Area wildlife includes friendly bovines

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Bill Kolodziej, grazing specialist for the Marathon County Conservation, Planning, and Zoning Department in Wisconsin, discusses the use of a pasture stick to estimate forage quantity in pastures.

Greg Galbraith/For Agri-View

Paddock entrances are marked with flags so Bill Kolodziej can tell from the road if animals are where they belong on his grazing land at the Buena Vista Wildlife Area.

Greg Galbraith/For Agri-View

Those who attend a pasture walk are treated to an occasional bobolink, prairie chicken and meadowlark sighting on the warm summer evening.

Greg Galbraith/For Agri-View

Red Angus cows and calves graze in field

Bill Kolodziej says increasing iodine in his mineral mix has helped his herd avoid pinkeye and hoof rot, which he hasn’t seen a case of in years. Iodine has also been shown to help cattle deal with heat stress.

Greg Galbraith/For Agri-View

Bill Kolodziej shows how a pugged area was successfully seeded with clover. He does that routinely where water tanks are located.

Greg Galbraith/for Agri-View

Each water tank on Bill Kolodziej’s grazing operation serves four paddocks.

Greg Galbraith/For Agri-View

Moving cows from one paddock to the next takes less than five minutes. Bill Kolodziej moves the mineral feeder behind the herd as they explore a new paddock.

Greg Galbraith/For Agri-View

An Aphrodite Fritillary lands on a flower in the Buena Vista Marsh in Wisconsin. The butterflies are orange with a variety of black markings. In some Aphrodite Fritillaries the hindwing is very dark and has almost no discernible light submarginal band, whereas other individuals may have a distinct light submarginal band. The long-lived specie is found throughout Wisconsin during much of July and August.

wisconsinbutterflies.org

Greg Galbraith

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Greg Galbraith For Agri-View

The Buena Vista Wildlife Area encompasses 12,700 acres in southwestern Portage County, Wisconsin. It’s managed by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Before it was drained in the early 1900s for agricultural use it was dominated by the only trees that could survive the tannic and acidic conditions – tamarack and black spruce.

Greg Galbraith and his wife, Wendy, sold their dairy farm after 30 years of grazing cattle. He now has 20 Greg Galbraith, a former dairy farmer who owns woodlot property in eastern Marathon County, Wisconsin, writes about the rapidly changing n