Drive through a major cattle producing area in Kentucky from December to March and you will see tractors hauling round bales.  Sometimes they will be going from a barnlot directly to a feeding area.  Sometimes they will be traveling on a public road to get to a more remote spot where cattle are located.  Sometimes this hay will be fed in a drylot, sometimes it will be fed on the edge of a pasture next to the road, and sometimes you will even see this hay unrolled out in the pasture.  

There are usually at least a few weeks during a typical Kentucky winter when it is exceedingly muddy and difficult to feed these round bales without causing significant damage to pasture areas.  Imagine not having to use a tractor during those periods to feed your hay.  Now imagine not having to use a tractor to feed during the entire winter.  

Drive through a major cattle producing area in late March after the first few nice days of early spring and you will see buggy tracks every 30-40 feet traversing the pastures on many of these same farms, where fertilizer was just spread onto depleted soils. Now imagine this pasture growing the heaviest forage growth you have ever seen on that farm and imagine doing this without any commercial fertilizer whatsoever.

To many, feeding hay without a tractor and having lush pastures without fertilizing would be inconceivable.  However, the last few years we have seen a growing number of cattle farms in Kentucky change their hay feeding system and experience exactly this by using a feeding technique called Bale Grazing.  Bales are set out on pasture before winter and fed in a planned, controlled manner, somewhat like rotational grazing.  You don’t need a tractor to feed during the winter, and you don’t have a mess to clean up at the end of the winter.

I saw this technique in practice in the northeast about nine years ago and was impressed with its potential.  I have been experimenting with this on my own cattle farm for the last seven winters and have been refining it for Kentucky conditions.  I’ve also been working with a farm in Green County for the last four winters, and two farms in Anderson County this last winter helping them implement bale grazing.  One of the two partners on the Green County farm presented on bale grazing at the national-level American Forage and Grassland Council annual meeting in 2018.  One county agent in Kentucky has been experimenting with bale grazing on his farm (and had a nice write-up with pictures in his monthly newsletter), and three more county agents are helping farmers implement bale grazing (Anderson, Adair, and Grayson Counties).  Out of four main topics I present in Master Cattlemen, this is the one that consistently has had the highest increase in knowledge/understanding.  In my opinion, bale grazing one of the easiest management changes that can be made that will have a major impact on profitability.

I started promoting bale grazing in Kentucky once I was sure it could be done effectively here (with two on-farm demonstration projects over multiple years).  The last two years I have been making a big push with this hay feeding technique, both in Kentucky and nationally.  In Kentucky I have had two articles published in the Cow Country News, have had eleven extension meetings, and have had over a dozen farm visits related to bale grazing in the last year.

Nationally, I have written two articles related to bale grazing in Progressive Forages (circulation 46,000) at their invitation: “Bale Grazing: Increasing Pasture Fertility while Reducing Machinery Costs” in   November 2018 and “Fertilizer Value of Feeding Hay” in January 2019.  In fall 2018 I was awarded a SARE On-Farm Research grant (Bale Grazing: On-Farm Evaluation in the Upper South) to start preliminary data collection on nutrient flows and forage production comparing bale grazed pastures to controls.  My plan is to use this two-year grant as a stepping stone for continued long-run research on bale grazing through NRCS.  Four other states will be part of this grant that will be submitted in 2020.