They’re Using Bamboo For Winter Grazing

They’re Using Bamboo For Winter Grazing CROPS New Crops Edmund and Garth Brown raise grassfed cattle in upstate New York They recently started growing bamboo for winter grazing and Edmund wrote about the experiment in On Pasture an online newsletter for graziers which allowed FARM SHOW to excerpt from the article www onpasture com Brown has been experimenting with a 35-ft dia circle of bamboo that he plans to expand to an acre as a first step The small area has given him experience with the plant and opportunity to evaluate feed value and quality As animals browse they consume both the leaves and twigs leaving the longer woody stems Protein content is right at 16 percent When calculated on an acre basis total wet yield was about 7 tons When sent to a lab for analysis it provided a little less than 3 1/2 tons of dry matter Brown noted a neighbor’s high quality hay production was 2 1/2 tons dry matter per acre “Hay and standing bamboo forage are not precisely equivalent but for my purposes they are close enough to draw meaningful conclusions ” he says “Both will keep my animals fed through the winter If I can get a roughly equivalent yield per acre per year I’ll be many dollars ahead ” He acknowledges the cost of strip grazing livestock through the winter However he expects bamboo to save the farm a substantial amount of money once he gets a big enough stand because it’ll save the cost of producing more hay The next step is getting an acre plot established and then evaluating the best grazing strategy Brown plans to graze the bamboo stand with sheep in early spring before the new growth emerges The goal here is to stunt emerging grasses that could compete with the bamboo “I run sheep and cattle together for most of the year but not during lambing ” he says “Weeding the bamboo with sheep will align nicely with lambing The shoots are quite delicate as they first emerge and I’m worried cattle hooves will snap them off below the surface if the soil is damp ” Contact: FARM SHOW Followup Edmund Brown Cairncrest Farm 156 Talbot Rd West Winfield N Y 13491 ph 315 368-2210 or 267 625-0812; info@cairncrestfarm com; www cairncrestfarm com

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