# Are walnuts safe in the pasture?



## Dexter (Sep 27, 2008)

I'd like to plant several nut trees right into the pasture for shade for cattle, possible goats etc in the future.

Can there be problems with cattle eating the nuts?
How about acorns, chestnuts, heartnuts or butternuts?

The pasture is rich with plenty of forage. We're not talking starved animals gorging.

Thanks!


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## uncle Will in In. (May 11, 2002)

Cows won't eat black walnuts or most of the other ones you listed. BUT they will eat acorns. Acorns can cause a milk cow to nearly dry up over night. On the brighter side, your cows great great granddaughters will have calves before the little oak tree you set out will have acorns on it. I've seen some beautiful southern places with a field of pecan trees in front of a big colonial house. There were some good looking angus cattle mowing the grass under those trees. <>UNK


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## starjj (May 2, 2005)

Before I got this place the last owners had goats on a pasture area with lots of acorn, walnut, hickory trees.

If it was horses I would say no but cattle and goats I think would be fine.

I think young trees may have to be fenced off to keep the animals from eating them.


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## agmantoo (May 23, 2003)

My beef cattle are permitted to have access to more than 40 acres containing lots of large acorn bearing trees. The cattle start consuming the acorns as they fall and apparently get accustomed to eating the acorns and do so with no obvious problems. I would never release a hungry cow onto an unlimited supply of acorns but gradual consumption seems to me to be acceptable. Some of the best and most expensive pork in the world is fattened off of acorns. In years past, acorns were gathered and stored as hog feed for Winter.


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## NorthCountryWd (Oct 17, 2008)

Black walnut (Juglans ***** L.) and Butternut (Juglans cinerea L.) are toxic to plants and animals. I know horses and goats can have problems if the chew the bark or graze the ground close to the trees. I'd investigate more and careful where you put them.


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## 7thswan (Nov 18, 2008)

My cows have walnut trees in the pasture and we have never had problems.


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## Joshie (Dec 8, 2008)

If there's ever a possibility that you'll have horses in the pasture I'd not put in walnut trees. Because I know these are toxic to horses I'd also be certain to see which other animals would not do well with walnuts.


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## tnokie (Jan 30, 2007)

Back in Okla. where we are from black walnuts are every where. No one bothers to cut them out unless they get huge and they sell the wood. I have seen horses,goats pigs and cows in pastrures containing the walnuts. The animals either stay away or or not affected by them. Nauture seems to know when and how to keep animals from things that bother them. Sometimes I think we worry to much about "protecting" our stock and not letting them do what comes natural!


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## GoatsRus (Jan 19, 2003)

I don't know how you'd get a tree to grow in a pasture before a goat would demolish it. My goat have made a mess out of every tree in their pasture and they were all well over 10 years old. Branches are stripped up as far as they can reach - and for my buck, that's at least 6 feet.


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## NCLee (Aug 4, 2009)

That was our problem here. Goats got out one day and consumed the recently planted maple trees in our front yard. With everything they had to eat while they were out of the fence, they had to choose those trees. 

Around here the only trees that people worry about are wild cherry trees. Some people clear their pastures of them on the chance that a storm takes one down or breaks off limbs while the tree is in leaf. 

Lee


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## ksfarmer (Apr 28, 2007)

An old professor once told me, "Most toxic plants taste so bad that only a starved critter will try to eat them".


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## Beeman (Dec 29, 2002)

I've got very mature black walnut trees that bear plenty of nuts in my pasture. No problem with horses or cattle. Trees are large so they don't eat the leaves off them. I have black walnut over part of my garden, no problems with it either. 
You would have to fence the trees off for years to get them to grow without livestock chewing them to pieces.


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## ovsfarm (Jan 14, 2003)

ksfarmer, I think your professor was on to something. When I was young, we had many black walnut trees along the edges of our horse pasture. Never had any problems. Now that I am an adult, we have many black walnut trees in our pasture that we have also put sheep, cattle, and horses on. Never had any problems at all. However, our stocking rate was always low and there were always plenty of other, more palatable things for the animals to eat.

I'm not saying it would be okay in every case, just relating that it was fine in two instance of which I know.


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## ronbre (Apr 26, 2009)

i planted an oak from an acorn 35 years ago..it is beautiful tree now..not huge but big enough to enjoy the shade from it..i planted several nut trees this year..they are all fairly slow growers..so you'll need to fence them and protect them..your animals won't be getting into nuts from those trees for a lot of years..i put in 3 kinds of walnuts, 6 hazelnuts, 2 hickory, 4 pecan, 1 almond, 2 chestnut, all babies this year..as well as paw paw..and others..fruit etc.


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## rambler (Jan 20, 2004)

Black walnuts put out toxins in the soil that are damaging to other plants, and horses for sure. Might be mildly toxic/ irritating to other creatures.

I don't think a pasture is a place to _plant_ such a tree. I understand, if it's already there... But not intentionally?

Nut trees with smaller nuts - acorns, etc - would seem to add the chance of choking some critters. Stuff happens, but something to think about before creating a big forest of such.

I'd really think 2wce about the black walnuts for several reasons......

--->Paul


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## Dexter (Sep 27, 2008)

Thanks for all the tips.
I have read that the phytotoxicity (chemicals toxic to other plants) of walnuts does not effect certain varieties of pasture grasses, which will thrive in the cooler moist area below the canopy.


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## rambler (Jan 20, 2004)

Dexter said:


> Thanks for all the tips.
> I have read that the phytotoxicity (chemicals toxic to other plants) of walnuts does not effect certain varieties of pasture grasses, which will thrive in the cooler moist area below the canopy.


If you haven't done this before:

Trees make shade.

Cattle love shade. They gather in the shade & stomp around under the tree.

The stomping kills the grass.

The tree takes a lot of sunlight, decreasing the amount of grass produced.

In mildly dry times, the tree shade can help retain dew & prevent sun-scalding.

In real drought conditions, the tree takes water away from the grasses.

Mostly, the cattle will trample the grass under trees, and the light the trees take away lessens the amount of grass growing. In most areas.

So, the trees generally reduce the amount of pasture you have available.


Then:

Cattle trampling under & rubbing on trees will kill them. It's ok if you have a whole lot of trees any very few livestock. But if you have only a handfull of trees - even adult trees - and a fair number of livestock, you need to to fence the cattle a few feet away from each tree. Allow the roots a place to grow, and keep the cattle from rubbing so much they wreck the bark. Butternuts are _very_ sensitive, and black walnuts are pretty sensitive to these things.

Nut trees, a person kinda likes to gather the nuts of some species. Can't gather them with the cattle trampling under the trees.

I like pastures, and I like trees and forests.

I'm not real keen on mixing them, as you can probably gather from my messages. 

--->Paul


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## Calfkeeper (Feb 1, 2006)

Yep, the shade will become a draw to the animals and they will trample the grass. Another thing to consider; eventually the manure will kill the tree, though some varieties of tree are hardier than others. It might take years, and depend on how many animals you have in there. But it's something I never would have thought of unless I hadn't seen it happen here. 

Also your animals will go to the tree for shelter during storms; not a good thing if lightning is a factor in your area. Several people around here, SW Missouri, have lost livestock due to shade trees being struck by lightning.


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## cowcreekgeeks (Mar 5, 2009)

I think that if you keep your cow to pasture ratio at an acceptable, realistic rate the nuts won't be a problem. New plants will need to be fenced off.


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## Paul Wheaton (May 10, 2002)

Black walnuts can be tricky. Their roots exude juglans, which is toxic to about half of the species of plants out there. There is a comment earlier about a person growing a garden just fine next to a black walnut. I would like to add to the mix that there have been a lot of folks (including a few on this forum) reporting that some things do fine and some things die after being transplanted. I would hazard a guess that in the above garden scenario, if a duplicate garden were grown far away from the tree, half of the plants would be far healthier. 

Normally, the allelopathic toxins from a plant do not hurt animal life, but in the case of juglans, there are known problems - at least with fish. So I'm not sure if there could be any problem with livestock. 

And ... as somebody rightly pointed out earlier ... most of these problems are not a problem as long as there is plenty of other fresh stuff to eat.



> Cows won't eat black walnuts or most of the other ones you listed. BUT they will eat acorns. Acorns can cause a milk cow to nearly dry up over night.


Uncle Will is spot on. And ... to add a bit .... it's the tanins in the acorns. And some acorns have a lot less tanins. And goats (and deer) have the ability to deal with tanins better than other ruminents. 

My impression is that as long as there is plenty of yummy vegetation around, cattle will generally avoid stuff with tanins. So I wonder if the problem might be that everything else is gone and so that cattle start eating the acorns.

Hmmmm ..... this gets me thinking .... since scottish highland cattle are better browsers than other breeds (as opposed to being grazers) I wonder if they might also have the ability to better deal with tanins ...


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## MELOC (Sep 26, 2005)

here is a list, one of many on the internet, that features juglone tolerant plants.

http://wihort.uwex.edu/landscape/Juglone.htm


there have always been walnut trees lining our pasture and lawn. no horses have died and we have grass growing in both areas. i think what ksfarmer said comes into play...as long as the animals are not starving, there should be no issues. i say that because we also have choke cherry and red maple in the fencerows.


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## sheepish (Dec 9, 2006)

We have black walnuts along one sheep pasture. The sheep llamas and donkey don't touch the nuts or the trees. (The squirrels OTOH, love them.) However, they do find the shade comfortable. I believe, as did my great great grandfather, that you should "leave a little shade for the beasties." They don't ruin the pasture in the shaded areas, but in the heat of our summers, they find shade necessary during the middle of the day. If we didn't have trees, we would need shelters.

We put ours trees in 25 years ago. The animals were fenced away when the trees were small. Any small trees they could reach, they ate.


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## crobar (Sep 20, 2006)

I had a garden in town, it grew great for several years, then a walnut seedling got started just over the property line. The first year it hurt my garden , knee high plants turned brown all at same time. I thought it was herbicide that "blew in." Next year, repeat exactly. Early spring ok, then boom all nightshades(tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, eggplants) dead in 2 or 3 days. Killed a ***** willow, some vines, etc looked all the world like some unknown enemy was spraying my plants. It was a moist area perhaps that made it worse. Sweet corn, rhubarb, castor beans, sweet poatoes seemed unaffected. Squirrels would bury walnuts in flower beds, small seedlings would kill plants. Keep walnuts in woods, they are a disaster. After what I went thru I can easily believe the worst.


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