We can also take care of your animals year round. We provide swath grazing and custom feeding at very competitive rates. Our low stress animal handling and year round grazing management gives you high quality animal care.

Bale Grazing

At Greener Pastures, our fertilizer program consists of bringing in nutrients to recycle them through the animals. When we have to feed stored forage, we place or unroll bales in the pasture allowing the animals to 'graze' the bales without the confinement of a feedlot. This is better for the health of the animal and in turn distributes the manure out on the land for us, saving unnecessary labor and equipment. This adds organic matter and nutrients to the soil creating a natural soil improvement.

Our fencing system allows us to place a month's worth of feed out at a time. Once that is done, our chores consist of opening a gate every other day. Again, this method of feeding saves labor and machinery costs.

Mineral is also fed to the animals year round which helps bring in micro-nutrients to help replentish the nutrients removed. Our fertilizer program is very simple. 80% of what goes into an animal comes out of an animal. Therefore, we need to replace the 20% and recycle the 80%.

Most agricultural practices remove 90% of the nutrients off the land which then needs to be replaced with high priced inputs. We just have to know how to effectively recycle the 80%.

Swath Grazing

Swath grazing at Greener Pastures is practiced for a number of reasons:

1. Lowers the feed cost for our contributors

2. Removes confinement feeding

3. Spreads manure more economically

4. Reduces labor and machinery costs

We move a portable electric fence every second day, allowing the cattle to graze the swath with very little labor and machinery costs. We have grazed through two feet of snow. We have grazed through freezing rain and we have grazed until the end of April.

We don't swath graze right through the winter every year, but we definitely can help lengthen the grazing season and reduce overal expenses for your cow herd.