We're this close! Let's put the tractor to work!

hey there folks this is josh stoney ridge farmer welcome back to another awesome day here on the stoney ridge farm today is going to be equipment fun so we're going to be running the t1104 the tymt 1104 tractor with the woods precision superseder today so we're going to have some fun over seeding pastures we're going to talk to you a little bit about grass seed the type of grassy that i use here in the fall to help establish forage and we're going to talk a little bit about clover nitrogen fixation and we're going to talk about correcting the ph of your soil so we've got all kinds of cool stuff to do today come along as we have a little bit of fun getting some work done on the tractor and a special surprise right after the break all right [Music] bridge you ready for your special surprise let's walk back here as i'm getting farm work done and getting stuff done here on the farm man's got to eat so i've got an awesome meal planned for tonight i've been out here i've been smoking this brisket for about five hours now and it's probably got about five more hours to go let's take a look real quick before we get busy working check it out oh look at that oh my goodness that's gonna be delicious so this is big tea this is the tym t1104 it's 110 horsepower tym tractor it's the biggest one in the lineup and what we're matching it up with is some grass seed clover seed and the woods precision superseder right here this is the pss-72 it's really really cool so on the front of it it has some spiked rollers those spikes help to rip up the ground ahead of the seed drill then there's a one big spiked roller right here in the middle and there is a cultipacker built into the back of it so it basically prepares your seed bed drops the seed in and cultipacks it right behind the seed this is the ultimate food plot machine right here so if you're planting food plots probably about a month and a half ago it's probably when you needed to do that you've got hoppers for all sorts of different stuff cool season grasses warm season grasses and those small seeds like clover or turnips or anything like that that you'd want to use for a food plot what we're building is a food plot for the cows so out here in this pasture in front of the house what we're trying to do is we're trying to fix more nitrogen we're trying to feed the soil and we're trying to amend the soil so the ph of our soil here on the farm is between 4 and 4.2 which is not conducive to growing good quality fescue grass for our cattle so what we want to do is we're going to bring that ph up you'll have to stay tuned for the future video and what we're using is fast cow or calcium or limestone basically but this fast cow is a product made by green resources in colfax north carolina and i think they're all over the states but it's called fast cow and one bag of this is the same as three bags of lime so we're drastically reducing the amount of labor it's going to take to spread all this now we're not going to be using the broadcast spreader today we're just going to be dropping down some seed in the ground so let's show you all the hoppers how this thing works and we'll get it loaded up and out here working all right i've got a scooper right here i'm going to toss that aside the scooper is so that i can scoop out clover seed and load up the clover hopper right here what we're doing with clover before we even start putting grass seed down what we're doing with clover is we're spreading the seed on the ground so that we get nitrogen fixation so clover will pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and bring it into the soil thus helping the soil to grow which is super super cool so along with the cow poop we've got clover that's fixing nitrogen here on the farm to help build the soils we are straying away from any type of chemical fertilizer here on the farm there are only three places that i use any sort of chemical fertilizer and that's right around my pond dam so my pond dams are really compacted i'm trying to bring that soil back so i'm putting a little bit of triple 17 on there just to try and make it pop okay that is not where the cows graze we are not grazing the cows on anything with fertilizer so this first bin is our small seed hopper and this will house the clover seed if you had any sort of uh food plot seed with tiny tiny little seeds and i'll show you the clover seeds in a minute that would be the hopper the next one is cool season grasses and cereal grains and what we're going to be putting in here today is a 80 20 fescue annual ryegrass mix it's called a contractor's mix it's the fall or spring contractors mix there is a summer contractor's mix that has millet in it foxtail millet box tail millet will grow on a rock so if you're like building a pond or something or if you've got an area that wants to wash that's what you want to hit it with in the summertime in the fall and the cool season or the springtime we're going to hit it with a 80 20 mix of kentucky 31 fescue and annual rye grass now on the back copper which we're not going to use today but we do use from time to time this is a big hopper and this big hopper houses bigger seeds so our native grasses like our eastern gamma grass like our broom grass not broom straw but broom grass all sorts of different varieties of warm season grasses so we bought this with all that in mind as we establish native grasses here on the farm and there are programs out there for you guys if you're interested look up on your government website stop into your local usda office there are programs out there that will help you pay for your native grasses so we can get those native grasses back and get those bobwhite quails back to the farm too so it's something important so let's go ahead and start loading this critter up this is our annual rye grass and fescue mix right here okay [Music] i always cut a tea in my bag so we've got two different types of clover here we've got the medium la dyno clover which is the clover that you see in most yards it's that clover it's about that tall and it has the white top now what we have over here is a medium red top type clover and there isn't much difference in the seed they look basically the same the red top is a little bit bigger seed let's go ahead and open up this guy um the ladino is a little bit smaller that's la dino that's the red top what we're going to do is take our scooper that we just tossed over here and we're going to mix about half and half now i know i'm going to be seeding around three acres right here typically the seeding rate is about three pounds to the acre for clover okay a lot of this clover seed we're gonna mix in with our lime and shoot it out with the broadcast spreader because when you put clover seed on the ground clover seed will sprout and this pasture that we're working with right here once we get the broadcast cedar up and running uh the cows will be on it pretty soon so we're gonna move the cows over here right after we put the grass seed down so that they'll trample that grass seed down into the ground that's what this machine does the best it saves you time it saves you money and it does all the trampling for you so if we were to broadcast spread this grass seed we'd be looking at 150 pounds to the acre if we're using this machine the woods precision superseder we cut that down to about 30 pounds per acre so one bag goes a lot further that's why you get a seed drill when you have a big piece of property like this so let's go ahead and we're going to load up this hopper [Music] start with the ladino [Music] move on to the red top a little more ladino [Music] and a little more red top now the reason we use la dino and red top is la dyno makes for a pretty good forage but it's not very tall and it's not very robust so we want to mix la dino and red clover so that we get that forage based clover we get that grass seed that comes up and we get that clover that fixes nitrogen that ladino clover really really fixes nitrogen now you might be thinking well won't your cows get bloat from eating too much clover your horses get bloat from eating too much clover yes they will so you have to be careful and you need to make sure that your mix is just right okay guys so no more than about 20 clover in the pasture and the rest of it needs to be different types of grasses as you can see we've got pretty good grass right over in here it's not a fenced in pasture we'll walk over here to this section this is where i basically had no grass whatsoever three years ago and now i've unrolled hay bales out here i unrolled about 55 hay bales out here last winter and the grass has just taken off there's a lot of nutrient in the soil but we need more nutrient and that again is where that clover comes into play so let's get busy rolling with the seed drill to be awesome [Music] so as you can see big t is doing an awesome job out here it really feels like you don't have the implement even behind you the pss the precision superseder from woods here has been an awesome part of the farm in building the soil and that's what this is all about establishing forage for the cows and building soil what this fall drilling is going to do this drilling down seed for the fall here is going to give the cows a little bit of winter forage in other words that uh that wonderful forage that we're experiencing from the rye grass and i misspoke earlier it's 80 20 80 percent fescue 20 percent annual rye grass that rye grass will stay green all winter long and the cows will be able to forage off of that now it's not really high quality forage but that's all good this is the time of year when you want to plant your fescue grass and you want to make sure that you get your legume in there meaning your clover you got to get that clover in there it really completes the package what we're shooting for here on the farm is a not a monoculture but a multi-species pasture so that's what we're shooting for you'll notice as we ride over the grass i didn't clip the grass ahead of time because when i run over the grass you can see where it's matted down and if i stay in the same direction i can always tell where i've been so i'm not crossing over the same place twice and wasting seed now inevitably you're going to cross over the same place once or twice just kind of turning around but we don't want to waste any seed because this stuff is super expensive this year i think fescue went from 60 to about 115 dollars per bag so it's expensive but uh we're getting there and hopefully we won't have to reseed this section of pasture ever again and we'll move on to the next section of pasture in the spring really awesome guys hope you're enjoying this beautiful day [Music] guys thanks a lot for joining me we'll see you next time on the stoney ridge park please pound that like button jump in subscribe the channel i'd love to have you back that's the way it's supposed to be stoney red