Just posting this in hopes that it helps someone someday. I think these principles will apply anywhere you have wet mild weather.
When trying to maintain pasture in the tropics, you are presented with a number of problems.
-
It grows really really fast. How can this be a bad thing you say? When you graze animals, you time rotation into new fields not only according to growth of the grasses but you have to ensure you break the parasite cycle. You frequently get stuck in a situation where you need the pasture eaten down and you are still weeks aways from letting parasites die out. The pasture quickly becomes weedy and requires mechanical intervention.
-
No winter. The land never gets to rest. Combined with high rain, the pasture rapidly degrades as nutrient levels cannot be maintained. In particular, the field gets depleted of phosphorus which the grasses consume in greater amounts to cope with added sun stress of the tropics leaving nothing for the animals. Phosphorus deficiency big problem.
-
It never burns. Grasslands naturally burn and this is renewing for the land and also controls Insects and prevents weediness. In the wet tropical uplands, it never dries out. Also cut grass doesn't die. You can't make hay.
-
Thick stemmed low nutrient grasses outcompete leafy nutritious grasses. Animals grazed on tropical grasslands are obviously malnourished and thin. They will seek out the more nutritious leafy grasses leaving the stemmy grasses until your pasture is so degraded that you have to till and reseed it.
Maintaining large pasture lands in the wet tropics isn't worth it. Where I homestead now, I watch a lot of very experienced ranching families struggle just trying to keep the weeds at bay.
So what does work if one wants to have live stock in the wet tropics? Sillage.
Sillage is fermented grass (leaves can do too). You can store it in bins or a puka (hole) in the ground. You circumvent the issue of being unable to produce hay. You don't have to wait and can cut the grass when it needs to be cut. Binned sillage can keep for two years .With the rate our grass grows, (my grass takes about 3 weeks to get about two feet in height and tease going to seed) you can get large sillage harvest on a regular basis. Some of my neighbors are supporting huge amounts of animals on 1 acre of grass regularly cut for sillage. I know one fellow with 4 horses, 3 calves, 4 goats and 5 sheep that have two acres to roam but are feed on sillage. His animals are healthier with better weight that another neighbor with 100 acres of pasture. He does have to be more proactive about parasite control but fortunately papaya grows like a weed and can control many types of parasites.
Sillage is a great way to feed animals. Even if you are a small holding suburbanite, you can turn lawn clippings into sillage to feed chickens, quails and rabbits.
So..um..yeah.
view the rest of the comments →
[–] SearchVoatBot ago
This submission was linked from this v/Memberberries comment by @AndrewBlazeIt.
Posted automatically (#150604) by the SearchVoat.co Cross-Link Bot. You can suppress these notifications by appending a forward-slash(/) to your Voat link. More information here. (@SquishedSpam: Click here to suppress your crosslink notifications from @AndrewBlazeIt)