, of course, an application to fill out and some other paperwork and then we waited.  After a few weeks, we were very excited when we were approved for the money to do all of this.  We, then, received our contract that told generally what was to be done and what they would pay for each item.  There are, however, certain stipulations in how you go about doing all of the work and exactly, I mean exactly, what has to be planted, what type of fertilizer to be used and how much of each. 

It has been very dry in Iowa this year and we have been putting off doing this until this fall hoping the rain would pick up.  It is no use spending all that money if the seed doesn't grow! 

As time has gotten a little bit away from us being busy with everything else going on in our lives, I am now trying to get everything lined up for this to happen.  The ladies at the USDA office are very nice and helpful; the problem is knowing the right questions to ask.  The lady at the seed store has been indispensable to me!  I have spent countless hours on this project trying to figure out who is going to do each part, how much it will cost and when can they do it.  I am also "dumb" at this since until now I had no idea what to expect with any of those questions!  I am learning, though, and hopefully within the next week we will have the first 10 acres planted.  At least with the next round in 2013 I will know what I am doing! 

Hopefully everything goes as expected and everyone shows up when they are supposed to.  For a day or so I was ready to give up and just deal with what we have after talking with some unpleasant folks, but that wouldn't do anyone any good.  I do have a newly gained appreciation for the people that have to deal with all of this all the time and the ones who were very pleasant on the phone with me after finding out I didn't know anything about this kind of stuff and took the time to explain it.  Also, there were a couple people that were not that pleasant that will not be gaining our business!