Pasture
What’s so big about a pasture?
I think that the word pasture typically conjures up an image of a fenced-in grassy area with cows grazing on it. Around here, if you don’t have cows grazing on it, you cut it and bale it into hay and sell it to someone to feed their cows in the winter. It is usually a stand of a single species, usually brome or fescue, which gets heavily fertilized with chemicals and sprayed with herbicide to eliminate competing weeds. That may be one type of pasture, but it is not the basis for a sound and sustainable agriculture.
The type of pasture we are trying to cultivate here is a species-diverse forage ecosystem capable of allowing multiple species of ruminant animals – multi-stomached animals such as cows, sheep, and goats – a varied and nutritious diet. It is based on the model of the original prairie, which, as many of you Kansans already know, refers to an incredibly diverse, complex and self-perpetuating grassland ecosystem that was capable of symbiotically sustaining millions of bison, deer, and elk, along with countless other foraging creatures. Wow! That was a mouthful! What does that really mean? Let’s take a look at how an ideal prairie works, and we’ll take that as the model for what the word pasture means.
Examples of undisturbed prairie exist in thousands of small pockets – many as small as one or two acres – of the upper Midwestern United States. These show us a diverse mixture of tall and short, warm- and cool-season grasses; forbs, which are mostly what we consider weeds nowadays; and native flowers, clovers and other legumes. The vast native prairie grasslands acted as an enormous solar collector converting and storing the energy of the sun in the form of sugars and starches in the roots and leaves of its diverse plants. In Eastern Kansas, where we still get more than 30” of rainfall per year, many of those grasses have a vast network of roots that extend as many as six feet into the ground. In nature, this grassland would have been mown almost to the ground by the teeth of grazing animals as they roamed constantly throughout the vast prairie. As you can guess, this would present a great shock to those plants. As you can also imagine, a herd of a million bison, large and heavy, with razor-sharp hooves, pummeled the topsoil at the same time as these plants were being grazed off. But fortunately, those deep roots provided a vast reserve of energy for re-growth after the animals had passed. This all happened at the same time that the top layer of soil was receiving a massive infusion of organic matter-rich manure and nitrogen-rich urine – the perfect growing medium for the partially digested and sprouting seeds present in manure. And those razor-sharp hooves? Millions of perfectly evolved plows for mixing and turning all this mess into the prime opportunity for both the re-growth of the original plants as well as the new growth of sprouting seeds. Typically, this cycle would only occur in a given area once or twice a year allowing plenty of rest time for recovery. Omnivorous predator species such as mountain lions, wolves, pumas, coyotes, and even bobcats encouraged the tight bunching and constant movement of the herd by roaming its vast perimeter and culling the aged, sickly, weak, or stupid genetics from its numbers. This perfectly symbiotic cycle of energy conversion from sunlight through plants into the vast bodies of grazing animals and then into the bodies of carnivorous predators, while at the same time providing for the enrichment of the growing plants themselves, evolved through millennia into one of the largest, richest, and most fertile ecosystems on the planet.
So, how does this become the model for a pasture-based agriculture?
First of all, our domestic cattle and sheep species, and to some degree goats as well, evolved from animals that originally existed in the ecosystem just described. They play the same essential role in the development of diverse, rich, and self-sustaining domestic pastures that their ancestors did on the vast prairies. Like you and me, individual animals within our domestic herds have preferences for diverse forage species. It is therefore essential that our pastures are species-rich, containing both warm- and cool- season grasses and a variety of forbs and legumes. These forage species can also be either native or domestic, but it is important that they are as varied as possible, deep-rooted, drought-tolerant, palatable, and nutritious enough to maintain the growth of large animals. In our domestic pasture, we human beings play the role of predators hovering ever present at the perimeter of the herd. At Sweetlove Farm, we do this through the skilled use of light-weight, portable, electric fencing and netting, which both protects our domestic animals from wild predators and allows us to carefully manage the rotation of the herd through the available forage.
Moving the animals
We move our animals from as frequently as several times a day to only once every few days, depending on the growth cycle of the grass and the time of year. This type of management is an intricate dance which constantly balances available forage with appropriate length recovery time for forage that has already been harvested by the animals. The benefits of this type of intensively managed grazing include: dramatic increases in the species diversity and soil fertility of the pasture; resultant increases in the number of animals a given area of pasture can feed; improved animal health due to improved nutrition and breaking up the life cycles of various parasites; lengthening the grazing season, in many cases to 10-12 months of the year, which can dramatically reduce the need for petroleum fuel-based methods of harvesting and storing forage for the winter; the sequestration of vast amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the increased biomass and soil organic matter of the system; and lastly meat for us that is demonstrably healthier – with an appropriate balance between omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, significantly increased levels of cancer-fighting, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), more trace minerals, and better taste. At Sweetlove Farm we are at the very beginning of restoring our small acreage of pasture to our own “domestic prairie.” So far, the only machinery we’ve had to use has been the occasional borrowed truck for hauling chicken feed and a weed-eater and lawn mower for keeping the electric fencing free of weeds. It is our goal to continue this whole process with an absolute minimum of petroleum-powered machinery – to find ways to simplify the skills of managed grazing to the point where the animals do all the work as they naturally would, and we simply guide them through the process under our own power.
I think that the word pasture typically conjures up an image of a fenced-in grassy area with cows grazing on it. Around here, if you don’t have cows grazing on it, you cut it and bale it into hay and sell it to someone to feed their cows in the winter. It is usually a stand of a single species, usually brome or fescue, which gets heavily fertilized with chemicals and sprayed with herbicide to eliminate competing weeds. That may be one type of pasture, but it is not the basis for a sound and sustainable agriculture.
The type of pasture we are trying to cultivate here is a species-diverse forage ecosystem capable of allowing multiple species of ruminant animals – multi-stomached animals such as cows, sheep, and goats – a varied and nutritious diet. It is based on the model of the original prairie, which, as many of you Kansans already know, refers to an incredibly diverse, complex and self-perpetuating grassland ecosystem that was capable of symbiotically sustaining millions of bison, deer, and elk, along with countless other foraging creatures. Wow! That was a mouthful! What does that really mean? Let’s take a look at how an ideal prairie works, and we’ll take that as the model for what the word pasture means.
Examples of undisturbed prairie exist in thousands of small pockets – many as small as one or two acres – of the upper Midwestern United States. These show us a diverse mixture of tall and short, warm- and cool-season grasses; forbs, which are mostly what we consider weeds nowadays; and native flowers, clovers and other legumes. The vast native prairie grasslands acted as an enormous solar collector converting and storing the energy of the sun in the form of sugars and starches in the roots and leaves of its diverse plants. In Eastern Kansas, where we still get more than 30” of rainfall per year, many of those grasses have a vast network of roots that extend as many as six feet into the ground. In nature, this grassland would have been mown almost to the ground by the teeth of grazing animals as they roamed constantly throughout the vast prairie. As you can guess, this would present a great shock to those plants. As you can also imagine, a herd of a million bison, large and heavy, with razor-sharp hooves, pummeled the topsoil at the same time as these plants were being grazed off. But fortunately, those deep roots provided a vast reserve of energy for re-growth after the animals had passed. This all happened at the same time that the top layer of soil was receiving a massive infusion of organic matter-rich manure and nitrogen-rich urine – the perfect growing medium for the partially digested and sprouting seeds present in manure. And those razor-sharp hooves? Millions of perfectly evolved plows for mixing and turning all this mess into the prime opportunity for both the re-growth of the original plants as well as the new growth of sprouting seeds. Typically, this cycle would only occur in a given area once or twice a year allowing plenty of rest time for recovery. Omnivorous predator species such as mountain lions, wolves, pumas, coyotes, and even bobcats encouraged the tight bunching and constant movement of the herd by roaming its vast perimeter and culling the aged, sickly, weak, or stupid genetics from its numbers. This perfectly symbiotic cycle of energy conversion from sunlight through plants into the vast bodies of grazing animals and then into the bodies of carnivorous predators, while at the same time providing for the enrichment of the growing plants themselves, evolved through millennia into one of the largest, richest, and most fertile ecosystems on the planet.
So, how does this become the model for a pasture-based agriculture?
First of all, our domestic cattle and sheep species, and to some degree goats as well, evolved from animals that originally existed in the ecosystem just described. They play the same essential role in the development of diverse, rich, and self-sustaining domestic pastures that their ancestors did on the vast prairies. Like you and me, individual animals within our domestic herds have preferences for diverse forage species. It is therefore essential that our pastures are species-rich, containing both warm- and cool- season grasses and a variety of forbs and legumes. These forage species can also be either native or domestic, but it is important that they are as varied as possible, deep-rooted, drought-tolerant, palatable, and nutritious enough to maintain the growth of large animals. In our domestic pasture, we human beings play the role of predators hovering ever present at the perimeter of the herd. At Sweetlove Farm, we do this through the skilled use of light-weight, portable, electric fencing and netting, which both protects our domestic animals from wild predators and allows us to carefully manage the rotation of the herd through the available forage.
Moving the animals
We move our animals from as frequently as several times a day to only once every few days, depending on the growth cycle of the grass and the time of year. This type of management is an intricate dance which constantly balances available forage with appropriate length recovery time for forage that has already been harvested by the animals. The benefits of this type of intensively managed grazing include: dramatic increases in the species diversity and soil fertility of the pasture; resultant increases in the number of animals a given area of pasture can feed; improved animal health due to improved nutrition and breaking up the life cycles of various parasites; lengthening the grazing season, in many cases to 10-12 months of the year, which can dramatically reduce the need for petroleum fuel-based methods of harvesting and storing forage for the winter; the sequestration of vast amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the increased biomass and soil organic matter of the system; and lastly meat for us that is demonstrably healthier – with an appropriate balance between omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, significantly increased levels of cancer-fighting, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), more trace minerals, and better taste. At Sweetlove Farm we are at the very beginning of restoring our small acreage of pasture to our own “domestic prairie.” So far, the only machinery we’ve had to use has been the occasional borrowed truck for hauling chicken feed and a weed-eater and lawn mower for keeping the electric fencing free of weeds. It is our goal to continue this whole process with an absolute minimum of petroleum-powered machinery – to find ways to simplify the skills of managed grazing to the point where the animals do all the work as they naturally would, and we simply guide them through the process under our own power.