🌱 The Five Jobs of Grass
Looks like a green carpet. Secretly running the whole farm.
Grass is doing several jobs at once — and it doesn’t complain, even when everything else does. Click each job below to see what grass is really being asked to do.
1️⃣ Feed the animal 🐄
+Obvious… but only on the surface.
Grass must deliver energy, protein, fibre, intake and palatability — whether grazed, chopped, or eyed suspiciously by sheep.
Get this wrong and performance sulks.
2️⃣ Survive the system 🚜
+Grass has to tolerate:
- Close grazing
- Heavy machinery
- Poaching
- Tight cutting intervals
- Farmer impatience
Persistence matters. A grass that yields once then vanishes by year two is basically an annual with commitment issues.
3️⃣ Protect and build the soil 🌍
+Grass isn’t just feed — it’s a soil engineer:
- Root mass improves structure
- Ground cover reduces erosion
- Organic matter feeds biology
- Living roots keep nutrients cycling
Bare soil is shouting. Grass is doing quiet, useful work.
4️⃣ Manage nutrients (especially nitrogen) 🧪
+- Use applied nitrogen efficiently
- Work with clover to fix N
- Reduce leaching and losses
- Turn fertiliser into milk or meat — not paperwork
This is where mixes start earning their keep instead of just looking fancy in the seed catalogue.
5️⃣ Fit the weather (even when it misbehaves) ☔🌞
+UK grass must cope with:
- Wet springs
- Dry summers
- Mild winters
- Sudden “what on earth was that?” weather events
Deep roots, species diversity and flexibility turn grass into a risk management tool, not just a crop.
🎯 The takeaway for apprentices
Grass isn’t one crop doing one job.
It’s one sward doing five jobs at the same time, for:
- The animal
- The soil
- The system
- The environment
- The business
If it fails one job, the others start wobbling. That’s why grassland management is farming on hard mode — it just doesn’t look like it from the gate 😉