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Good nutritious grasses and forbs, healthy cattle, biologically active soil, and nobody ever said it was going to be easy.
Root Prairie Galloways is situated on an old farm that had been row cropped with minimum inputs or erosion control methods on the rolling hills just off the edge of the prairie. The old practices left us the subsoil layer in most areas as what we had to work with. Being located on a somewhat direct runoff outlet to the river it is important to us to be able to use this farm with as many perennial crops as possible to reduce the frequency of tillage and bare soil open to erosion and nutrient translocation into the river water.
Early on we established two plantings of Big Bluestem grass, those are permanent, and last year we grazed them for the first time with good results.
We wanted to develop a plan that included livestock to help us jump start the biology. Turning old eroded and beat fields into balanced living breathing soils is a challenge and requires giving a lot back. Grazing cattle and using them to harvest the suns energy to make healthy meat is the path we chose as the best management practice for this particular farm at this point in time.
Galloway cattle are busy out on the hills bringing the biological life back into this old corn field turned pasture. They are eating and cycling nutrients and trampling tons of material down to the soil surface to become decomposed and turned into organic matter.
mullein
