There’s no place like the pasture

A three-story farmhouse with stone walls and a wrap-around porch sits at the heart of Springwood Organic Farm. It is where Dwight Stoltzfoos grew up, and it is where he and his wife, Brenda, are currently raising nine children of their own. After moving away for a while as a young adult, the fourth-generation dairy producer returned to the outskirts of Gap, Pa., to help his parents, Roman and Lucy, run the farm. Then Stoltzfoos moved back into his childhood home with his family in 2014 and acquired majority share of the operation in 2022.

Roman began implementing organic practices in 1982, but it wasn’t until 1996 that the farm became one of the first four certified organic dairies in Lancaster County. Stoltzfoos continued to feed cattle organic grain until 2012 when grain prices got too high. Then another approach to crop production piqued his interest.

Industry buzz about sprouted barley suggested the crop would enhance dry matter value in dairy rations. That was enough to convince Stoltzfoos to eliminate grain from his feeding plan and build a new barn that housed a hydroponic system to grow sprouted barley. Unfortunately, he did not see a return on his investment with virtually no improvement in milk production and only about a 0.1% gain of butterfat.

“We were digging a hole into the ground financially,” Stoltzfoos recalled. “The output was 3 wet tons of barley sprouts per day, and it was stressful to operate the system and control the environment to keep mold out. I look back on those days and I am glad we figured out a more holistic lifestyle since then.”

Now, Stoltzfoos’ cattle are 100% grass-fed. All of the milk is processed by Organic Valley, and in 2016, the farm joined the organization’s GrassMilk campaign in partnership with CROPP Cooperative. A portion of the milk stays at the dairy where it is made into cheese on-site, but no matter the end product, milk production at Springwood Organic Farm is ultimately anchored in a comprehensive forage program.

Lay of the land

The farm comprises about 165 grazeable acres that are broken up into several permanent pastures. Stoltzfoos further divides these pastures into 2- to 3-acre paddocks with polywire, and a roadway of gravel lanes connects each pasture to the cattle yard to limit compaction from heavy hoof traffic. The lanes also serve as a trail for his all-terrain vehicle (ATV), which is an essential piece of equipment for checking paddocks and implementing rotational grazing.

Cattle are milked twice daily and move to a new paddock after each milking. Instead of always returning to the same area they occupied before parading to the parlor, though, Stoltzfoos adheres to two different rotation schemes. He sends the herd to paddocks of fresh grass that are father away from the farmstead during the day and keeps them closer to the barns at night. Not only does this boost efficiency from a labor perspective, but it also reduces stress on animals.

“We follow both rotations partly because I don’t want to move the cows so far late at night or early in the morning, and partly because I don’t want them to have to walk that distance twice a day,” Stoltzfoos explained from the driver’s seat of his ATV.

Most of the pastures contain a combination of grasses and legumes, including meadow fescue, orchardgrass, perennial ryegrass, red and white clover, and alfalfa. Stoltzfoos has also added festulolium to recent seedings. His biggest concern is that all of his stands are highly diversified even if each pasture has a different proportion of forage species, which is another reason he separates his grazing rotations.

“I don’t like to run a drill with less than seven or eight species going into the ground,” Stoltzfoos asserted, assessing the composition of his paddocks. “Quality will vary from pasture to pasture, so if you have two rotations, I have found it balances everything a little better.”

Silvopasture shade

Diversity doesn’t stop with forages at Springwood Organic Farm. Between 2019 and 2020, Stoltzfoos planted more than 3,000 trees to establish about 65 acres of silvopasture. The cost-share program that provided funding for the first 1,800 trees required they be planted at a dense rate of 100 trees per acre, whereas the next 1,200 trees were planted at a more moderate rate of about 30 trees per acre.

The tiny red and white oak, black locust, and persimmon saplings were planted in neat arrays across the landscape and protected from livestock with plastic tubes wrapped in barbed wire that still hug their trunks today. While the trees are currently only 6 to 8 feet tall, they will eventually be able to provide ample shade for animals, which is Stoltzfoos’ main objective for planting them. He plans on adding another 600 trees on about 20 acres in the spring of 2024.

“Managing heat stress is a big deal, and that is why we are moving to silvopasture,” Stoltzfoos emphasized, looking out across the rows of small saplings. “Keeping milk volume up is not easy when it is hot and you have fly pressure. When you’re organic, your fly sprays are more like fly repellants. It can be a challenge.”

Graze, graze, graze

Summer pastures tend to provide a steady supply of forage, but plant growth starts to dwindle when the seasons begin to change. Stoltzfoos offers his herd greater amounts of stored feed when they come in for milking during the fall to stretch forage availability into the winter. He knows completely resting pastures this time of year could encourage better plant growth the following spring, but he doesn’t have the facilities to house cattle long term.

“Our policy in the wintertime is if it’s freezing and there is something falling down from the sky, the cows will come in. Otherwise, they will stay in the pasture,” Stoltzfoos asserted. “We always pray for the nicest and driest weather in December. That is when I have the whole herd, and I am running 240 cows through the parlor.”

The majority of the cows are Ayrshires, along with some Norwegian Reds. Stoltzfoos has also been introducing Fleckvieh cattle into the herd because of their sturdy frames and affinity for grazing. He said these cows are more feed efficient than conventional dairy breeds, and they have relatively low maintenance requirements. Stoltzfoos also switched from A.I. breeding to bull breeding a few years ago, and he raises his own bulls and replacement heifers with nanny cows in a rented pasture.

The Stoltzfoos family includes (from back left) Ian, Jewel, Ava, Brenda, Dwight, Aleah, Savannah, Andre, (front left) Liam, Elayna, and Evan.

When cattle in the milking herd start to dry off in January, he relocates them and his replacement heifers to a hayfield on another property a few miles away where the animals strip graze stockpiled forage. Doing so enhances forage utilization and promotes a better distribution of manure in the field. It also reduces feed, fuel, and labor costs.

“It’s cheaper to truck cattle to feed than to truck feed to cattle,” Stoltzfoos said. “If you have the infrastructure to handle the cattle in the pasture, it’s by far the best way to do it as far as money goes.”

By February, nearly 65% of the herd will dry off before calving season begins in early March. While these dry cows and the replacement heifers keep grazing stockpiled forage, Stoltzfoos continues to rotate the remainder of the milking herd through winter pastures at the home farm. To supplement the lower quality forage found in both systems, he unwraps and unrolls baleage in the fields.

Hay in a day

Stoltzfoos prefers to make baleage over dry hay because the process can be executed in a single day. He harvests hayfields throughout the summer, cutting 80 to 100 acres of forage every 28 to 30 days.

Mowing begins at the crack of dawn — sometimes even before sunrise — and all of the hay is laid out in wide swaths by 10 a.m. If a stand has a high percentage of legume species, he will run a tedder through the windrows to speed up dry down.

Regardless of moisture content, Stoltzfoos schedules his custom harvester to merge forage around noon or shortly after. The round baler follows closely behind the merger, and bales are wrapped with an in-line wrapper a few hours later. Stoltzfoos wraps about 95% of the forage he harvests, and although plant moisture varies from one crop to the next, the baleage consistently boasts a relative forage quality of 170 or higher.

“I love making hay in a day because it is easy. I only need one day of good weather,” Stoltzfoos beamed. “It might get baled at 60% moisture or it might dry down to 30% moisture. Cows like it best when it is about 50% moisture, but I will take whatever I can get.”

Since starting to make and feed baleage, he has seen a significant improvement in milk production, and thus, profit margins. What’s more is the stored forage provides flexibility in his feeding plan when pastures are low in yield or quality, which is problematic for any grazing herd, but especially a grazing dairy.

Stoltzfoos is able to meet almost all of his cows’ requirements through grazing and feeding baleage with occasional supplementation. Similar to how his involvement in the operation — and his residence in the farmhouse — has come full circle over time, so have his efforts to maintain an organic grazing system that can support 100% grass-fed cows.

This article appeared in the March 2024 issue of Hay & Forage Grower on pages 32 and 33.

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