Eddie Yokley To Host Foraging
Workshop
The Four Seasons Grazing Club will meet for a Grazing for Profit
Pasture Walk titled “Profitable Ground … what does it look like?” at Eddie
Yokley’s farm on April 13 from 5:30-8:00 p.m. The farm is located at 1046 Old
Kentucky Rd., South, Greeneville, TN. The event is free and a free hamburger dinner will follow
the pasture walk.
Yokely is using an innovative rotational grazing and forage
management method. Practices include rolling out hay in the fall, using a
sacrifice field for winter grazing and moving to grass in February or March,
using temporary fencing, and grazing areas on the margins of streams or rivers
on dry winter days.
Mike McElroy of the Greene County Soil Conservation District
said the method is nontraditional but effective.
“It boils down to grazing management and the landowner being
in control,” McElroy said. “A lot of the complaints that we get during winter
time are, ‘There's nothing but mud around the hay rings,’ or ‘I lost a calf
because of the mud.’ To get away from
that, you've got to change your management. You've got to do something
different to get around it.”
The pasture walk will include seeing a stream crossing with
a water access point, freeze proof waterers, additional quick connects, even manure
distribution in the sacrifice field and learning about how farms can qualify
for cost sharing opportunities.
One of the keys to successfully implementing this method is
unrolling hay on the ground when the weather is dry.
“You put out what they can eat in three to four hours, the
next day you unroll the hay again,” said McElroy. “But you pick those days and
you do it on dry days. If it's nasty, wet, cold, rainy, snowy, and all that,
walk out there and open up the gate handle and turn them into a pasture field
that has been sitting there and growing all winter long. We call that
stockpiled forages.”
McElroy said the event will bring together people to find
new solutions to old problems.
“We'll get ideas from Eddie on things that he's tried that
did not work, and things that he tried that did work,” McElroy said. He adds,
“In the winter of 2015, Eddie fed 148 rolls of hay. In the winter of 2016, he
fed 26. Same number of animals, same number of acres of land, everything was the
same except for how it was managed.”
McElroy says proper forage management also improves soil
health, reduces water run-off, eliminates the need to spray costly herbicides
or bush hog, and increases the amount of protein available to livestock from
what are commonly considered weeds.
One thing I’ve told Eddie and everybody else, these land
owners are going to have to decide,” McElroy said. “Do you want a pasture field
or do you want a golf course?”
To register for this free event, go to ruralresources.net
and click on the Four Seasons Grazing Club under the Programs tab, or call
Rural Resources at 423-636-8171 or the Greene County Soil Conservation District
at 423-638-4771 extension 3.
The Four Seasons Grazing Club is an educational and
networking organization dedicated to encouraging better forage production
through grazing management. This Grazing for Profit Pasture Walk is sponsored
by Rural Resources, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the
Tennessee Department of Agriculture.
