To harrow pastures or not

[WildRoseBeef]

I was reading somewhere that a particular rancher who has done mob grazing for quite some time believes that harrowing your pastures is actually detrimental, not helpful. He claims that doing this increases losses "due to volatization and run-off...A well-placed dung pat that is undisturbed is decomposed by the soil life from underneath. This is nutrient cycling in action." (Canadian Cattlemen, Dec. 2011 article, "When the Dung Pat Hits the Fan")

Unfortunately there's no research on whether harrowing pastures is good or not, as this article states: What about Dragging Pastures?

So harrow or no harrow, and what are your opinions on it?

 

[herfrds]

For us it depends upon what the grasses are doing.
If we have an area where we fed heavily we will go over it to bust up the manure.
Have a ground moss that will choke off the grasses and we will gpo over those areas when needed.

 

[Cricket]

We pretty much have to because of the horse. She poops along the edge of the fence lines and corners. We need to clip our pastures and the side bar mower doesn't do 'piles'. We have a typical Vermont hill farm--pastures squeezed in between ledges and woods. If we don't clip, we'll have trees growing in a matter of months. It also brings the fertilizer to the center of the pasture and you can see a huge improvement--clover taking over weeds. We pasture way more than we need for a horse and couple of cows as it either isn't dry enough, flat enough, or has too many rocks to use as hay field. They seem to rotate themselves, favoring a specific area for a few days, then another.

Our soils tend towards clay and you can see that it's compacted in places. There was a segment on the news last night about a University of VT study where they are planting some kind of radish which gets HUGE. Apparently you can graze over it and it dies off in the winter, leaving a little mini compost/aerated hole. It was no-till planted. Quite interesting.
Cricket

 

[20kidsonhill]

Our neighbors plant radishes every fall in their field. I am assumming to loosen up the soil instead of dragging or tilling. They don't seem to be huge radishes, long white radishes, but I beleive they are of the normal variety. They can get to be 8 to 10 inches long, we occasionally pull a couple up to feed to our rabbits.

We don't do any kind of harrowing on our pastures. Infact I rarely see any one in our area harrowing or plowing, even corn fields. Where I grew up in Wisconsin they still seem to do a quit a bit of it. But here in the valley, due to run-off, soil consdrvation and conservation of the Chesapeake Bay, No till is encouraged over any kind of tilling or harrowing.