We have had another full month at Triple Creek, with some great grass and pretty nice temperatures. We remain on the dry side, but some heavy rain is expected over the next two days so we should be in pretty good shape for forage production for the next few weeks. We have a short hay crop due to the dry April, but it is looking better and we have our work cut out for us.. We spent time today getting up the early novel fescue hay we cut last week, and it should make great feed. Despite it being Mother’s Day, Christina was running one of the tractors!
As I went through the day I kept coming back to thoughts of my mom. She loved to help with the hay and all the other farm chores as well, and really supported my desire to be a farmer. We spent so much time at the farm together that my memories are so clear it is almost overwhelming.
My mom, Ninalei Bader Poore, was quite a woman. She was born in Honolulu, Hawaii before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and she spent most of the war on the mainland with her aunt. She went to nursing school in Hawaii, and then trained as a midwife with the Frontier Nursing Service in Hazard, KY. She rode a jeep or horse to visit families deep in the mountains to deliver babies and to help the people however she could.
She met my dad at the University of Virginia where he was in medical school and she was doing a continuing education course. They were married a few weeks later, and set off on a life of adventure that turned out to be pretty amazing. They raised 7 children, all of whom grew up attending school in Flagstaff, AZ and then spending the summers on a tobacco and cattle farm in North Carolina.
I can’t explain how much my mom meant to me through all the things I have done in my life. We had a great many adventures together and I feel her spirit strong at the farm. It was especially so today as I saw all the text messages coming in from my sisters and brother wishing everyone happy Mother’s Day and remembering our mom.
Our farm has been very important to many in our family. As young men my brother Sam and I both did solo times at the farm. We have had four nephews that have worked at the farm as well including Blake, Mitch, Korey, and Noah. Each of them served in turn as the main on-site manager for a span of nearly 20 years and it proved to be a valuable experience for each of them. Blake passed at a young age. We will never forget him and named our beef “Blake’s Beef” in his remembrance. The others have gone on to have productive lives.
I didn’t really expect to have another nephew at the farm, but about 6 months ago Silas Henry Poore (my brothers son) sent me a text and said he would like to come spend a few months at the farm. Silas has been with us about a month now and we have really enjoyed having him here to learn the basics of how pasture-based beef production works.
We had a chance to test our stewardship skills this week when we had a lame cow in the main herd in the very back pasture. We have a small catch pen there, and used polywire to separate her and her calf and work them to the pen where we could load them out. This technique is just one of the many benefits of having a herd that is very well trained to polywire. It’s the Power of One Wire!
Silas has also been helping Christina keep up with the face fly sticky traps so we can keep ahead of the population before they build up. We catch an amazing number of flies per cow, and we have seen in past years that if we keep after it and change out the traps every few days we will see the population start to decline.
The novel fescue pastures we established two years ago have been very productive this year, and that has helped us get through the erratic weather conditions we have seen. The benefit of the novel endophyte tall fescue is especially noticeable now in mid-May when ryegrass is heading and turning very low in quality. The novel tall fescue is holding it’s quality and gives us a lot more flexibility on utilization.
In past months I have written about our apparent failure with a conversion to novel endophyte tall fescue using the Spray-Wait-Spray technique. We overseeded half of this with additional novel tall fescue in March, and the remaining half will be sprayed with glyphosate and will plant to sudangrass in the next few weeks. We also have additional acreage that we will be converting to novel this year using the spray-smother-spray system, so we will batch it together with that and move on.
I hope you are having a good season so far. I realize that there are extreme wet conditions in parts of the fescue belt and drought in other parts. That seems to be the story these days, with drought and flood becoming a regular part of life. Always remember that a strong forage system based on soil health and perennial species, and passionate management will carry you through many adverse conditions.
~ Matt Poore, NC State and the Alliance for Grassland Renewal
The Alliance for Grassland Renewal is a national organization focused on enhancing the appropriate adoption of novel endophyte tall fescue technology through education, incentives, self-regulation and promotion. For more resources or to learn more about the Alliance for Grassland Renewal, go to www.grasslandrenewal.org
The Alliance for Grassland Renewal 