Pasture clipping

We have four horses that are grazing pasture near our house. We split the horse pasture in two and are grazing the horses in one pasture while the other one rests. Horses are selective grazers, they will ignore some parts of the pasture and continuously nibble other areas down to less than an inch. Rotating and resting and clipping their pasture is a good plan.

That still leaves quite a bit of pasture that's not being grazed, something like 40 acres. I'd like to have cows grazing that acreage but we are not ready yet. So, this past week I started to bush hog/clip some pasture. When I get home from work I can hop on the tractor and cut for an hour or so. I've set the 10' bush hog up to cut at about 8" in the pasture (it can cut from about 2" - 14" I think). The bush hog is a pull type with a hydraulic lift. I've been cutting our main field, some of this has not been cut in a year and was very thick and tall and quite diverse in plant species, insects, etc.

I found two surprising things while cutting, first we have a gazillion praying mantis insects out in the pasture, and second I found two large wasp/hornet nests on top of the ground in the thick stuff.