By Bill Clark
What is Bale Grazing?
Minimize feeding efforts with a method that offers multiple benefits to livestock and land.
Photo By: Bill Clark
W
hat in the world is this all about? Simply put, bale grazing means that you stack hay during summer in a position that allows you to feed cows a controlled amount of hay by simply moving a few feet of electric fence. My family operates a small cow/calf operation near Roff, OK. My wife Betty, our son Garrett and I do most of the work on the ranch. We all have “town jobs” so most of our work is done in the evenings or on weekends. Consequently we are always looking for ways to cut down labor, especially time spent feeding. During the winter it’s usually dark by the time we get home or if we feed in the morning it seems there’s always something that makes us late for work. While visiting with Hugh Aljoe, Consultation Program Manager for the Noble Foundation, about minimizing inputs on the ranch he suggested that bale grazing might work well for our operation, and introduced me to the concept. We’ve been bale grazing for the past five years (except for last year when we didn’t make any hay) and have learned a lot from our mistakes and successes. We prefer to leave grass standing and have the cows do the harvesting, but for those years that we have been fortunate enough to make some hay bale grazing has worked well. I would like to share with you what our experience has been. Benefits we have found: • Labor is greatly reduced. We have to haul the hay out of the field anyway so positioning the bales to graze doesn’t take much longer than stacking them in a hay pen. The real labor savings comes during the winter. We can give our cows another row of hay in less than ten minutes. Since we usually let them have three to four days supply we spend about 30 minutes a week haying our cows. • Tractor wear and tear is reduced. Probably one of the hardest jobs your tractor has is getting started on those cold days to only run for a few minutes. If we
