cows eating hay in pasture in snow

How to Improve Your Pasture (For Free)

How to Improve & Reseed Your Pasture This Winter (For Free)

Pasture seed sure isn’t cheap! Perhaps you’re wondering how you’ll afford to re-seed it. This simple way of feeding your livestock hay this winter will spread seed and fertilizer right where you need it! You’ll have better pasture before you know it!

This fall, for the first time in our homesteading career, we purchased pasture seed. We’re feeling very blessed that our new homestead actually has a pasture. As opposed to the lawn we tried to graze our cows on at our last homestead. We learned the hard way that trying to graze livestock on what is basically a lawn is poor animal husbandry. Our animals need, no deserve, better than that! Their bodies require more nutrition than they’ll find in the species of grass growing in a lawn.

While we do have a pasture, it was overstocked and that with horses. Horses can be very hard on a pasture and there is much room for improvement.

How to Improve & Reseed Your Pasture This Winter (For Free)

A couple acres of the pasture had to have some earth moving done and is now bare. It turned out it was too late in the year to risk seeding it not knowing what the weather would do. And after the sticker shock of buying that 50 pounds of pasture seed mix,  we sure weren’t about to risk losing it!!

Since we now know the cost of the seed, improving our grazing land is going to be something that happens over several years utilizing a rotational grazing plan. We will also control weeds using sheep. Getting better pasture is a top priority though, knowing that the body condition of our cattle will, in turn, be improved by the quality of the grass.

One way that we can work on that, without spending a dime is to be strategic about how we feed hay throughout the winter.

How to Reseed Your Pasture This Winter (For Free)

Over the years, we’ve managed hay feeding and winter-time manure accumulation two ways.

How to Improve Your Pasture (For Free)

The first (and the messiest) way is to make a “sacrifice area.”

Basically, a sacrifice area is a portion of the pasture that you section off and give up as ever being worth anything. The cow(s) will be up to their knees in muck and manure if the ground doesn’t freeze. Throwing down some straw goes a long way to helping keep it somewhat under control. What’s wonderful about this method is that when the ground dries out, you can come in with a tractor scooping up all that manure and straw. This makes great compost and your gardens really happy!

Should you have a tractor. Which we don’t.

Combined with our half our herd being “open” we’re facing a long winter with no drying off period before calving this year. (Ugh. That makes me so mad! It really stinks that they won’t be calving on good grass!) Keeping dairy cows in a sacrifice area makes for a nasty job twice a day of cleaning them off for milking.

How to Improve & Reseed Your Pasture This Winter (For Free)

So all things considered, and so long as the ground is frozen this winter, we’ll be working on improving the pastures instead of collecting manure for the gardens.

This second method of hay feeding and manure management is to systematically feed the cows right on the ground. The hay gets spread out in short rows covering strips of ground.

How to Improve & Reseed Your Pasture This Winter (For Free)

This accomplishes 4 things:

{Re-Seeds the Pasture}

The hay bales drop their seeds into the ground. You’re reseeding your pasture… for free!

{Fertilizer}

It forces the cows to directly deposit urine and manure right where you’d like it to go, fertilizing the grass.

{Protects the Ground}

Keeps the cows from congregating in only a few spots all winter, damaging the earth.

{Less Mess}

There’s a greater chance that they’ll come into the barn clean at milking time.

And, hopefully, one day, I might be able to give you an update! I can’t wait to share the improvements made in the quality of the pasture grass and the how long we’re able to keep them on fresh grass!

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Last update on 2024-03-27 at 17:53 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

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16 Comments

  1. I have 2 mini horses that are in a fairly small pasture. They have overgrazed and parts of it just don’t grow grass or good grass anyway. I’ve put a big round bale in the middle for this winter & I’ll spread it out when they’re done (before spring). I could keep them in the dry lot outside the barn so the grass can grow but it’s not that big & I feel badly. The look at me longingly to let them out. Lol

    1. It definitely can be a tricky balance to find when we have limits on how much pasture we can provide, for sure! I know our cows are pretty fed up with being cooped up for the winter too. One day not too long ago our 10 yo Jersey had enough of it and refused to go back in the barn and went bucking and kicking all over the yard like a youngin’- 😀

  2. Thanks for sharing how you manage that with the round bales! We have a different goal this year while we're using rounds (trying to destroy sod while adding fertility to future garden space) but it's good to know going forward.

  3. We've been doing this for years. We have bale feeders, for the big round bales, but we routinely drop a bale on any areas that are bare. This may seem like a waste, the cattle eat a lot of it, but a lot is stomped into the ground. The cattle aren't walking in mud, the babies make beds in it, and in the spring the seeds make a lovely yard of just the type of grass the cattle love to eat and it's good for them! When it's really cold and nasty/snowy or wet we feed in the lean-to on the side of the barn. That gets scraped up several times thru the winter and spring and piled out of the way and in a few years you have awesome black dirt to put on your garden site. Be sure to use newspaper or cardboard, tho, or you'll have a fine crop of datura and such that strangles out some of your milder seed.

  4. Very interesting to see what you are doing to rebuild pasture. We had a similar experience with our beef cattle which we had on two rotating areas about an acre each. After three years all the cows are now butchered and delicious but the ground needs some lighter use for while. I am letting the small flock of 8 sheep forage on it, after it was fallow for 5 months.

  5. We do a combination: we hay out on the pasture all winter until spring thaw, we then put them in a paddock with bedding to let the grass get at least 6″ tall before we start grazing. This makes the grass much stronger and keeps the cows from pugging up the pasture with the mud. Making great progress so far!

    1. We do this too. Pretty much they get closed into the sacrifice area whenever the ground isn’t frozen. Thankfully, it has been much of this year. But we’ve officially entered the season of mud. We’re grateful that the pasture next door is vacant and we have permission to keep it grazed so they don’t have to mow it. The lay of the land is much nicer and it’s not nearly so muddy over there and we’ve been able to keep them out of it some.

  6. This is great Quinn and exactly how we do it on our farm! The less mess is excellent and the benefits in the Spring are awesome!

    1. We had to borrow one today to pull Bill’s truck out of the mud while he was getting firewood. He was dropping hints. He can beg all he wants, it doesn’t make the money appear! Thank you Lord for kind and generous tractor-owning neighbors!! 🙂

  7. I can certainly appreciate this post as we’re knee deep into pasture building right now. Any books you recommend? Ihave a subscription to the stockman grass farmer, but they’re too advanced for rookies! Allan nation has some good stuff, but again, so advanced. You can bet we’ll be trying this method out though. Blessings and merry christmas to you and your precious family!

    1. YES! I can’t believe I forgot to mention it- how very uncharacteristic of me 😉 I LOVED All Flesh is Grass by Gene Logsdon! Well written, not at all boring, I loved his stories about arguing with THE Bob Evans over their favorite grass. I found it at the library, but will be buying it for our bookshelf- way too much info not too- and it was written in such a way that there are no bullet points so I’ll be busting out the highlighter on my copy. Here’s the link to it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804010692/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0804010692&linkCode=as2&tag=reformationacres05-20&linkId=7PXSQZTUXTIOEX5H

    2. There is some good information offered by the OSU state extension office here in the Rogue Valley on mud abatement and managing small farms.

      1. Do any of these address mud management/ pasture improvements for horses rather than for cows.

        1. The same pasture improvements would work with horse pastures. Just keep in mind that the sacrifice area will always be mud. There is just too much traffic for anything to grow. Good landscaping for rain water runoff, etc. helps with mud, but there will be spots, especially near the barn that will have mud when wet, unless you invest in mud stop products like panels you put down, etc.