LANGHAM, Sask. — There are many ways to create a new pasture, but focusing on grazing strategy, field history and climate makes the options more manageable.
For Steven Balzer, there were several factors with a piece of old hay land he purchased two years ago just outside of Langham, Sask .
He wanted to intensively graze the land and looked to the On-Farm Climate Action Fund (OFCAF) to help put together the fencing and system he needed.
His proposal was rejected in the first round of funding, but when an approved project didn’t work out, the Canadian Forage and Grasslands Association, which administers some of the funding for OFCAF, turned to Balzer’s project, located near the site of the Ag In Motion trade show.
Balzer and the association held a tour in conjunction with AIM in July, where about 30 cattle grazed about half of the property. Balzer plans to fence the rest of the property but scaled it back when he didn’t originally receive the funding.
Balzer’s design follows Steve Kenyon’s one-alley design for an advanced grazing system. Kenyon is a consultant for the forage and grassland association related to grazing systems.
Kenyon, who operates Greener Pastures Ranching Ltd. in Alberta, was also at the tour and was a speaker at AIM.
The Langham area has had low precipitation in 2023, with Balzer and some of his neighbours at the tour saying the area has had only about 75 millimetres of precipitation in 2023. The town average for an entire year is about 350 mm.
“It’s been a really tough two years,” says Balzer.
Despite the lack of precipitation, Balzer says that an advanced grazing system will allow him to graze more cattle on the property’s pastures.
“It’ll definitely impact the number of animals that we’ll be able to have per acre,” he says.
As the farm was in hay for many years previously, he will have to learn how many cattle the pasture will carry.
Kenyon says it will also depend on rainfall.
“Rainfall is the most important nutrient,” he says. “Getting started in a drought is hard to do,” he adds, and encourages patience.
“It takes time to manage for a water cycle.”
The fact that Balzer is turning a hay field into pasture is a benefit, says Kenyon. It already has perennial root systems, which will help it manage through years with low moisture.
Kenyon assesses grazing systems using the acronym GRASS: graze period, rest period, animal impact, stock density and soil armour.
A hay field already fits many of the criteria of a healthy grazing system, including a grazing period — when the field is cut and harvested, and a rest period — in between cuttings. However, the nutrients are removed from the field and the livestock aren’t there to return nutrients back to the soil.
“We’re not getting that biological animal impact,” but hay fields “usually kick into gear faster than an old pasture.”
Kenyon has several strategies for managing the plants in an old hay field that’s being turned into pasture. By the time a hay field is several years into its current incarnation, it is getting thin in spots.
Kenyon has broadcast seed and zero-tilled new seeds into the ground, but he also recommends patience, and in dry areas, prioritizing water-holding capacity.
“Depending on how rough it is, my most successful way to rejuvenate a pasture is actually just deferred grazing,” he says.
He’ll let it grow for a season without grazing and then put the cattle in to “stomp it into the ground.”
“That allows the root system to dig deep. It allows it to go to seed formation, and then we stomp that material into the ground and it gives us a thatch layer. That gets us water-holding capacity for next year.”
The challenge is the financial cost of not having that plot of land produce revenue through grazing that year.
He says he’d recommend broadcasting legumes into the mostly grass hay field at the Balzer pasture to increase plant diversity. Frost seeding would also work — getting seeds onto the field after the snow is gone but when the temperatures still hit freezing overnight and are then warmer during the day, he said.
Planning for future droughts is always on Kenyon’s mind.
“Especially in this environment (in central Saskatchewan), what’s your most important nutrient? Water by far.”
Kenyon gets about 380 mm of precipitation in an average year where he ranches in Alberta, but he can get years of drought, and plans for it, especially during good years.
If there are 30 paddocks in an advanced grazing system, he says he’ll leave two or three out of use in a year, letting the plants flourish, put down larger roots and set seed. It will also help rejuvenate the biology of the soils, which Kenyon says is a major challenge for Canadian agriculture.
“I don’t believe we have a fertility issue in agriculture. I believe we have a biological issue. We need to get the biology back working in our soils,” he says.
There’s another good reason to get roots working deeper in the soil at Balzer’s Langham pasture. Kenyon pushed soil probes into the soil and found that much of the land, other than some lower areas, which were likely wet spots, was compacted at about five inches.
That means the land was cultivated until about 10 to 15 years ago, and the compaction layer still exists. Deep-rooted crops, such as pasture grasses and legumes, will eventually break through that layer and help increase the water-holding capacity of the soil.
In the shorter term, Balzer plans to extend the time on pasture for the cattle through bale grazing in an area where there’s some downed timber he’s been cleaning up. He will then bring in some replacement heifers in April next year and bale graze them until the pasture is ready for grazing.
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