Getting Ready for Spring

by Jim Gerrish

Beef Magazine

Even if you still have snow covering your pastures and the groundhog says it’s another six weeks of winter, it’s time to be thinking about getting your pastures ready for Spring. Spring is always a busy season on the ranch so it’s best to have a plan made for where you’re headed and what you need to get done. Here are some Spring jobs to be thinking about.

If you took soil samples last fall and need to apply P and K or other micronutrients, fertilizer can be applied as soon as the snow goes off. In the wetter part of the US, spreading fertilizer with a bit of frost in the ground can allow you to get over ground you may not be able to cross in another month. You don’t want to apply fertilizer with the ground frozen a solid foot or two deep due to run-off risk. Just hit it after the main thaw when a spring cold snap firms the surface again.

What about applying N for spring pasture? I generally don’t advise it on a large scale. Most graziers already have too much spring pasture and adding N just aggravates the problem. For a lot of folks, that 40-60 lb of N applied before green-up translates to brush hogging a ton of wasted grass in July. Better to save the N application for later in the season when it can help you grow grass when you really need it.

If you need to jump-start some pasture for early grazing, consider using 30-40 lb of N on about 1/3rd of your pastures. The extra early grass can let you can get cattle off hay and onto grass a couple weeks earlier. Choose the pastures most likely to be grazed at the start of the season and fertilize only those. Avoid early N fertilization and grazing on swampy pastures where early grazing can do a lot of soil damage. With high cost of N, use N fertilizer as a specific management tool, not a blanket treatment.

What about dragging pastures? If you’re going to do it, plan to do it as early as possible. As soon as the manure piles are no longer frozen is the time to get after it. Hit those pastures with the most accumulation from winter grazing or hay feeding first. In mixed grass-legume pastures there are lots of legume seeds in those piles wanting to germinate. If you drag them early, more of those seeds will come in contact with the soil and be more likely to germinate and help keep your legume stand going. If you wait until the manure piles are little green hills covered with clover seedlings, you are destroying your seed bank. The rule with dragging is the earlier the better.

The rest of the work I don’t have to remind you about. Elk have smashed the fences, snow drifts have pulled wire off the posts, the tank you didn’t get drained froze and broke. You cattlemen in the South, count your blessings now. Those of us in the North and West will count ours in the summer time!