Pasture rotation is for drought too. But I'm still worried. Bring on the rain dance please!

I know I've talked a lot about pasture rotation. Most of the time it's in the winter or the late fall I'm talking about it because it's allowing me to use forage rather than grain or hay late into the season. This year and last year too, this is worse even than last year, I thought last year was bad. We are having a very very bad drought and so while it is just the beginning of June we are really low on forage. However because I am doing pasture rotation and because I have done it consistently for a few years here I still have forage. So the majority of my animals are keeping on their weight and we'll walk through them in a minute. As you can see and I have yet to have to give them grain besides to move them from another field you know from one field to the or hay. Although I did put a little book of hay out there today trying to test them to see how bad is it and they ate up the hay which in June for them to be eating hay is crazy. So I did open up a new section today and I'm going to walk through here and you can see how bad it is. I mean this is June it should be lush lush lush grass and not only is it got lots of brown in it it's like crunchy when you walk on it. It's not great forage but it has been able to sustain my animals up until now which is great. But I will show you the difference of where they just came off versus where they are currently. I'm gonna go ahead and start this four-wheeler so it's going to be a little bit loud but actually I don't even know how I can do this holding the camera. You know sometimes I need a cameraman but hold on a second I'll put it down. Just takes two hands to do that so and hopefully you can still hear me over the four-wheeler. I'll stop it up here but I'll get as close to this phone as I can but you will be able to see a very distinct line where that line was up until now and there it is. I'm pretty sure you can see that on camera where it is nearly down to the dirt over here. I mean it's just awful not much forage at all and they just got let out into this other area or at least there's some right. This is good good news right. You also noticed there was one on the other side of the line despite the electric and I only do one strand of electric so yeah that's not much but it's really important to me that my animals respect that single line because it is a lot less work for me to put up one line than two. It takes a lot less time so if an animal does not respect that single line they kind of lose their place here. So this little dude right here while he was not on my call list for early calling and going off to be a feeder lamb he just won his place because he keeps going on the other side of the line. So yeah that's a no-no in my in my book but you'll see that you know all my animals are still good weight. All the lambs have not been fed grain they're just grass and milk and they're still looking you know still pretty beefy despite the drought and that's because of pasture rotation. It takes a little bit of time but not a terrible amount of time and dividing up your fields even if you have a smaller field dividing it up the best you can is going to make all the difference in the world where you have more forage. You're spending a lot less money on hay and grain and you're getting a much healthier animal without parasite control. I have really had almost no parasites at all this year. I mean they're parasites but no parasite effect on my animals. So pasture rotation's it. Do it even if you only have a small area to do it in. I cannot recommend it more than especially in times where you have stress either due to early frost or drought. So signing off. Go rotate your pastures.