RED OAK, VA – It’s been hot everywhere this summer, but it’s been especially hot in Charlotte County, in the heart of Virginia’s central Piedmont.
Miller Adams, a fifth-generation farmer, checks on his herd “morning and night to make sure they’ve got water.”
Adams raises a three-way cross of Angus, Gelbvieh and Simmental on his ancestral farm, founded by Adams’s great-great-grandfather, a sawmiller, when he moved here from Gretna in the 1890s. His herd is fall-calving and numbers 90 cows.
For some years Adams has been selling his steers through Amelia Area Cattlemen (AAC), a regional association that preconditions feeder calves for sale through Virginia Cattlemen’s Association’s VQA (Virginia Quality Assured) feeder sales. AAC also organizes a spring-bred heifer sale at Knoll Crest Farm in which Adams is a consignor.
In 2019, Adams began developing a silvopasture program on his farm, a development he attributes in part to his partnership with AAC. “With their more organized approached to preconditioning cattle,” he said, “I started to pay closer attention to weight gain.
“Having shade is important for cattle, especially when we’re having weather like we’re having now,” he said.
Adams grew up raising cattle with his father R.M. He attended Virginia Tech and graduated with a degree in forestry. He’s been the Area Forester for Charlotte County for 25 years. Over that time, he’s helped producers develop silvopasture programs to get a double crop of cattle and timber from the same ground.
“Being a forester, the practice piqued my interest,” he said.
Adams has been rotationally grazing cattle for decades. He’s also consulted with other cattle producers who, like him, have invested in the conservation practice of fencing cattle out of streams, which also often means fencing cattle out of what had formerly been prime shade areas.
With less available shade for their herds, cattle farmers were noticing their mid-pasture shade trees were dying. Cattle were congregating under those trees and trampling the trees’ fine surface roots, Adams explained.
Combine that trend with the memory Adams had of seeing steers in the preconditioning program “more or less run back to the shade when the feed troughs were empty” and Adams knew it was time to experiment with silvopasture.
“It’s a good opportunity to mitigate heat stress,” he said.
Miller Adams pulls up some temporary fencing to let his cattle go to a new section of pasture. Photo by Karl H. Kazaks
Adams had recently purchased a piece of land adjoining his farm on which a stand of loblolly pines had been planted in 2001. Adams marked out the land for the future grazing operation. First, the wet areas were excluded. Then he divided the remainder into alternating 50-foot-wide strips of grass alleyways and 50-foot-wide strips of forest. The strips of trees he thinned by about two-thirds.
“The trees were about 20 years old – old enough that the lower limbs had already fallen off,” Adams said. Hence, Adams didn’t have to limb the loblollies. With younger plantations of pines, limbing the lower branches is often needed when converting land to silvopasture.
Overall, the logging removed 60 loads of pulpwood (taken to a local OSB plant) and five loads of small sawlogs.
Adams then turned to establishing grass. In the alleyways he hired a contractor who used a forestry tiller to go eight inches deep and mulch the stumps. Using this method, Adams didn’t have to use equipment to pull out the stumps and haul them elsewhere.
“It was a dry fall,” Adams recalled. “I saw some natural switchgrass growing by my mailbox and it was nice and green so I decide to plant that.”
Switchgrass is a light seed and should not be planted too deeply. Adams lightly disked the alleyways, then broadcast the seed and rolled the surface of the ground.
At same time he developed the silvopasture, Adams also renovated adjacent pastures with novel endophyte fescue. He killed the existing stand of grass in spring, smothering it with a summer annual mix, grazed it, killed the residue and then planted the fescue in autumn.
Grazing in the tree lanes doesn’t hurt the roots of the trees too much, Adams assured. “The cattle are in there only a limited time – and mainly in the summer, when the weather and soils tend to be drier.”
Switchgrass is a sun-loving grass, so over time Adams may need to thin the strips of trees to permit sufficient sunlight to penetrate. When the loblollies are harvested, he may permit the deciduous trees which presently make up the understory of the pine forest to mature and make their own type of silvopasture.
On a recent day, with the temperature set to peak in the upper 90s, Adams went to check on his cattle. They were happily grazing the switchgrass, enjoying the shade from the pines.
“The real commodity here is shade,” he declared.
He smiled, then looked off in the distance. “Silvopasture as a concept inspires a lot of questions. I don’t have all the answers, but what I’m seeing here now is convincing.”
by Karl H. Kazaks
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