Taking care of forage takes care of all the rest.

You can’t talk to John Spain very long about his ranch in northwest Arkansas without hearing him say the words, “total forage management.”

It’s his way of saying he has tried to think and work completely through every aspect of his Hindsville ranching operation and operate it as logically and efficiently as possible, with all the pieces fitting together as smoothly as a jigsaw puzzle.

The result of his efforts is at least 600 pounds of beef per acre every year with a minimum of inputs and a very manageable amount of labor.

Spain and his wife, Becky, run cattle on 219 acres of pasture in their 300-acre property in the hilly country about 15 miles east of Fayetteville. They move the cattle through 35 paddocks, in herd sizes of 65 cows or about that equivalent. This year each of those paddocks will produce enough forage for about 10 harvests, mostly by grazing but sometimes by silage cutting.

The Spains choose silage over the more traditional choice of hay because they have gone to great lengths to produce good quality forage; only silage can consistently capture that quality when forage growth begins to outpace the cattle.

Good forage is what?

There’s a subtle point to understanding Spain’s operation: don’t focus on just the silage or on any single aspect. Each action has reasons and functions beyond the obvious, and each method interlocks with other pieces to form the whole picture—just like the parts of that jigsaw puzzle we mentioned a moment ago.

For example, a person could ask John Spain, “Why grow good forage?”

His answer is that good forage health and more diverse forage help develop soil and that the combination provides higher productivity, which allows more cattle per acre and more profits at lower fixed costs.

He also believes that better forage provides a longer growing season, more drought resistance and better uptake of nutrients. Good nutrient uptake is important to Spain, allowing him relatively high application rates of turkey litter yet keeping those nutrients out of the scenic War Eagle Creek, which forms the north boundary of the Spains’ rolling property. The younger, more nutritious state in which the Spains keep the farm’s forage also improves  habitat for dung beetles. These insects bury manure, capturing nitrogen and phosphorus that might otherwise be washed into the bordering river.

Snip, click, snap! The pieces of Spains’ puzzle go together.

Changes wrought

When the Spains bought the ranch in the mid 1980s it was rough—so rough in fact that it had to be mowed every year to keep brush from overtaking all the pastures.

“When we got this place it was so grown up and brushy…if you got horseback you might be able to see a cow,” Spain said.

“It was in fescue but you had to cut the brush every year. I had an old dozer and I pushed out a lot of brush with it. Some of the stumps had grown new suckers and expanded out until they were as big as our living room and I could barely push them,” he added.

Spain said he began early with a “traditional rotation,” meaning he moved the cattle around a little bit, but did not have enough stock density, nor did he really understand why he was doing it. That would change very soon.

Spain began to learn about the advantages of more intense rotational grazing when he split 26 acres into six paddocks and began to rotate 65 cow-calf pairs through, averaging graze periods of about 5 days per paddock and rest periods of 25 days per paddock.

“The cows realized it was a success before I did,” Spain said.

The animals were moving onto fresh new forage, which had a better balance of protein and energy. The land began to improve: clovers and grasses other than fescue began to appear, filling grazing gaps. That made for healthier cattle, especially in periods when most of the region’s ranchers battle fescue toxicity.

These days, the base forage on the Spain ranch is divided into about half warm-season and half cool-season with the entire ranch in 6-acre paddocks—except for one 20-acre paddock which is often divided into strips with portable electric fence. The warm-season base is bermudagrass. The cool-season base is fescue, but a trip through the pastures shows just how varied the forage in these pastures really is.

White clover is scattered densely throughout. There are several forage species present in any particular paddock. Spain adds to that yearly with crabgrass seed broadcast into cool-season paddocks and forage rye and annual ryegrass overseeded into warm-season paddocks. These costs are minimized because these desired forage species reseed to some degree during the defoliation and rest cycle Spain supplies via grazing and silage cutting. These mixtures of warm- and cool-season forages work well because as one type of forage fades, Spain applies grazing or cutting to remove the competition of mature forage and let the new crop of grass bloom.

That biodiversity thing

“There’s no monoculture anywhere,” Spain said. “I want what grows. If it grows here under my management, it’s adapted to this farm.”

“There are big advantages to biodiversity in your pastures,” he added. “Those cattle have taste buds just like you and I do. They like different things.”

Biodiversity means many different biological forms. For cattle, a smorgasbord of forage species means they can eat things with different nutrients. Over these years while the Spain pastures have improved, their cattle have eaten less mineral, even though it is available on a free-choice basis, he said.

For comparison, he said that the cattle he runs on a nearby rental property eat three times the amount of free-choice mineral. That particular monoculture fescue pasture was typical of most pastures in the region when Spain rented it a couple of years ago. But Spain’s rotation already has spurred clover and a few other grasses to appear in the paddocks. Biodiverse pastures are less subject to drought, which means in dry weather Spain needs a less severe destocking plan in extreme droughts.

“When we have a dry spell I’ll brown up 2 to 3 weeks behind everyone else, and in the spring I’ll green up 2 to 3 weeks ahead of everyone else,” he said.

Soil matters

“The organic matter in my soils is really being built by our grazing program,” Spain said. “There is as much plant growing underneath the ground as above it, and each time plants are grazed, they don’t need all those roots. Some of the feeder roots die off, leaving their organic material. The plants grow new roots as they regrow their forage material and the whole process happens over again.”

Speaking of litter

The Spains have three turkey houses on their land and spread 400 tons of litter per year across their property. Although poultry litter has received much attention and blame for pollution of streams across the Ozark region, monitoring equipment shows the Spains have no such problems.

The Arkansas Soil and Water Commission put in water monitoring devices upstream and downstream of the Spains’ property and monitored every rain of 1 inch or more. The agency found no change in water quality from water entering to water leaving the Spains’ property line.

Spain is certain that’s because another piece to his total forage management puzzle: He tries to keep pastures green and growing at all times. This not only increases the amount of forage grown for livestock, it uses more nutrients and prevents their escape into the watershed.

That hay problem

Despite John Spain’s efforts to keep forage growing all year, cattle need a little help in those coldest months. Some native-grass operations with enough paddocks can eliminate hay, but that is difficult with an introduced-grass forage base, and it’s especially hard in wetter climates.

Spain solves this problem not with hay, but with silage. He chooses silage because he can put it up any time of year. He likes to have 30 days of forage stockpiled ahead of his cattle by July 1 and 45 days stockpiled by Aug. 1, but when the paddocks get too far ahead, Spain wants to capture the forage quality he works so hard to attain.

In the region where Spain and the readers of Today’s Farmer live, haying is tough enough in the hot summertime and nearly impossible during rain-prone spring, but Spain can cut and store quality forage almost anytime. He uses a direct-harvest silage machine for harvest and later feeds from the same trailer that hauls silage to storage. One of the main reasons he keeps cow herds at 65 head or equivalent is because that is exactly the herd size he needs to eat the amount of silage he can feed from the trailer.

Thinking and thinking

Spain is a sophisticated grazier, at times using two or even three herds in succession. He sometimes runs stocker cattle in the first wave, letting them take just the high quality tops of the forage. Next come wet cows. With their moderate re-quirements for quality they take the forage down a little farther. Last in the succession Spain sometimes runs dry cows, whose low nutritional needs make them a better candidate to eat and digest the roughest forage. He manages this juggled grazing with spring- and fall-calving cows, buying stocker cattle during times of rapid grass growth. “If you’ve got forage you can do anything you want to,” he said.