You may need to subsoil those. I was not able to get very good penetration with my disk on mine until I did that. Then I added lime, and I had to add triple 17 to get them to really perk up with cereal grains last fall. They came up ok, then yellowed and I kept adding nitrogen, and nothing. Added some triple 17 and off they went. Most all the fields I did soil tests on didn't suggest anything but nitrogen.

One of mine I have subsoiled twice and added lime as well, and it still needs it again, so I think we are going to add some horse manure to it. If you really want to create biomass, plant sunn hemp next spring. Onoe of them this spring, I subsoiled it and planted buckwheat and peas on it as is. They came up really good.

I actually accused a landowner of turning crickets loose in a white clover stand. That place was loaded with crickets.

I’ve referenced the book “A One Straw Revolution” a million times in the past but if you’ll look at the ways that Japanese farmer incorporated white clover into his farm, I believe that is the more natural and more productive way of using clover……The Japanese farmer considered white clover to be the most important plant on his whole farm and a key specie to driving the whole cycle. It was the most important because it was what brought nitrogen into the cycle for the other plants……It’s suppose to be a companion crop to the other plants……He didn’t try and grow pure clover plots….He simply seeded a small amount of white clover across his orchards and crop fields each year until it just became part of the landscape……That’s how I see clover being used but instead of that being a Japanese farmers fruit orchards and fields it’s a quail plantation or what have you…..Same management style though…….Grow it in large scale “prairies” as a companion crop by simply broadcasting a little as you going along……That’s what the seeder box on top of that big Ranchworx aerator was for .......

So big picture ideas now…….The problem when you start talking about REALLY scaling up these ideas and concepts to create vast areas of rich actively managed habitat like this is that mechanical means of doing it really becomes limited or at best it would be very intensive to try and manage acreage in the thousands by mechanical means. I was thinking about how someone could feasibly and realistically use that Ranchworx machine to implement some of concepts and about the best scenario I came up with would be to use it to create 20-40 acre “prairies” in your best soil areas and maintain however many of those blocks or corridors was realistic for you……..That’s still kinda small fries though …….

If you want to really talk about having a profound impact on habitat in Alabama then change the way we raise cattle to make it look like what the guy in that last video was doing……Make the blackbelt look like that instead of looking like one big cow pasture with some hedge rows…….Yeah, I know I’m not talking about something simple and I’m not in any way suggesting that anything be forced…….but there are folks out there who are very creative. Most of it just revolves around changing a mentality of how things are done…..Change the ideas in people’s heads and the groundwork will take care of itself I believe…….

This may sound really out of the box to some but others will get where I’m going with it….but another way I got to thinking that someone could use that Ranchworx machine and likely be the most effective at replicating what a natural actively managed understory would look like……..would be to get on it a few afternoons a week with you a little cooler of beverages and just randomly joy ride around pulling that machine behind you…….I think another one of our issues with the way we manage is that we do everything too uniformly….Nature is usually the exact opposite and its like that for a reason……It creates a mosaic of “layers” within the plant communities. It gives that little quail or turkey somewhere to feed right beside somewhere to hide…..The less prey species have to travel the better. The more they move the more they usually die.

You know when you really get to lookin……there’s a chit load of different ones these critters…..The bright yellow ones are one of the more commons ones but they act like crack heads and wont sit still long enough for me to focus…….the camera that is.

You know it may seem really far fetched to talk about changing the way we raise cows to impact wildlife but in reality we really aren’t that far off with our “on the ground” resources. The chess pieces are on the board already…..it’s just the manner in which they're being used.……all that is really needed is a tweak in the stocking density we’re running…….Hypothetically speaking if Alabama were a monarchy and being run by a King then you could simply make a decree that all cattle stocking rates be cut down to 1/3 of their current levels and bada boom bada bing you’d probably see a big change just from that alone.

Here's what I mean.....If we were to take a big piece of property like the Sedgefield Plantation that just sold……The simplest way of managing to produce this natural effect I've been talking about would be to wrap the perimeter of the 6,000 acres in a low fence and then introduce a cattle herd that roamed the entire paddock at their free will along with the use of periodic fire…….The most important question would be how big to make the herd so that they leave the desired footprint without over doing it…….The way we are raising cattle now in most situations is simply “over doing it” from this perspective……

Again, if we were King would could just make everyone adhere to the this same rate and not let them run cattle at any higher rate than what we deemed was ideal…….We cant do that though but the concepts would still work the same if someone were creative enough to make it happen through different avenues. I think it mostly involves economics and psychology…..It’s also why I mentioned in another thread about making soil OM have a $$$ value associated with it.……..Probably just pipe dreaming but at least its dreaming BIG!! .....

Yellow crack-heads…….check. Look at his eyes how bugged out there are………Hmmmmm.

If there’s an app now that will recognize plants for you just by showing it to the camera……I wonder if anyone has made one for recognizing the different songbird sounds and inventorying them.....or just bird sounds in general??? That would be a simpler way of doing a diversity survey than chasing butterflies. I’d think you could use that as a measuring stick of sorts…….From a food perspective what is good for songbirds is probably good for turkey and quail, correct?

I have really enjoyed this thread CNC. You have me staring out the window at work all week waiting until the weekend so I can take a trip to the camp.

Your camp must be a weedy mess too 😆😆

This is more of the new growth from the areas I mowed midsummer……Deer are hammering it now eating the tops out just about any and everything. They target those tender "high energy" growing tips of the new growth.....I’m pretty sure this is goldenrod. Something is even nibbling on the ends of those vines....It may be from some kind of insect.

A little updated pic on the area where I was playing around creating "layers".......It’d be way simpler to just let cows do this….

Back in the beginning of the thread I was talking about the canopy effect and how to get your crop of biomass to efficiently decompose……That task has been accomplished…….With about 6 ish weeks to go until planting everything is lining up just about perfect.

I stomped down a little area to show where we're headed with it…..This would probably be excellent fawning cover…..most of it is 5ft tall or better… It’ll make a perfect biomass crop to plant my fall cereal grains and clover into. There’s still a little component of crabgrass in it that comes in at the very end that actually works great for making “hay”….. a LOT of ragweed.....lot of dog fennel. That Ranchworx machine would be so sweet for this process…..Talk about “gitter done”…….It’d be like standing around one evening in early Oct watching that cold front headed our way…….and someone hollers………”Food plots!?!?!?”......and then you say……”Hold my beer and watch this.……….Bam!!!!.......Food plots………”