What I Learned About Grass at the KHSI Expo: Part IV

 

Here is the fourth section of my notes on grass. Needless to say, I took a LOT of notes during Woody Lane’s lecture…

 

What I Learned About Grass at the KHSI Expo: Part I

I’m not sure if I can say which speaker had the most exciting information at The Expo, there were several highlights. But this was one of the top ones for me: Dr. Woody Lane’s two-hour discussion on pasture management and grass. Dr. Lane owns and operates Lane’s Livestock Services, a consulting firm. (I couldn’t find a website to which I could link…). And, everyone seems to just call him Woody. He lives in Roseburg, OR, and frequently teaches a very extensive animal nutrition course in that area.

Woody is an engaging and animated speaker, started out his talk with these fightin’ words: “Pasture rotation doesn’t work.” :-0

 

What I Learned At Summer Camp

Well, not summer camp exactly. But I just got back from a four-day trip to Corvallis, OR to attend the Katahdin Hair Sheep International Expo and Sale. I really enjoyed it, they had great farm tours, speakers, and a sheep sale. I bought a few sheep too! I’ll try to write about the highlights, as best as I can capture all that I absorbed there.

 

Giving Field Fence a Little Lift

When I am starting to attach T-post clips to a newly strung fence, I find that it can be heavy work lifting and pushing the fence up against the posts. Field fencing is so heavy (about 200 lbs for a 330 foot roll), it wants to sag or lay down on the ground. I never get the T-posts in a perfectly straight line or perfectly vertical, so there is always some pushing required to get the fence to meet up with them.

If I’m fencing a curve, it’s even worse. Though I know it’s convention to have the fencing material sit on the outside of a curve, I chose differently in several spots on this pasture. I think it’s more important to have the fencing on the side where livestock will be pushing the most, so that when they push, the pressure gets put on the posts, not on the fasteners. So, that has left me with inside curves where I need to push the field fencing, sometimes a foot or two from the main line of travel, against the posts, to fasten it to them.

 

Forensic Analysis of an Old H-Brace

This is a very, very old fencing H-brace that I just removed from our pasture. I would venture a guess that it is part of the original farm homestead, and was probably installed before 1910. It is interesting to see that people in our region are still building these the same way, and to see where this one failed as it aged. Most of the old fencing from this place is gone, but there are a few stretches here and there that remain, half-consumed by nature.