My trainees thought THIS was a perfect pasture!

In 2009, I learned there is a big difference between what trained, weed-eating cows and people think of as perfect pasture.  That year, my trainees gave up on grass almost completely, and focused on the enormous variety of weeds in pasture.  To learn more about what they ate, click here.

But just because the cows don’t care about grass, doesn’t mean that weeds are what we want to grow.  Boulder County Parks and Open Space is managing for biodiversity, and to provide forage and habitat for wildlife, as well as recreational opportunities for residents, and weeds just won’t do.  So for the next three years, we’re going to use our cows’s willingness to eat weeds combined with some different management practices, to provide everyone, including the cows and ranchers, with what they want.

This three-year project is funded by Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education.  We’ll be using trained cattle, along with high stocking densities to:  1) improve the water cycle, nutrient cycling and energy flow in the system, 2) prevent erosion, 3) reduce invasive species, and 4) increase native plant density, cover and production.

Brothers Babe and Leo Hogan are 4th generation ranchers in Boulder County. They own the cows that I trained to eat weeds and have been strong supporters of weed research in Boulder County.

We have 6 ranchers participating in the project, providing cattle and advice.  Their participation is critical because we want the demonstration to give examples useful to producers for managing their cattle to improve both ecosystem function and rancher profitability.

Our demonstration area is a 500 acre pasture owned by Boulder County and managed as open space with a mandate for preserving native ecosystems and providing opportunities for recreation and agriculture.  It has been impacted by almost a decade of drought, and extended period of use by prairie dog colonies, and years of invading non-natives, particularly bindweed, mustard, diffuse knapweed, dalmatian toadflax, musk and Canada thistle, ragweed and pigweed.  A prairie dog colony covered about 200 acres of this pasture until 2009 when plague reduced the population to almost zero.  Prairie dog contributions to the pasture’s problems can be seen in increased invasive species and severe erosion.

We will be working with “Mob Grazing” as a tool for improving ecosystem function and increasing forage production.  Typically mob-grazers use smaller pastures to focus animals and move them when they have “eaten half and trampled half” of the forage available.  The combination of vegetative material, urine and manure improves the soil and natural cycles, even enhancing soil carbon sequestration.  Since fencing and small pastures can be an issue in the larger scales of western ranches, we hope to take what we learn and extrapolate it to a method that makes sense at this scale.

We’ll be monitoring changes with rangeland health assessments, water infiltration testing and photo monitoring.  Stay tuned for updates!