This Might Blow Your Mind!

[00:00:00]So this used to be a tobacco farm. All of this were tobacco was tobacco fields back in the day. It was let to grow up.

[00:00:08]In other words, for about 40 or 50 years, these tobacco fields uh were abandoned and trees came up. And good after morning everybody. Welcome back to another gorgeous day here on the Stony Ridge Farm. Today we're going to be talking about grazing. We're going to talk about multiecies pasture. Now, if this doesn't interest you, then food doesn't interest you and health doesn't interest you because the health of the soil here and the health of the grasses and being able to identify the types of grasses and types of trees and such that are all around you and the benefits of those is super important. I don't care if you're a cattle farmer, cattle rancher, or you're raising chickens, or you're just walking through the park with your family. It's neat to know these things. and we're going to take you around and talk to you a little bit about forage and what the cows are eating out here on this multiecies pasture here on the Stony Ridge Farm. Welcome to Regenerative Farming.

[00:01:19]Heat. Heat.

[00:02:02]All right, [music] folks. Welcome back to another beautiful day here on the Stony Ridge Farm. I just moved the cows out onto this beautiful pasture of crappy grass. Now Josh, this is looks great. It's green and pretty. It looks really good. This is low nutrient content grass. It is low nutrient content. The protein content of this grass is somewhere in the neighborhood of 6% 2 to 6%. This is broom sagege and we're going to go through and we're going to show you guys how to identify some of the grasses that we have here on the Stony Ridge Farm. It's important to know. It's also important to research those grasses or forages and understand what their purpose serves and whether they fix nitrogen to the soil like clover, which we see right here, different types of clover, different types of flowers, all sorts of fun stuff. And to identify the weeds that you have on your property and how to get rid of those weeds, whether it's choking them out with grazing like this or whether you put down some sort of herbicide. We don't encourage herbicides on our farm. not herbicides. The H is silent, by the way. You don't put herbs on your food. You put herbs on your food. [laughter] So, let's walk around and talk a little bit about that. Folks, before we go any further, I'd like to give a quick shout out to today's money saving day sponsor.

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[00:05:53]There's our English lesson for the day.

[00:05:55]We're also going to go, so stick around to the end. We're going to go around in in the forest a little bit here. There's probably 50 tree species that we see right here, uh, that have various uses, and we'll show you that, too. So, as we walk a little bit, I want to show you guys what we've got. This is broom sedge and broom sge does not uh provide good high quality nutrient for these animals.

[00:06:18]They will eat it when it's green. You can taste it and it tastes like nothing. It's bitter.

[00:06:26]It's nasty and it's not good as compared to something like clover right here. So clover is a legume and clover legumes fix nitrogen. There are ways that we can identify grasses without having to carry around all this knowledge in our head.

[00:06:44]Your phone, whether you know it or not, will identify different species of grass and weeds for you, which is really neat.

[00:06:53]So, we're going to look at this. I know that this is called sweet gum. So, we'll take a picture of that and we'll hit the information button right here. It says look up plant sweet gum. Bam. There it is. That's what it is. It's sweet gum.

[00:07:08]So, anyhow, we can take our phone and go through and if you got a plant that you want to identify, easy enough, just take that plant like this weed right here, pick it and take a snapshot of it, and it'll tell you what that weed is, whether it's a beneficial weed, whether it's a good forage, and you can look all that stuff up. We're going to take you and show you some really cool grasses here in just a little bit. Uh they are native grasses, and a lot of this stuff is native. The broom sedge is a native grass here. And what that broom sedge means is that your soil is lacking in nutrient. It is lacking in virtually every single nutrient. It also means that your soil is very acidic. So this used to be a tobacco farm. All of this were tobacco was tobacco fields back in the day. It was let to grow up. In other words, for about 40 or 50 years, these tobacco fields uh were abandoned and trees came up. And these trees are 40 to 50 years old right here. All the stones and rocks that are out here on the farm.

[00:08:08]And if you guys aren't subscribed, please subscribe. You'll see me picking up rocks and stones over and over and over again here on the farm. All of those stones keep coming up, keep coming up, keep coming up. Back when this was cultivated, it was relatively stonefree, but you dig down that far, you're going to find rocks. As we look through, uh, we learn more and more like what the best forages are. The cattle love whatever that was. And I know exactly what it is. That's Johnson grass.

[00:08:37]There's another thing called deer grass over there. The clover. We have two different types of clover. I'm going to show you. This is ladino, medium ladino clover right here. We planted some of this and some of it came from the hay bales that we roll out on the land. Now, we've got some purple top clover right over here. We'll show you that real quick. So, this is a purple top clover.

[00:08:59]Um, and that is a variety that grows a little bit taller, has a purple top. And once it dries up like this, if you pinch that off, you'll find little clover seeds in there. And you can actually see the purple top right here beside the ladino clover. This is what our honeybees are foraging on right now.

[00:09:19]Actually, right there is a honeybee foraging on ladino clover. That's awesome. That's what we're getting here in midsummer for our nectar for our honeybees. Let's go in the forest a little bit and we'll talk a little bit about identifying the trees. This is a beach tree. And you can tell by the slick bark on the tree. That is a beach tree. We're going to identify that.

[00:09:44]It'll either say that it's a chestnut oak or a beach. Look up American beach.

[00:09:51]That's what it's called. It just identifies the uh the leaves. Now, we've got various types of maples, various types of oaks. I don't know if this is going to identify uh this maple as a silver maple or not, but I do believe it is either a silver or red maple. Identify. Look up. Bam.

[00:10:10]Red maple. And it'll tell you everything you want to know about that. We've got various types of oak trees in our forest. And we've got trees that are beneficial to our honeybees as well. If I can find one. We've got the sourwood tree uh that has little wispy blooms on it. I'll see if I can find one of those for you guys. This is a dead sourwood.

[00:10:32]This is a red oak. Now, you can tell by the leaves. That's not a good leaf.

[00:10:39]Let's take that leaf. You can tell by the leaves of this, the pointiness of the leaves, what type of red oak this is. There are red oaks, white oaks.

[00:10:46]There are many different varieties of red oak and white oak. There are willow oaks, there are pin oaks. Uh, and a common misconception in your front yard, people call them the willow oak, but they're actually the pin oak. Uh, here is a sourwood tree. We'll show you that.

[00:11:02]This is also known as lily of the valley. You see this flower right here?

[00:11:07]This is the sourwood flower. And this is the leaf of the sourwood tree. The sourwood tree was known by the um explorers back in the day as a source of water. So, in other words, you can snap a limb out of a sourwood tree or a leaf and suck on it and it's sour and it's a good source of water. It's not going to kill you or anything like that. Now, I wouldn't go eat a bushel of leaves or you'll probably end up in the bathroom just sitting on the toilet there having a good old time. We've got what they call refer to as the tulip tree. These are tulip poppplers. They have a little tulip on them and that tulip uh actually feeds the honeybees as well. Uh right here we've got a hickory tree. Again, you can go through with your camera. If you're curious about these things and you can identify the various species that are growing on your property or in the park that you visit frequently, it's good to know this stuff. This right here is a locust. This is called a black locust. Black locust puts out a beautiful fragrant flower every spring and the honeybees absolutely love it.

[00:12:14]We've got some blackberry over in here.

[00:12:17]But there's just so much out here to think about and to see and to learn about and to taste and try that it just makes no sense to be ignorant, especially when you've got this phone.

[00:12:29]Now, don't take everything to heart.

[00:12:31]Learn a little bit and teach other people. This is one of those willow oaks that I was telling you about. They grow native here. They grow wild here in the woods on the Stony Ridge Farm. That is not a pin oak. That is a willow oak. A pin oak will put out a different style of a leaf. It's similar to this, but spiky. This is a white oak. You can see the difference in the leaf from the one I just showed you to this guy. See how it's more rounded on the edges? This, you can also tell from the bark that it is a white oak. Pretty interesting, huh?

[00:13:11]I'm interested in all this stuff. I like to know all the flora and fauna that's around me so that I can identify it and know the purpose of it. Uh there was a sweet gum back there. This is called a black gum. The black gum puts off a little berry, so the birds love it. So if you got a black gum in your yard or in your neighbor's yard, odds are your car has little purple poopy marks all over it in the late summer. [laughter] So, we've determined that out here in this pasture, we have gosh, probably 50 different species of grasses and and legumes and forage for the cattle out here in this pasture.

[00:13:53]There is another species right here, and maybe we'll be able to identify this with the camera. Let's see. This is what I call water grass. It's also known, I think people call it crest. It's called rush, soft rush plant species that grows in wet areas, wetlands. So why is this area wet? Why is that growing right there? Odds are there's a spring underground somewhere in this area and that spot stays wet. There's a lot of that way down on the creek bottoms here on the Stony Ridge farm. Uh this is called Sissi Lepedza. Okay, Sissi Lepedza will produce a little flower right there and eight billion gazillion seeds. This is a great forage for your cattle. It is a legume. It will help fix nitrogen to your soil, but once the stem gets woody and stiff, the cows will not consume it. They'll eat the leaves off and they'll leave the stick behind. Um deer grass, that's what this we refer to this stuff as deer grass. The cows love it, but it can be toxic if they eat too much. Let's see if it'll identify that.

[00:15:05]Deer tongue grass. That's what it says on there. You probably can't see it. The cows will eat that. It's not the best quality forage. And I do believe it's Japanese. I don't think it's native.

[00:15:18]Most of the grasses that you see in pastures in your park, wherever you're at, are European or uh Asian grasses. A lot of our native grasses are gone here in the states. And the reason they're gone is because of cultivation and because of population. Okay? So, our native grasses are gone. Back in the day, in the Laura Engles days, back when uh we explored our prairies, the biggest fear that parents had was children getting out in the grass and getting lost. I don't know if you've ever been lost in a corn field, but you can easily get disoriented in super tall grass.

[00:15:58]They say that the grass was so tall that it would be over the shoulders of a man on horseback in those days. Now, I'm going to take you down and I'm going to show you one of the native grasses, one of the few native grasses that we have left on this farm. And Susie and her calf are going to make a guest appearance. So, let's go down and we're going to show you eastern gammarass. If you've ever seen this stuff, you will be amazed. It looks like corn. Kind.

[00:16:42]Where's mom?

[00:16:56]If you like this kind of video, guys, please hit that like button, subscribe to the channel. I'd love to have you back here on the farm with me. Hey, mama.

[00:17:04]Hey, mama. What are you doing? Well, stop and look at this guy. This is called mullen. If you've never heard of mullen, there's a million videos out there about the um medicinal properties of mullen, but uh it's it's a really cool flower here uh that grows wild. And it's a medicinal plant here. The leaves are fuzzy, like felt. They almost feel like felt. You can tell that they even look fuzzy. Interesting. You can dry these up and you can smoke them, but I don't [clears throat] recommend it.

[00:17:39][laughter] Let's get down here and show you the eastern gamma grass.

[00:17:43]>> Now, what are the cows doing out here in this pasture of broom sedge grass? Well, they don't like the broom sedge so much, but they'll eat it and they'll gobble it all the way down to the ground. It's good for them to eat various forages, just like it's good for you to eat various things as well. It's not smart for you to eat just one thing. In other words, if you like lasagna and all you eat is lasagna, you going to get sick.

[00:18:07]Same thing with these cows. If they only have one species of forage to eat, then they're going to get sick. The quality of the meat is not going to be as good.

[00:18:17]I tell you what, guys, people preach local honey for allergies. I preach local beef for allergies because these cows are out here consuming every allergen known to man. Local beef, local food has the taste of the area that you live. My beef off of this farm just simply tastes like [snorts] home. Ain't that interesting? And also, it will help with allergies. And we have honey bees as well. Close this gate. With cattle being so expensive, rustlers are real, guys. People can pull up, load up your cow herd, and take them and sell them.

[00:19:00]Each one of these cows now, well, 5 years ago, each one of these cows would bring about a,000 bucks. an adult cow and a calf would bring about 350 400 bucks. Now, these calves are bringing almost $2,000.

[00:19:15]That is an asset right there. It's a walking savings account. It's good to do something with your land. Let's go check out Eastern Gamma.

[00:19:27]It's important that you know this stuff if you raise cattle. It's important that you know this stuff if you uh are just interested in ecology. And you know, ecology is pretty much the study of how things work in nature. It's important to know that. It's also important to know that ecology requires a predator and a ruminant animal. We need those little rabbits. We need those little mice. We need the vermin. We need uh a ruminant animal like a cow to digest this food, this forage, and to produce fertilizer.

[00:20:01]Now, check this out. This is eastern gamma grass. Look at that. And look at that tuft of it. Oh my goodness. This is huge.

[00:20:10]Look at this. Look at the blade on this grass. Look how wide it is. I've got big hands here. That's probably an inch and a half wide blade of grass. It looks like What does it look like? What's that look like to you?

[00:20:25]Looks like corn to me. M sweet, delicious. Nice.

[00:20:33]Nice robust stem, just sweet and delicious. Here are the seeds of the eastern gamma grass. Look at this right here, guys. It's so interesting to me to see how this comes about. This is the flower. You can see that's just really interesting the structure of the flower. And then the seed. Um, so the flower extends all the way up here and the seeds are down here.

[00:20:59]And they're like little kernels of corn.

[00:21:02]In case you don't know, corn is a grass.

[00:21:05]Okay, the corn that we have nowadays.

[00:21:07]And here's here's some with the kernels just about to break off. So, they break off in chunks if they're ready. There we go. And that is an eastern gamma [sighs] seed. We'll chuck that over into the pasture. What we want is for this to take over that whole pasture. This brings us to another very interesting point.

[00:21:32]In the world of forage and the world of grasses and the world of nature, there are cool season grasses and there are warm seasoned grasses. Most of the cool season grasses and forages that we have here in the United States were brought over from Europe and Asia. Most of the warm season native grasses like this are native and they came from here. There are very, very few native grasses out here. And guys, there's a turkey right over there. She's on the nest.

[00:22:04]I can see her head just sticking up barely.

[00:22:08]Either she's on the nest or she's got little bitties. Turkeys love this kind of stuff. And they'll consume those seeds and poop them out all over the farm. And hopefully we end up getting a nice stand of eastern gamma grass. Can you imagine if this entire field and we're in a drought condition. And look how much grass we have here. If this entire field was eastern gamma in the in the warm season, if it was cool season fescue and eastern gamma in the warm season, look at how much forage those cattle would have. That's awesome.

[00:22:41]There's a tuft of it here. And there's a huge tuft of it right over here. Still watching mama turkey over there. Love to have my wild turkeys. Look at that.

[00:22:51]That's native grasses.

[00:22:54]That's what people used to get lost in back in the day. Isn't that crazy?

[00:23:01]This stuff back in the old days, back when our explorers were first going out uh and exploring this land, this is what all the grass looked like. Isn't that amazing? Again, these will sometimes be up to 12 to 14 feet high. That is native grass. Isn't that cool? It just kind of takes me back. And this gets bigger and bigger and bigger every single year. It sends out ryomes. What's a ryome? That's what your lawn is sending out. If you have a fescue type lawn, tall fescue lawn, lawn fescue, whatever you want to call it, that's what it's sending out.

[00:23:37]Ryomes are roots that sprout new growth.

[00:23:40]Kind of like a bamboo tree will do that.

[00:23:41]They will sprout new growth. We don't have any bamboo on this farm, but I would like to get a nice forest of bamboo established way on the backside, way far away from me. Cattle can eat bamboo, but it's not not faster than it will grow. [laughter] All right, we got one more grass I want to show you guys. And you think this is big, just wait. This is eastern gamma before it sends out the seed. Isn't that cool?

[00:24:09]Look at the different grasses right here compared to where we were up there in the pasture. There's some more of that deer grass.

[00:24:18]There's some yellow stick weed.

[00:24:21]So much here, guys. And I happen to know that there's some beneficial mushrooms that grow right over in here, too. And some of them beneficial mushrooms grow out of them cow patties. We try to stay away from them unless we want to get dizzy.

[00:24:38]There's my turkey. It's right up there.

[00:24:43]I guarantee you.

[00:24:46]See her pop her head out.

[00:24:52]She's right there.

[00:24:55]The wildlife on this farm has quadrupled since I brought cattle in. And people would think that it would be the exact opposite, but more and more and more wildlife on this farm since I brought the cattle in. The other day, I actually heard a bob white quail down here. That turkey just laid down. So, that tells me she's got her babies covered up. We'll leave her alone. Let her do her thing.

[00:25:19]Out in this little section right here where she's roaming, that's a lot of ragweed. Cattle will gobble up ragweed.

[00:25:27]It's very nutritious for them, but it's not good for the allergies.

[00:25:32]All right, moving right along. Let's show you something else. This is wild garlic. See these little these are little uh garlic seeds right there?

[00:25:43]That's wild garlic. People refer to them as wild onions when they're growing in your lawn, but it's actually wild garlic. And it's about eight times stronger than regular garlic, and you can use it to season things. Bye-bye little turkey. There's more eastern gamma. Why does eastern gamma disappear?

[00:26:02]Overg grazing. You can't graze that down to the nub and expect it to survive. It cannot be grazed down this high. It will not survive. It's got to seed out year after year so that you can establish some good forage on your property. My plan is to drill down eastern gamma this fall. About the time those things start dropping seeds is when you need to go buy some bags of eastern gamma grass and get it started on your farm. Cows will be in here grazing very soon. They graze right through here. This is called Silvo pasture pasture in the forest.

[00:26:38]There's some more of that hateful dog fennel. This is the most hateful stuff ever. It's in the dill family. It smells delicious and if you rub it all over yourself, it'll keep the flies off of you and keep mosquitoes and stuff off.

[00:26:53]You can see this tough of grass we're getting ready to go up to right here.

[00:26:56]This thing's huge. I don't know what it is. It's some kind of Japanese ornamental grass. Look at that. Look how big it is compared to the four-wheeler.

[00:27:05]This thing will send out shoots. It looks like what they call pompus grass. Um, and where did it come from? I have no idea.

[00:27:15]There's only one of these on the whole farm. We'll take a good snapshot here.

[00:27:20]Maiden silver grass called Ualia grass. Chinese silver grass or elephant grass. Species of flowering plant native to most of East Asia and Southeast Asia. Look at that. It's like Forest Gump Vietnam grass right there.

[00:27:39]Boy, tell you what.

[00:27:42]So much to learn, guys. So much to learn. Y'all want to go down and see the shiakei mushroom logs we got planted in the woods? Let's go check them out. See you later, big guy. That grass puts out seeds every year, but I never see it anywhere else. Maybe I need to come up this fall and just get me a chunk of it.

[00:28:00]Maybe plant it beside the gate. I think it's pretty. Really pretty.

[00:28:06]Cruising down. Cruising down. What do I see? Let's just turn this thing off. I see some other things we need to talk about. These are wild blueberry bushes.

[00:28:17]Okay. Awesome.

[00:28:19]They're actually called something different than wild blueberry. I call them wild blueberry. It's my common name for them. Let's take a little snapshot and let's check. This is This is just fun. I enjoy this kind of stuff. Look up plant.

[00:28:35]Early blueberry or spyhea, a genus of shrubs. It's It's early blueberry.

[00:28:42]That's it right there. Very cool.

[00:28:44]There's a lot of it that grows down here, especially on north slopes here on the Stony Ridge Farm, and it's all over everywhere. Here's another one of those sourwood trees.

[00:28:55]We look way up high, we might see uh sourwood blooms, and we might see honeybees. These are my shiakei mushroom logs. So, down here in the woods after a rainstorm, I'll come down. These are shiakeis. They've kind of fallen by the wayside. That's another shiakei. Um, and if you have not seen my video planting shiakei mushrooms, I will post a link to it at the end of this video. Beautiful guys, beautiful day. Uh, we'll start doing some mushroom foraging videos here as soon as the fall mushrooms start coming in. We've got chanterell mushrooms all over this hillside. We'll teach you what you can eat, what you shouldn't eat. This is the Stony Ridge Falls, and it looks like I got me a tree on the Stony Ridge Falls. Thank you guys so much. I'm glad you enjoyed this little video here on the Stony Ridge.

[00:29:43]Just taking you around, talking to you about grasses, talking to you about all this stuff. Oh, a turkey tail mushrooms.

[00:29:49]Here's your turkey tail.

[00:29:52]You can take these guys.

[00:29:54]Oh, that's either turkey tail or false turkey tail mushroom. You can take this guy and you don't want to eat it or fry it up like a mushroom you get from the store. You want to make a tea out of it.

[00:30:05]Dry it and make a tea. A lot of stuff you can do right here in the forest just knowing what you see. Pretty cool stuff.

[00:30:14]Be sure there's a book called Mushrooming Without Fear. There's a couple books. I'll post links to them right down there in the video description for you guys in case you want to learn a little bit. There's all kinds of information out there. Thank you. We'll see you next time on the Stony Ridge.

[00:30:29]>> Come on down to [singing and music] the Stony Ridge. Bring your wife. Bring your kids.

[00:30:35]Pure and sweet. That's the way it's supposed to be. Stony.

[00:30:41]>> All right, folks.

[00:30:43]Come on, bro. Really? Just sitting on the toilet there having a good old time.

[00:30:47]You can dry these up and you can smoke them, but I don't [clears throat] recommend it. There's a mayfly right here. That's going to quick die. Thank you. That's like Forest Gump Vietnam grass right there, boy.

[00:30:59]Y'all come back now. You here?