To Mow.....or not to Mow.....THAT is the question

MRollins10 · Sep 21, 2018

I need some advice. I am new to farming. I have a small 7 acre place with some cows and a few goats. My pasture is about a foot tall, and has quite a few weeds that the animals do not appear to be eating. I mowed a strip from my house to the barn, and ive noticed that the grass seems to grow better there than elsewhere. Thus....the question...should i mow the entire acreage? Will this make for a better pasture and will it give the grass more opportunity to grow and provide more long term benefit to the animals?

John Fitzgerald · Sep 21, 2018

Mow it. Mowing hurts weeds much more than it hurts grass. Fields that get mowed 3-4 times a summer around here tend to have far fewer weeds than un-mown fields.

atsah · Sep 21, 2018

Yup, mow it..

MRollins10 · Sep 21, 2018

John Fitzgerald said:
Mow it. Mowing hurts weeds much more than it hurts grass. Fields that get mowed 3-4 times a summer around here tend to have far fewer weeds than un-mown fields.

Excellent! Thank you for the advice.

MRollins10 · Sep 21, 2018

atsah said:
Yup, mow it..

Thank you. Glad to know my "thinking" was right

robbyr · Sep 23, 2018

I “knocked the top off” in our pasture recently. I’m always reluctant to mow because we have more cows than we probably should so I don’t cut it too short.

denchen · Sep 23, 2018

My unscientific theory that I work by is that there are many varieties of grass. If they are allowed to grow wild, the course rough varieties grow above the sweet low types and stop them from growing. If I keep the grass to 3 to 4 inches, the grass grows a nice colour green, and the animals love it.

Gary Fowler · Sep 23, 2018

Mowing equalizes the growing of wild grasses and gives the slow tender growers a chance to gain on the fast tough grasses. If left unchecked your pasture will eventually be just weeds with no grass. Pastures should be mown at least twice a year but not mown like a yard. Leave it 3-4" high or higher but cut it low enough to get all the weeds. Keep the weeds from going to seed and you will eventually kill them all off and have nothing but nice grass.

Bitter weeds (those nice little plants with yellow flowers) will really take your whole pasture over if not mown at least 2 or 3 times a year and nothing eats them, not even a goat. I mow them down every time I see them flower out.

jjp8182 · Sep 23, 2018

This is something I've been doing a lot of reading on lately, and I'd agree that the mowing does help on multiple fronts based on both what I've read as well as the experience of mowing my own pasture the last few years.

From what I've read, I'm coming to the conclusion that rotational grazing is probably the single best method of managing a pasture in order to keep the grass between 4" and the height where it goes to seed. However, if the animals aren't doing it then helping out with a mower can be very useful. It seems that many pasture grasses don't handle being shorter than 4"-ish tall too well. Then on the other end of the spectrum when they get to the point where they are developing seed heads they're putting more energy into developing the seeds rather than growing vegetation. So if they can be kept between 4" and the seed development height they put more energy into growing the plant's vegetation (which keeps it tender/fresh and higher in protein).

As others noted, and I've seen on my own small place over the last couple years, mowing also helps reduce the amount of weeds that the animals won't eat as it will keep them from going to seed..... and depending on the type of grass, the grass may also start to spread by means other than by spreading seed (some of the areas I've been mowing have gotten noticeably thicker grass in the last couple years ...in addition to having fewer weeds).