Field notes

Spent today squaring the map against the ground on the north-west paddock, and the map lost. On paper it's about four and three-quarter acres. But a band of woods runs across the north end — trees, not pasture — and the cattle, sensibly, don't graze the trees.

When I lined the drawn boundary up against where the strips actually run, the long dimension came up well short of the polygon, and the missing length was the woods. Corrected for that, the grazable part is closer to three and nine-tenths acres — roughly a fifth less than the map claims. It matters because the honest figures — how many animals the ground can carry, how much feed is really out there — all start from grazable acres, not from the line on the map. Counting the trees would have flattered every one of them.

I suspect a few of our other paddocks have the same gap between the drawn line and the grazed ground, so this is the first of a handful of corrections, not the last.

Found a fresh dung pat in the north-west this evening, only hours old, and the top of it was dotted with little holes — dung beetles, already in and working. It's the first time I've documented them on the place.

It's a small thing that means a few good ones at once. Those beetles bury the dung and pull it down into the soil, which feeds the ground and breaks the fly and worm cycle before it gets going. That they turned up within hours says the local population is intact, and that there's no wormer residue in the manure holding them back — they're famously sensitive to it. (Why we work to keep those chemicals off the pasture is spelled out in the measurement methods.)

A word on certainty: I read this off a photo of the holes, not beetles in hand, so the exact kind is a guess — most likely one of the small burrowing sorts. I didn't see any sign of the ball-rolling kind. Call it a promising read, not a survey.

Working through the first pass on the north-west side, I found wild chervil — an invasive, lacy-leaved weed in the carrot family — scattered through the paddock. It's the first time I've put a name to it here. It sits in patches, heaviest along the strip edges, and at a rough eye it's somewhere around a tenth of the standing growth. The cattle mostly step around it; it isn't something they choose to eat.

The plan is to let the herd deal with it: pack them tight enough that they graze and trample less selectively, pass after pass, and try to catch it before it flowers and sets seed. Whether that actually knocks it back I don't know yet — it's a hypothesis, not a result. So I'm marking where the patches are this time through and will compare on the next pass. If it spreads instead of shrinking, that goes in the record too.

The herd came off its winter ground this evening and onto the first fresh strip of the season — the first move of our first proper rotation here, in the old hay field on the north-west side. I gave them a bale that first night as a bridge, the way you ease cattle from dry winter feed onto lush spring grass so their rumens can catch up. By the next morning they'd barely touched it. They were already nose-down in the grass, no upset and no bloat — quicker over the change than the books warn, at least for cattle that have seen grass before.

I'll be honest about the measuring. I sized that first strip by eye rather than walking it properly, and I called the grass shorter and thinner than it turned out to be — a careful walk of the next strip the following morning came back taller and denser, and most of that gap was my eye, not the field. The number we use to turn grass height into pounds of feed is also still uncalibrated for this particular ground, so treat any weight figure off these early strips as a working guess, not a fact. The lesson is the plain one: walk it before you size it, even on strip one.