In December of 2018, we purchased an old dairy farm in Monteagle, TN to be able to expand our herd. The location of the farm is excellent and the soil fertility is in decent shape but we noticed that there were only a few dominate species of forage growing. In particular, fescue dominated most of the pasture. In other areas, blackberry briers had taken over. We decided that rotational grazing would help native species as well as other seeds that had been dominated by the fescue to express themselves and give them a chance to establish.
In addition to rotational grazing, we felt that some areas, especially those with briers, could benefit from cover crop. After bush hogging the areas with briers, we planted a mix of buckwheat, sudan grass, millet, and black oil sunflower seed. These are very fast growing summer annuals that we were hoping would shade out the briers.