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What you prepose will work. The question is, how well? If you want good hay, will the cattle over-compact the soil? Will they make it rutted & rough & hard to drive on? Will they get a good % of crop to emerge? These would be real questions in my area. Your soil/ climate might be different. I need to recondition 1/3 of my pasture this spring - small area. Trying to decide how to do it myself. With care, the grasses there will bring themselves back strong. I need to add fert & legume seed, and I'm thinking over the many ways to do that myself. And there are many ways. The trick is to guess what the weather will be April through august, & pick the method that works best with that particular weather! :) Pature is easy, but you want hay ground. That is a higher- quality operation, and around here requires more care to get a good stand that can handle wheel traffic & 2-4 cutting a year. Do it wrong & you lose a valuble resource. Seed plots and rough pasture a person can try any old way & see what happens, try again next year and see if that works better, etc. Not sure where you fall in on that. :) I've 'saved' a weak alfalfa field for an extra year by planting oats into it with the seed drill at the normal oats planting time - first cutting of alfalfa is strong, second cutting the alfalfa is weak but the oats makes ok feed & good volume, and third cutting will depend on when the oats got cut - if early enough & some rain it will regrow a second time. So, your plan can work. Depends on the effort, value, & end result you want/ need. If this hay ground is important, I would put more effort into making a good seedbed & good permanent hay-type crop. If it is waste land & you are playing with it & will take bonus hay if you get it, won't care if you don't, then give it a try & see what happens. --->Paul
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