Did you know that winter is the time that soil builds the fastest here in VA?

…And you can use your wastes RIGHT NOW in different ways to accelerate that?

Here is another snippet from the Peaceful Valley rehab project that shows how we used the hay feeding program, combined with the right amount of recovery, to rehabilitate a severely overgrazed field.

Instead of trying to keep the hay off the ground, we fed it each day on the ground and covered the high traffic and muddier areas first. Then, each feeding we moved it farther away, so that the animals mixed in their manures and had to walk back over the hay residues on the way back to the water and shed. When we were done, we had a nicely smashed layer cake of hay and manure – hopefully with the seeds of the hay and manures stomped into contact with the soil, so they could germinate and feed microbes, and with a light covering of stems on top.

So we used the animals to mix in the seed and fertilizer for the new spring grass you see growing in the video. Leaving hay on the ground is not a waste – as it feeds the microbes and creates the right habitat for healthy plant growth.

Remember to feed your BELOW GROUND herd so that in the spring they are ready to perform come green-up!

By providing the right BALANCE of fungal and bacterial foods, we regenerated the field quickly and with NO EXTRA COSTS. We are using our wastes to generate profits.

So you can start now to use your hay feeding program to spread hay (food for the soil fungi) and manure and urine (food for bacteria) over the soil that was severely overgrazed.

Grazer’s TIP: Be proactive and cover the areas likely to get too much traffic BEFORE the plants are destroyed. If you cover it with hay, it leaves the growing tips protected and warm all winter so you will get exponentially more growth in the spring! Also, recovery is key – so let it REST once it is covered, for new seeds to germinate and grow.

I wanted to take time to say thank you for being part of our community. From the winter solstice, here is something to add a bit of cheer – a free inspirational tidbit that looks forward to the spring!

This clip was from a pasture restoration project we call Peaceful Valley. The field had been turned to mud a few months before, and we used the hay feeding program to cover the land and fertilize it, reseed it without any added inputs. Nothing more than using the wastes in a different way than normal.

Bottom line was the remediation got us a better field and cost us no more than what we had invested already in the hay we were feeding. Changing how we did things got us DRAMATICALLY better results.

In this clip, the field is recovering and we are looking at how to know when it is ready to re-graze. We will be sending more of the story in the weeks ahead.

We have grown a lot and gotten a lot of amazing progress in developing our farm in 2016. We will be releasing more free videos to share with you over the next few weeks and months. If you get on Facebook, be sure to follow our Simple Soil Solutions page as we will also be putting out a lot of great stuff there.