Control Thistle in Pasture

[rook]

A strong shot of Ally has worked for us. Cheap, safe, and a few years residual.

[smcgrath76]

I would certainly concur with your thoughts on symptom vs. problem cakadu. Back when we had sheep (120 ewes) thistles were gourmet forage.

For cows, thistles make a lovely place to feed minerals. The best overall treatment we have found for thistles is to let grass grow. A one time shot of Grazon or Roundup or whatever may work, but only so long as you change the system surrounding the problem in conjunction. I know people think we are nuts to waste grass when 50% or more is left behind, but we don't feed cows in summer or most of the winter and we actually have higher carrying capacities because of this practice. The old timers are right when they say "it takes grass to make grass". I have some reasearch and some math here that supports the theory. Letting grass grow is a great form of cost reduction, weed control, and drought insurance.

Thistles are actually pretty good forage and another good way to make them palatable is to silage them.

[coppertop]

The donkeys loves the young thistles. Only problem with that is donkeys are tough on wooden fences so the thistles might be the lesser of two evils !

[exnaboe]

An interesting discussion. I'm glad that some folk manage to control their thistle population by "natural" methods. We try to be effective grazers, practising rotational grazing and trying to balance consumption and rest periods. However there are places where the thistles have taken hold and mowing is not possible, unless with a scythe, and lacking sheep, goats or donkeys to help us, chemical control appears to be the only option. I recall a Forage Association tour where an Ag student had an experiment in essentially forcing cows to eat the thistles. They will when hungry enough, but this looks rather self-defeating to me. I have a neighbour who has proved this with a Longhorn herd. With sufficient overgrazing great patches of thistles do indeed disappear to my - downwind - relief.

[grassfarmer]

exnaboe, Research done in the States - I forget the persons name but I think it was at Univ. of Utah showed that you could teach cattle to eat thistles but you should/could not teach them by starving them or forcing them to eat them because they had nothing else available. Teaching cattle to broaden their diet to include thistles would seem a very worthwhile exercise. I haven't needed to because a proportion of my herd already graze thistles and they seem to be teaching the rest. There is a history of browse grazing bred into some of my cattle.

Cakadu, we never had much success with thistles and sheep (maybe different breeds?)- indeed I find we have less problems under a cattle only system than under a cattle/sheep system as I believe thistles seeds can pass through a sheep viable which they can't with a cow? Even if your sheep do eat the buds you will still get spreading by roots as that is where about 60% of the thistles reproduction comes from.
I was brought up with the cutting stems/rotting theory and it seems to work if you get enough rain to drown them out. Many people find it doesn't work as well nowadays as it did years ago and I think that the increasing use of disc or flail cutters smashes the cut stem tops up thus not allowing the water to enter the stem.

[cakadu]

The best thistle control we ever had was with the goats - they would eat them quite short. As coppertop has point out however, the goats were far harder on fences and the lesser of the two evils was to see the goats go.

While not as quite efficient, the sheep do tend to eat the thistles. They also eat things like stinging nettle - at a certain stage anyway - and they absolutely love pigweed. Don't ask me why, but they will literally fight each other to get at it.

I do believe that your assessment about not being able to "starve" something to eat thistles is correct. How many pastures do you drive by where there isn't a blade of grass to be seen, yet the thistles are going to seed?

We have also spent many hours cutting them down with a sythe. I don't know if we would ever be to the point that we would use chemical control. We'll see how they fare after this last hail storm. I doubt we'll see much regrowth this year, but I suppose that depends on conditions over the next few weeks.

[grassfarmer]

Yeah, I spent many hours in my youth cutting thistles with a scythe - a soul destroying job except for on very small areas!
I could take some great pictures just now of our roadside ditches which are full of waist high thistles, yet they more or less stop at the fence line. This tells me we are at least close to managing the threat from thistle invasion with our existing management.
So much for the theory that if we didn't control "our" weeds the county weed inspector would be ordering me to use chemicals to destroy them!

[cakadu]

I find being out there cutting those thistles is good stress relief, not to mention it is one of those tasks that requires next to no thought, which is good sometimes. Either that or I find that I spend a lot of time thinking.

Either way, I end up feeling as though I have accomplished something - at least for the moment.

[coppertop]

Interesting to note that the fellow across the road pastured a large number of horses on one quarter of land for years, including 2002 during the drought. The pasture was eaten to the dirt, then he sold the horses and pastured cows on the same land. There is no sign of thistles anywhere except around the vacant buildings. In this area the county ditches are relatively free of thistles but I can't say the same for the primary highway ditches !!!

[cakadu]

It is sad to see the thistles coming back as strong as they have what with having them almost gone prior to the drought. It was also unfortunate that the fellow we rented to had agreed to not overgraze, yet the year before the drought and the year of the drought he seriously overgrazed both years. Both years we had asked if he would take them out, which of course he never did. Now he has moved on and we are left with the aftermath and trying to get it under control.

I suppose we might consider using some sort of chemical on them, but for two reasons. #1 we just don't agree with the whole notion of chemicals and #2 if we use it on the thistles it will also take out any other broad leaf species, including the clovers that were so laboriously planted. We want the effects of the clover moreso than that of the chemicals, so I guess we are caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

[coppertop]

Just yesterday a friend and I were discussing the use of all types of chemicals, and we came to the conclusion that we would need to be in a glass bubble to avoid any contact with chemicals.

Laundry soaps, household cleaners,additives in the food we eat etc., are so prevalent that it's little wonder that there are so many people developing allergies to food, and their environment !!

I use roundup in areas of the house yard where I want to completely kill out vegetation, and I have had thistles sprayed with Grazon in past years but haven't done so this year.

The air we breathe, and the water that sustains us are two areas that all of us need to be more concerned about, particularly now when things are booming like they are here in AB.

[grassfarmer]

Cakadu, Are your thistles really getting noticably worse or are you just trying to control them because they look unsightly? If as you say you have reduced past overgrazing that alone should increase competition on the thistles and start to lead to their decline. Do you have gophers or moles? the fastest I have ever seen thistles spread is on fields that are overrun with gophers - I can think of a couple of fields I drive past occasionally that have gone from 2% thistle cover to 60% cover in a couple of years.

I'm with you on the spray killing broadleaves - legumes in particular. My place here had only a few tiny overgrazed white clover plants for legumes on it when I bought it but now has alfalfa, red clover, alsike clover, white clover, yellow sweet clover, Kura clover, cicer milk vetch, American vetch. Of these I only seeded the cicer milk vetch and kura clover. It truly is remarkable what can appear as a result of simple grass management - just cattle, electric fences, water, a grazing plan and time.

How bad would my thistles need to be before it justified spraying them and killing this amount of legumes and setting back this much progress?

[cakadu]

Grassfarmer, the gophers here have gotten relatively bad again - despite my spouse and dogs making a dent in them. About 10 years ago we had a resident badger here because of the gopher population. Then we got two years of absolute downpours - almost 300% of normal rainfall. The watertable was at ground level so the gophers were gone and consequently so did the badger move out. Since then, he gophers have slowly come back and the badger hasn't.

An interesting comment - how would the gophers spread more? I have no idea how that would happen.

Coppertop - I am not against chemicals entirely and I agree with you - there is no way we can get away from them. I wonder just how much this whole "anti-bacterial" phenomenon is good for us as we need some of these bugs around to help us keep immune. I sometimes joke with my urban friends that when it comes to an outbreak of something, those of us on the farm will be able to outlast them because we are in contact with many things in a day.

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that since this obsession with clean and anti-bacterial started, that more of us - particularly children - are continually getting sick? Seems to me that we weren't as sick when we were kids.

The best disinfectant around is still bleach. Not the kindest on the environment, but it works and it definitely isn't a high-falutin' type of cleaner.

[coppertop]

vinegar is an excellent disenfectant, I use it around the house, on cutting boards, counter tops etc.

I agree that it does seem that certain flu bugs really knock people off their feet. I am thinking that the farming community can't afford to be sick so maybe we just tough it out whenever we do feel out or sorts.

[Smithy]

Interesting that vinegar came up in this thread as my daughter uses it to kill thistle around her yard. It isn't as effective as roundup and seems to take several applications to really knock it down but she has little kids and pets and it is much safer.