Farming '90, 1990-03-21, Page 19FARMING ‘90, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21, 1990. B3.
Call of nature put to work reseeding pasture
Necessity may be the mother of
invention, but Glen Wells certainly
could be the father of his imaginative
way to reseed pasture without
working it up.
Mr. Wells told farmers at the Soil
and Crop Conservation meeting in
Brussels March 7 about his ingeni
ous methodof rehabilitating pas
ture. Mr. Wellsisthe manager of the
Bruce Community Pasture located
on 1200 acres in Bruce township. The
pasture was set up through an ARD A
program back in 1966 to let farmers
pasture their cattle on supervised
land at reasonable rates. There had
been a need for grazing land and a lot
of land that was not being properly
managed.
The land was first worked up and
seeded in 1966 and 1967 to a mixture
of 50 per cent trefoil and 50 per cent
timothy and hasn't been plowed
since as more than 29,000 head of
cattle were raised on the land. But
over the years weight gains began to
drop and on investigation, the
management found the trefoil con
tent had been dropping. The
problem was how to get more trefoil
back into the pasture without
plowing up the fields. One year they
tried a no-till seed drill on a 25-acre
test plot and it worked reasonably
well. Another they tried seeding
from an all-terrain vehicle and
another year planted 100 acres with
an air way planter.
But looking at the resources at
hand in 1988 Mr. Wellscame up with
a different idea. Hefelt the cattle
should be able to help spread the
seed for him. He took a 100-acre
plot where the trefoil content had
dropped to about 15 per cent. He
turned 450 head of cattle into the plot
in early June to graze it right down
then left it alone. The trefoil, given a
goodjumpoverthegrasses,came up
beautifully and he let it go to seed. In
September he turned 450 head of
cattle back intothe pasture. They ate
everything, including the seed pods
of the trefoil. The seeds passed
through the cattle and came out in
the droppings. A chain harrow was
used to spread the seeds around. In
19891 he resulting crop gave the field
the same kind of trefoil crop it had
hadbackin 1966 when it was first
planted.
With the difficulty of working up
the heavy clay soil, this discovery
gives new optimism to the future of
the pasture. With this kind of
results, Mr. Wells said, the fields
couldbeinpasturefor25yearsor
longer.
One of the discoveries of mana
ging the pasture over the years has
been to graze more heavily, he says.
In the early years 250 cattle would be
turned into a 100-acre field and they
would patch graze, eating what they
wanted and leaving the rest with
resulting programs-. He feels that
thiswasoneofthe problems with the
killing out of the trefoil, that the
cattle didn’t graze closely enough to
give the trefoil an edge over the
grasses. Heavier grazing keeps the
grass down so the trefoil has a
chance and also keeps weeds from
being a problem, he says.
e
HEART
AND STROKE
FOUNDATION
OF ONTARIO
IMPROVING
YOUR ODDS
AGAINST
CANADA'S
#1 KILLER.
Times change way OAAAF helps
SHARRON MOTYCKA,
Blyth Branch
NEIL THOMPSON
Continued from page B2
and second in a whole group of
other commodities.
He credits Huron’s politicians by
helping keep it that way through
instituting the first county land-use
plan. The consultation work with
farmers at the time helped pave the
way, he recalls. Farmers showed
they didn’t want to see the farm
country fragmented by pockets of
urban development among the
farms.
There may be new stresses on
the system in the tougher times he
says. Pressure from people moving
out of Kitchener and Cambridge to
save money on housing combined
with low prices for farm goods may
make some farmers want to get the
money for selling off pieces of their
land. That urban pressure, where
city-dwellers find they can buy a
whole Huron county farm complete
with house for less than they’d pay
for a city bungalow has already
driven up some farm prices hurting
other farmers who want to stay in
business. Still many of these
urbanites turn around and rent out
the land to other farmers so there
may be a gain.
Over his 22 years as Ag. Rep.,
Mr. Pullen has seen the work of his
Office change. The early years
featured what he calls the exten
sive approach as more workshops
and meetings were held with
groups of farmers. Over the years
more intensive work has gone on,
working directly with each farmer.
“Everybody’s goals and objectives
are different” he says, so more
individual attention is needed. The
seminars and workshops now are
often handled by Centralia College
or by the Huron Industrial Training
Advisory Committee.
Most of the programs offered by
OMAF over the years have grown
out of needs expressed at the
grassroots level, he says. Interest
of the farmers is passed on up the
chain of command and programs
are developed to meet the needs.
“I’ve always tried to stress the
open-door policy,” he says, ending
most discussions at meetings with
the invitation to come to OMAF
staff with problems or with sugges
tions for new programs.
He praises his staff at Clinton as
“a topnotch group”. There has
also been great stability in the
organization which had helped his
office give a more comprehensive
service to farmers.
But he is high in his praise of
farmers. He recalls how people like
Norman Alexander and Don Lobb
and Bruce Shillinglaw made contri
butions to changing the way farm
ing is done with conservation
practices. He remembers attending
a meeting in Blyth where former
Deputy Minister of Agriculture
Gordon Bennett (another former
Huron Ag. Rep.) was speaking.
Norman Alexander asked Mr. Pul
len who was responsible in the
province for looking after the
combined problems of soil and
water conservation. Not knowing
the answer, Mr. Pullen introduced
Mr. Alexander to Mr. Bennett who
was asked the same question. Mr.
Bennett admitted there needed to
be more work to develop some
co-ordination in the area and out of
that discussion the Huron Soil and
Water Conservation District was
born. Some of OMAF’s policies
have developed out of that initia
tive by Huron County farmers, he
says.
Recent programs to encourage
more conservation practices in
farming have been hugely popular
and he hopes that it will have
a lasting effect on how farming is
done.
Farming remains a precarious
existence. “A lot of things have to
go well in order to turn a profit
down on the farm”, he says.
‘‘There isn’t much margin for
error.” A lot of people have
observed that every day has to be
productive on the farm. In many
businesses you can take a sick day
or just a day that isn’t very
productive and you still get a pay
cheque but not in farming.
Still that old optimism of the
Huron farmer comes out. There are
still good opportunities for farming
in Huron, he says. If you can make
money anywhere, you can do it in
Huron. In the upcoming months as
he takes more time to help his wife
Florence run her sheep farm east of
Clinton, he’ll be out to prove it.
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