Some Benefits of Bale Grazing

Jun 12, 2025

By Amos Johnson

Pockets of hay remained after the snow melted away, golden-brown knolls in the green sea of early spring grass. The sheep and cattle stood in the last of their winter paddocks, monoliths of round bales in various stages of collapse as they’re rent apart by hungry mouths.

Hannah Bernhardt, of Medicine Creek Farm near Finlayson, Minnesota, explains how she rotates her livestock through hay-filled paddocks in the winter.

In the fall, she strategically pre-sets all the bales based on where she wants the animals to be at different points in the season. Sometimes that means proximity to water sources, sometimes that means avoiding low and muddy spots when the weather warms. Right now, they are near the house for shearing before soon moving out to begin lambing on pasture.

Usually, Hannah simply spreads any leftover hay with her feet, kicking it around as she does chores. Pointing to two big bales the sheep refused to finish eating before moving on, she acknowledges that sometimes there’s too much to do manually, but it won’t decompose well in a mound like that.

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Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators