A customer friend of mine texted me the other day and said, “Google Maps is the coolest example of how beneficial your feeding systems are to field fertility. You can’t argue with the picture!”
What she was talking about is the chicken-pox-like pattern you can see in the fields just south of the red Farm One Forty marker in the picture below. Those dots aren’t a glitch in the satellite image—they’re the legacy of years of bale grazing.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, bale grazing is how we feed our animals through the winter. In the fall, we set the hay bales out in the field in rows. Each row is separated with a single strand of temporary electric fence. Every day the animals walk out, eat their fill, and slowly work their way through that first row of bales. Once it’s gone, we roll up the fence and move it ahead, giving them access to the next row.
It’s a simple system, but it accomplishes a lot.
First, it keeps the cows moving. Instead of standing around in one spot all winter, eating and living in their own accumulated waste, they’re active and spread out. Healthier animals tend to follow.
Second—and this is what you see from space—it spreads manure, urine, and wasted hay evenly across the field. That combination is like a fertilizer bomb for the pasture. Over the years, we’ve watched the productivity of that land increase and the water cycle improve dramatically. More life, more resilience, more grass.
Third, it changes how we work. Most of the tractor work happens in the fall when conditions are good. Come winter, there’s no scrambling to start machinery in the cold, no days where feeding doesn’t happen because equipment won’t cooperate. We burn far less diesel by batching the work, and in the spring there’s no corral or shelter to clean out because the nutrients were distributed across the field from the start.
This winter is an exciting milestone for us—it’s the first year our cows are bale grazing on our new land near Delisle. That ground is very sandy and low in organic matter, exactly the kind of soil that needs patience and care. Our hope is that, one day, the Google imagery of that land will look like the home quarter does now.
We don’t see soil health as a quick fix. I don’t think you can repair land that’s been deteriorating for a century with a product that comes in a jug, especially not in a season or two. This is a long game. To me, the path forward looks a lot like the past—restoring land management to something closer to how it functioned before industrial agriculture.
Did you know there were more buffalo roaming the Canadian prairies before European contact than there are domestic cattle today? Grazing herbivores shaped this ecosystem. The grasslands evolved with them.
Especially in fragile areas, I think that relationship—animals, land, and time—is still the way forward.