MAKING more land through Regenerative Agriculture
In Seattle, I had a heavy use area in front of the barn. I learned about the dangers of overgrazing and erosion the hard way on this hillside!
Having animals is fun, but if you’re not careful, feeding them can be unbelievably expensive. Learning and implementing rotational grazing has given me back an INSANE amount of time, the time I used to have to spend feeding them, but has also saved me A TON of time and money running back and forth to the feed store. I'm super passionate about regenerative agriculture, because you can multiply your existing acreage many times over simply by improving soil health, plant diversity, and nutritional availability to your grazing livestock. It's like buying more land, but comes at a fraction of the cost and just takes a little more planning, thoughtfulness, and work up front when it comes to grazing. It’s a win, win, win, because you save money, improve your land, and your animals are healthier and more disease resistant as a result. As we are trying to help our pasture recover from decades of over-grazing, soil compaction, and weed overgrowth, we are implementing a system of concentrated, multi-species rotational grazing for short periods of time.
For some farms, keeping animals inside a barn or enclosed barnyard is the only option, and there are definitely ways to do it and do it well, I had to do a lot of enclosure management on our smaller acreage in Seattle myself. Some things that helped a ton were literal tons of arborist chips and pelletized pine for deep litter bedding, high quality feed sources like Chaffhaye and locally grown hay (I’m looking at you Clint!). But ultimately keeping animals enclosed or on poorly managed pasture means you, the farmer, must shoulder the burden (both financial and time-wise) of bringing your livestock’s food to them. Often that is in the form of hay, grain, and presents the need for supplemental vitamins and minerals, because the fed-food is lacking the nutritional diversity livestock would naturally select for their diet while free-range grazing. That barn or enclosed yard quickly gets overgrazed, trampled, and manure, fly pressure, and parasites can quickly become an issue. Hungry animals also eat things they normally wouldn’t, like poisonous plants, moldy hay, and soiled bedding. If you put animals on a patch of grass, they’ll eat what they want at first, but if the grass doesn’t have what they need nutritionally, or if there isn’t enough grass or there aren’t enough things they like, they’ll stay hungry, they’ll keep eating, and ultimately trample the grass till it becomes a dirt patch. That dirt patch will become a mud pit, erosion issue, and dust factory in different seasons.
Try as I might to keep enough grass for my animals in Seattle, the land had been taxed far too much in past years to support them, so I had to bring in almost 100% of their feed, at an enormous expense. I was just starting to implement rotational grazing in the small way I could on the land we had with my animals when we found out we were moving to TN. Darrel, the gentleman who purchased our farm, has continued and expanded upon my efforts and now, not even a year after this picture was taken, he tells me the grass is MUCH healthier.
A better way is to mimic nature. What happens there is you have multiple species of herd animals with all kinds of different teeth and different ways of munching and different “favorite foods,” traveling together moving across fields, eating the things they like that have the nutrition that they need, gently mowing the grass as they pass through, taking only the best, most nutrient dense options, then they move on and find others. Wild birds follow them through the grassland picking larvae out of their poop, and aerating and scratching manure into the soil. The birds eat seeds in one place and then spread those seeds all over by pooping them out somewhere else, adding to a great diversity of plant life on the prairie. Rabbits and other rodents move through the area eating still different plants than the herd animals, clipping the grass with their own unique teeth patterns, dropping their own seed filled own manure, which, in turn, fertilizes and populates the soil with an even greater plant diversity. Animals die and decompose, annual plants die back and leaves from trees fall and create mulch, both of which foster a rich diversity of microbes, worms, and other insects that aerate the soil and add their own special stuff to it. Land, unmaintained by man, maintains itself, and usually quite well. So stewards of farm land, mimicking nature, rather than fighting it is our best line of defense against so many things farmers have struggled with for centuries.
Fancy and Little Man are the two bull calves born to Tyler’s and My milk cows, Reba and Sally this spring. When weaned next month, they’ll become the start of my beef cattle herd, and be joined by six other bred cows that will calve in the spring. The addition of these larger animals will complete our rotational grazing system and help manage the pasture better.
The best way I’ve heard this phenomena described is “becoming grass farmers rather than livestock managers.” -Joel Salatin, slightly abridged. Instead of having one big pasture, start thinking of it as a hundred tiny pastures, and think about what you can do to create the healthiest, heartiest grass possible, how you can plant it in the best soil possible, and how you can use the animals at your disposal to best manage it. For me, that looks like using goats, sheep, donkeys, cows, all followed by chickens to clean up their mess. It looks like a little extra up front effort with the promise of some pretty incredible rewards in the form of longterm feed savings, animal health, and increased ability to graze the pasture with even more livestock, which ultimately means more meat in the freezer, more responsibly raised, nutrient dense food on my neighbors’ tables and more dollars in the bank.
This mobile chicken coop was designed to deliver my chickens directly to the pasture, let them eat up the bugs, fly larvae, grass, spread manure, and aerate the soil in quick, intense bursts, then move.
My rotational grazing system starts by creating a small paddock using Premier 1 Electronet Fencing paired with a solar charger. Using electric netting gives ultimate flexibility when it comes to paddock creation and the breaking up of pasture into small rotational grazing plots, and it is also a heck of a lot cheaper than permanent fencing. I’ve got my animals trained to follow my golf cart, so all I’ve got to do to move them from paddock to paddock or from barn to pasture is drive my golf cart and they follow. They get to work munching away instantly. A little rickshaw Josh and I built from a pile of chicken coop scraps and a kid’s bicycle the former owners left here gives the animals shade in the sun and shelter from rain and inclimate weather. My two livestock guardian dogs, Johnnie and June, keep watch over the livestock and this whole system approach gives me the freedom to leave the animals out on pasture with little more than a few check-ins to make sure water pails are full and everyone is accounted for every few days. The extra time initially spent setting and moving fences is massively saved here by not having to haul hay, clean barn stalls, or inoculate sick animals. After our goats, sheep, donkeys, and pig eat the “first bites” of the available forage, while simultaneously leaving fertile deposits in the form of manure into the soil, we move them to a new paddock, wait three days, then bring in our mobile chicken coop and release the birds to eat some more of the available forage, to scratch and disturb the topsoil, to stir in the livestock's manure deposits into the soil, while simultaneously leaving more of their own, and to eat any fly or parasite larvae in the area, search for grubs, graze on grasses and weeds themselves and convert those FREE foodstuffs into harvestable chicken meat and eggs. Once the chickens have been in that paddock for three days, they are rotated to the next paddock behind the livestock once again and the cycle continues. Meanwhile, while the livestock is grazing on their new patch of grass, and the chickens are cleaning up the patch they were just on, the patch of grass behind them is growing back, better and healthier than before. A similar thing happens when you mow your lawn, except most people have to fertilize their lawn to keep it growing healthy. My lawn mowers make their own fertilizer, and are kind enough to spread it ALL OVER THE PLACE.
Cub Cadet sent me a zero turn mower to use in our pasture regeneration educational project earlier this summer to partner with me in teaching more folks about rotational grazing and improving pasture health. Finish mowing is the last step in our multi species, multi step rotational grazing process. I’m routinely tackling and toppling 4 foot tall dense grass and weeds, climbibg and descending our steep hillsides, both of which exist APLENTY here. After moving the chickens, we use the Cub Cadet mower to "finish mow," which takes all competitive plants back to ground level, keeps weeds from going to seed and proliferating season after season, adds green manure (grass+ weed clippings) to compost in place, and that green manure also helps provide mulch for diverse seed species to germinate, and keeps more moisture in the soil.
After the finish mow, the ground rests, recovers, and the pasture regrows, before the animals return to graze again. Each season, the pasture will become healthier and the plants will offer more nutritional value to the animals eating it than the last. On a pasture like ours, the final finish mow is crucial to the process, but a very tricky piece without the right equipment because of our hills and other property "features," and this mower definitely fits the bill. Though this is only our first year on this property, arial photos of the pasture are already DRASTICALLY different than this same time last year, and I cannot wait to see how it continues to regrow and thrive as the years go on.
My friend Zack and his “chew crew” are using intensive rotational grazing to restore a former sod farm that has been STRIPPED of all soil health, nutrients, and the soil’s ability to retain moisture or sequester carbon.
This is my first year of a multi year process here on our farm to restore our pastures from years of overgrazing and neglect. I started the year on this property by strip grazing the entire thing with my friend Zack’s 125 sheep. Currently, because my small flock of animals can’t keep up with the grass we currently have on pasture, I’m bush hogging twice a year to keep weeds and other invasive species from going to seed, rotating my animals using electric netting, then moving the chickens over that same which allows the chickens to spread the animal manure, deposit some of their own, scratch up the soil surface, and eat the fly and parasite larvae that might collect in the animal manure and matriculate, stopping that process. After the chickens have gone through, I finish mow the whole area, which provides the access to sunlight diverse plant species need to germinate, provides mulch for that germination process, and drops compostable material onto the soil surface. This fall, not only will I reseed the entire pasture with a large diversity of seeds, I’m also bringing in a few beef cattle, which I will add another kind of grazer and manure into the whole mix. The way I’m doing it now is certainly not perfect, this is all a massive learning process and a time intensive project, but year over year, I think we will see huge improvement.
My livestock can stay out on pasture because Johnny and June, my guardian dogs, protect them from predators and alert me to distress within the herd. Just LOOK at all that lush grass around us!
Managing pasture with regenerative principles like this in mind has actually been likened to purchasing extra acreage because healthy soil and plant diversity increases the nutrition available to your grazing animals. A lot of states measure the nutrition available in a pasture by “cow days,” the number of days a year a given portion of land could support a healthy cow. Tennessee’s average is 80 days an acre. Joel Salatin’s farm’s average is 400 days. So, by improving his pasture, he’s essentially “purchased” 5 times the acreage he originally had, and that nutrition is available to the livestock that graze it, and ultimately available to those eating the meat, dairy, and other products nurtured on that land. Instead of multiplying the land we need to feed our livestock, we multiply the land we already have’s ability to feed them.
For more information on rotational grazing and regenerative agriculture, check out Joel Salatin, Jim Gerrish, Richard Perkins, Greg Judy, and Allan Savory