Our front-west field is being disked now to prepare it for planting. We don’t have a big enough tractor or disk to do this sort of work, so we hire the job out to custom farmers in our area.
We’re going to put it back to permanent irrigated pasture. We’ll be planting a mix of grasses that we can either graze or hay as needed. It’s unlikely that we’ll get much feed from planting it this year, but we can let it grow all summer and graze it off this fall. We can also save it until after a major frost, when it’ll stop growing. We will eventually add in some clover, but not this first year, just in case we need to spray for broadleaf weeds. We can always frost seed clover in the spring if the weed load isn’t too bad.
We’d originally hoped to do rotations of grass and annual forages, but all we do when we disturb the ground there is collect nice crops of rocks. For us, a permanent pasture is the only viable option. It’ll be nice to have this all done, though. This will give us many more options for grazing, and we might even get a bit of hay some years. Our front pear orchard fields will be done as well.