Typical farming news today.
We planted oats in a new pasture to provide some grazing during the summer slump. We repeated that in the early fall for our sheep to enjoy as temperatures started to fall.
We always do testing on our forages to balance the minerals we give our sheep. Before grazing the pasture, I take a sample and send it off to a nutritional lab for analysis. Because small grains can produce high nitrates, it makes sense to always test nitrate levels.
Unfortunately, our June testing revealed that our oats pasture was unusually high in nitrates – high enough to require limiting the sheep’s grazing time and supplementing them with hay. This was doable, but it clearly wasn’t ideal.
We checked with our extension and with other folks, and were told to wait and re-test before grazing it again. Nitrate levels often go down with time, and the plants might have just been stressed from our hot summer, and on the way to recovering naturally.
We’re now at the time when we need to graze that field. I sent off another sample for testing, hoping that, as they’d suggested, the nitrates had gone down over time. Well, the results are back, and the nitrates are so high that we can’t graze the field at all! With 200 sheep to feed, we had really planned on having those oats as finishing feed for our lambs and flushing feed for the ewes. Now, it’ll probably just go to waste. Perhaps the wildlife will get a chance to enjoy some before we figure out what to do with it. It’s going to be some very expensive green manure!
We’re still debating the final solution, but we’ll probably plow it all down this fall and try to plant permanent pasture in that area. Now, I have to go find more hay, as we’ll be starting winter hay feeding about a month earlier than planned.
Moral of the story: as annoying as this whole fiasco was, it was a good thing we did the test. If we hadn’t, we might have discovered the high nitrates by finding dead sheep in the field, and that would have been the worst possible scenario.