Benefits of Overseeding Aeschynomene to Livestock Grazing Systems

Mar 14, 2022

By Jaime Garzon

Since the green revolution, grazing cattle producers have can use synthetic fertilizers to increase grasslands forage accumulation and nutritive value, which directly impacts the animal performance and the profits of the system. However, the costs of fertilizers have been increasing for several years, and their use is less profitable now. Therefore, the association of legumes within the pastures becomes an attractive option for grazing cattle production, since these plants can provide atmospheric nitrogen to the soil and cattle, improve nutrient cycling, and increase animal gain weight, among other ecosystem services.

Aeschynomene americana L. is a warm-season legume native to the southern United States. Its performance and productivity have been studied in previous years, but now we have the methodologies and technology to evaluate other ecosystem services this legume can offer to improve grazing livestock systems. However: would the aeschynomene association produce better results than nitrogen fertilization in the grasslands? We invite you to watch the following presentation, where we discuss the potential benefits that aeschynomene overseeding can provide to bahiagrass pastures.

Source : ufl.edu

Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.