14 December 2025 TOP: UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA PHOTO | MIDDLE: VAL STEINMANN PHOTO 15 www.SmallFarmCanada.ca turns should be substantially greater now. The jingle of more coin in your pocket is music to the ears of cattlemen including Duynisveld and Manitoba grass-fed beef producer Ian Grossart. “In terms of tractor time and fuel, bale grazing’s savings are big,” says Grossart. Duynisveld reckons the cost of operating a tractor (including fuel, labour, maintenance and depreciation) at somewhere around $100 an hour. When hay is delivered to his Wallace Bay, NS farm, he drops the bales on their round sides (to shed rain), strips off the net wrap or twine and leaves them in place, ready for feeding. Given the cost of running a tractor, he says, “I only want to touch those bales once.” The beauty of bale grazing is its flexibility. You can bale graze for a few weeks, or a few months. You can line up bales in a grid, or just leave them where they rolled out of the baler. You can feed whole bales, roll them out one at a time using a commercial or homemade unroller – or even by hand (it’s cheaper than a gym membership). On his Fort Frances, ON farm, Micha Gerber’s 45cow herd transitions from grazing standing corn in the fall to bale grazing through the winter. Rather than set bales out in the autumn, “I like to keep my hay in the shed to maintain quality, and to make it easier to take the net wrap off,” he says. “On a weekly basis, I’ll go out and set up bales.” A big selling point is the way bale grazing outsources bedding and manure management. With conventional winter feeding, Gerber says, “there’s a manure pile you’ve got to deal with every year.” Bale grazing hands the job over to the cattle, and lets them spread the manure, with no mechanical spreader or front-end loader required. As cattle chew through 25 big alfalfa-grass bales per acre, they leave roughly 75 pounds of plant-available nitrogen in the topsoil, boost available phosphorus and potassium, and hike valuable organic matter to feed hungry roots and soil microbes. For tired fields, “it’s pretty transformational,” Gerber adds. “Depending how much thatch is left (from bale residue) you won’t notice a difference the first year. But the year after you see the real difference, with the grass coming in nice and thick.” Bale grazing “isn’t a cakewalk,” Steinmann adds. “It’s a lot easier to dump a round bale into a feeder beside the barn. But I’ve seen the benefits of feeding on pasture over the past few seasons. Poorer areas seem to respond with a thicker sward.” The common knock against bale grazing is it wastes hay, and you can see where the argument comes from. Bale-grazed fields look plug ugly in the spring, when melting snow reveals clumps of manure and leftover hay. Outwintering cattle also tend to consume more hay, because they expend roughly 20 per cent more bale grazing than lounging in a yard. And when hay is both the main course and the mattress, some waste is unavoidable. (Just imagine what university residences would look like if pizza was comfy.) But this surface disarray is deceptive. After sifting through bale grazed rescue to separate manure from waste hay, researchers pegged wastage at 8-20 per cent – not much worse than the 15 per cent or so when cattle eat from a standard ring-style hay feeder. And while studies at the University of Manitoba found heavy residues suppressed forage growth for at least two years, waste can be reduced by moving cattle more quickly, increasing competition by putting more cattle on fewer bales, or feeding smaller bales. If you’re okay with extra labour, rolling bales out helps, too, because it spreads the same residue over an area that’s about 3.5 greater. Or you could harrow the area in the spring. Ontario producer Val Steinmann rolls bales out on the snow to feed her small herd of cattle (and one retired draft horse). One of the challenges of bale grazing is limiting the smothering caused by heavy residues of manure and hay. Photo from a University of Manitoba trial. As University of Saskatchewan Animal and Poultry Science professor Bart Lardner says, “it’s not waste, it’s residue. Think of it as a slow-release mechanism for building soil fertility. Three years later there’s still fertility here from where these cows and bales were.” KEEN TO TRY BALE GRAZING? Make it easy on yourself by starting small and erring on the side of caution. Feed mature cows in good condition after they’ve weaned their calves. Put the herd out when the ground is frozen or firm. Make sure they’re trained to respect electric fences. “If you’re currently feeding in the barn, start in the early mid-winter period and do six or eight weeks of bale grazing,” Duynisveld says. “That’s the safest bet.” Find a site that combines shelter, access to water, and a field needing a nutrient fix. Shelter is a priority because a cow’s energy requirements rise by roughly 13 per cent for every 5°C increase in the windchill. Look for the protective lee of nearby buildings or wooded areas, install portable windbreaks, or repurpose something on the farm to block the breeze. The staff at AAFC’s Nappan Research Farm slapped boards on the racks of an old bale-thrower wagon. Other producers use piles of stored bales or wrapped silage bales. Forcing cattle to eat snow for moisture hikes energy demands, so offering fresh water “reduces stress, especially in colder temperatures,” says Gerber. He supplies water from a dugout with the help of a solar pump and frost-free trough. Other producers pipe water from springs that run through the winter, rely on underground waterlines, or require the herd to hike back to a waterer near the barn. Finally, select a rundown field, but avoid sites where excess nutrients will run off to contaminate creeks, rivers, lakes and wells when the snow melts. (Manitoba, for example, urges bale grazing areas be at least 100 metres from a “surface watercourse, sinkhole, spring or well.”) To reduce soil nutrient overloading, University of Manitoba sessional lecturer Gwendolyn Donohoe says it’s important to rotate wintering sites by giving bale-grazed sites several years off before returning to them. On his farm near Brandon, MB Grossart selects flat areas away from creeks, and only returns to those sites every six-toeight years. Like any scheme involving livestock, bale grazing requires a plan B (or maybe C and D) in case things go wrong. The problem could be as obvious as a nasty freezing rainstorm or extended blizzard, or as subtle as a herd that’s slowly losing condition. Either way, the solution is usually more shelter and better (or more) feed. “When you’re dealing with a harsh climate, you’ve got to be prepared to adapt,” says Donohoe, who once had to supplement a herd with rolled barley during bale-grazing trials at the University of Manitoba. To be on the safe side, “you’ve got to be careful about the quality of hay and decide on supplementation if you’ve got lower quality hay.” Given the right site and good feed, cattle cope nicely. Gerber likes to see his fat cows lounging among the bales, with the snow frosting their heavy winter hair. Even “when it gets to 30 or 40 below, they take it really well. They tuck down around the bales and bed themselves in.” Like any grazing system, bale grazing is open to constant refinement. “Every technique you use has a learning curve. Often, it’s after two, three, four years of doing the same thing that helps you get better,” Duynisveld says. Back at Steinmann’s farm, she’s ready to roll, despite an on-again, off-again winter. Working outside with the cattle on a sunny winter day, “it’s emotionally and spiritually satisfying,” she says. “I’m no expert, but I’m enjoying my little herd having to do some work for themselves, instead of waiting around beside the barn for me to start the tractor and bring them their feed.”
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