By Jordan Penrose
Winter is an excellent time of the year for planning things on the farm for the upcoming year. Winter offers that rare chance for you to slow down, reflect, and plan. As the new year approaches people start thinking and talking about their resolutions, or what they would like to do better or differently. Have you ever thought about applying the same principle to your farm? Setting goals now can help you make the upcoming year go smoother and maybe even less stressful. We can take things that we have learned from the past to help us improve in the future. Maybe it’s improving your pasture management, adjusting your calving window, or keeping better records. Just remember each year will bring new challenges and I feel like this past year was no different as we started with tight hay supplies, then a really wet spring, then the weather changing to almost no rain for the summer and early fall. These experiences can help shape what you want for the upcoming year and beyond.
When it comes to making a plan just remember the one thing that we can definitely not control is the weather. The weather in Ohio for 2025 was a wild ride across most of the state. The planting season and hay making season were wet and difficult for most. The past two years we have had some big droughts in Ohio, 2024 impacted the southeast the most and 2025 impacting the northwest the most. These weather patterns that we have had can leave some lasting impacts on different things like forage quality, pasture growth, and even animal performance. This year in extension we spent some time looking at hay samples across the state and only had a few samples meet the TDN requirements for cows at calving time, and the weather played a big factor in that. We have also seen a lot of pastures and hayfields that have been beaten up these past couple of years as well with the weather that we have had.
Source : osu.edu