5 tactics for planting and keeping a pasture

If you have livestock to feed or want to stop soil erosion, try planting some grass. Here's how:

• Managing a grassland is like managing a small ecosystem. The trick is to keep the variety of plant species.
• Try adding legumes like clover and alfalfa to provide a nutritious diet for livestock while still maintaining or increasing soil fertility.
• Legumes also supply nitrogen, which grasses need for good growth.
• Regulating grazing, mowing and the soil content helps you control growth and keep troublesome weeds under control without chemicals.
• A variety of plants lessens their vulnerability to pests and disease.

• Grasslands fit well into crop rotations. For maximum production, you may want to plant a grassland on a cultivated field.
• Rotation also prevents a buildup of pests and pathogens by depriving them of hosts.
• You may decide to put steep, uneven or rocky land into permanent grassland. All you need is sunlight for at least half the daylight hours, and enough rainfall, irrigation or sprinklers.

1. To grow a pasture on cultivated land, start by ploughing and harrowing the soil.
2. Lime it, if needed, to bring the pH to between 6 and 7 (slightly acid).
3. Till in manure, compost or an all-purpose fertilizer.
4. The seed can be broadcast or planted in very close rows using a seed drill. For hay, you may wish to plant only one crop, such as alfalfa. For pasture, a mixture is preferable, since livestock suffer from bloat on a pure diet of fresh legumes.

• Don't let livestock graze in a pasture until the plants are well established, giving them time to build up food reserves in their root systems.
• Repeated grazing closer than 7 to 10 centimetres depletes the food reserves of forage plants, so they grow back poorly.
• If grazing isn't controlled, plants die off and leave land open to weeds and scrub.
• Controlled grazing and mowing will help keep weeds and scrub under control.

• To renovate an old or run-down pasture, plough it thoroughly, apply lime and fertilizer and reseed the land with desirable varieties.
• Grasses will often come back vigorously from their roots in the soil, so little reseeding may be required.
• Legumes usually need reseeding, sometimes every year.
• If the old pasture is overgrown, grub out scrub and young trees or keep them mowed close to the ground. Eventually they'll be starved out.
• Before renovating a pasture, make sure you know which grasses are present.
• Native pastures may look poor at some time during the year, yet they may include some of the most drought-tolerant and productive grasses.

If you have a horse, a cow or some livestock and an acre or so of unused land, you can put that land to work by planting it to grass. On top of providing essential pasturage and hay for the animals, grass protects the soil from erosion and furnishes a habitat for a myriad of small creatures.