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...read more