Best Management Practices
/Heavy Use Areas
Living in the Pacific Northwest we deal with a lot of mud. To eliminate mud, install a heavy use area for your livestock.
Heavy use areas help protect pastures from soil compaction during the wet months and overgrazing during the summer. Designing a heavy use area properly can help you prevent mud, manage manure, maximize chore efficiency, and protect animal health and water quality.
Tips on installing a heavy use area
Pick a dry, well-drained area away from existing steams, ponds, wetlands, or other water bodies.
Choose a location that will make chores like feeding and manure pick up as efficient as possible.
Consider accessibility for your own vehicles and others, such as gravel and feed trucks. Size gates to accommodate tractor and truck equipment.
Size the area large so that it’s large enough for animal movement and comfort but small enough to easily pick manure. A minimum size would be 400 square feet per animal for livestock in general.
Use footing material suitable for your area and soils, and placed over geotextile fabric. Animal-friendly hog fuel, wood chips, 5/8-minus gravel, or sand are common choices for footing.
Install gutters and downspouts on all buildings and divert water away from heavy use areas. Use swales or subsurface drainage on the outside of the confinement area if surface water threatens to enter.
Protect downspouts from livestock damage.
Provide adequate outdoor lighting.
Select fencing material with safety in mind. Electric wire provides the most flexibility in terms of maintenance and adjusting the size of the area. Other fencing materials can be supplemented with electric fencing to protect both the livestock and the fence.
Eliminate protruding nails and bolts. Remove loose and hanging wire. Consider covering T-posts with caps and covering in a protective sheath.
Leave a grassed or vegetated buffer on the downslope side of the heavy use area to filter sediments and nutrient from runoff.
Once a heavy use area is installed and in use, be sure to pick manure every one to three days and enclose animals during the wet months or when pasture is grazed down to three inches or less in the summer.
Composting
There are many reasons to manage your manure correctly. Manure creates an unhealthy environment for livestock, creating more vet bills and increased feed costs. By composting livestock waste, you reduce the chance of runoff from your property becoming contaminated and contributing to pollution of surface water and groundwater. Polluted run-off can be detrimental to fish and other aquatic life. Compost also improves the tilth of your soil and can be a soil amendment.
How to compost
Optimum composting rates can be achieved by ensuring proper moisture, carbon and oxygen needs are met. Take these steps for successful composting:
Install a three-pile compost bin system. One for fresh manure, one in the decomposition process and one ready to spread.
Store the manure in a covered area, either with a roof over the bins or a tarp. This keeps the rain from leaching away nutrients.
Turn the compost pile regularly if possible. This helps aerate the pile and speeds composting.
Monitor the temperature of your compost using a compost thermometer. Check moisture too, make sure it’s not too wet, or too dry. It should be like a wrung-out sponge.
Get your compost tested so you can apply at the right rates.
Once the compost is ready (it should smell like soil), you can apply it to your garden*, crops or pasture.
Pasture Management
Proper grazing management and pasture rotation produces more grass, fewer weeds and reduces bare ground. This will save you money by lowering feed costs, colic risks and reducing veterinary expenses.
Pasture Rotation
To create a healthy field of grass, subdivide large pastures into smaller pastures and develop a rotational grazing system. This will eliminate over-grazing and give your pastures time to recover which provides the best grass (and nutrients) for your livestock.
Continuous grazing allows weeds to grow where grass roots have been weakened. If your grass has not had adequate time to recover in any of your pastures, hold and feed animals in a heavy use area. Move livestock into a pasture when grass is 6” to 8” and move them out when the grass is grazed down to 3”. Each pasture should be rested for 28 days before re-grazing.
Fertilizers and Amendments
Test soils in pastures to determine if you need to add any amendments and to make sure you are applying at the right rate. Over-applying fertilizer can be harmful to animal health, plant growth, and the environment.
To amend your soils, use compost to improve tilth and add nutrients. Supplement with fertilizer if needed, based on soil tests. Compost should be applied only during the growing season when plants can take up valuable nutrients.
* When applying composted manure to gardens, it should be composted for 180 days or more.
Questions?
Contact a farm planner at your local conservation district for questions. Snohomish Conservation District farm planners can be reached at 425-335-5634 or farmplanners(at)snohomishcd.org.
