May 5, 2023
All our sheep are back in the pasture eating grass again, which is truly a wonderful feeling. I imagine after a winter of eating nothing but hay, it’s a wonderful feeling for the sheep as well. On winter mornings when we showed up at the gate, they all bellowed impatiently, as if we’d been missing for days and they’d been left starving. Now that they are “on pasture” and can graze fresh grass to their heart’s content, when we show up in the morning, they lay complacently under the apple tree, chewing their cud and silently watching us. They act mildly interested in what we are doing but not curious enough to actually get up and come see.
In the springtime while the grass is growing quickly, we set up a section of portable fencing and give them a new area of the pasture to graze each day. By the time they return to a section that they’ve previously grazed, the grass will have recovered and what manure was left behind will have been broken down by all the soil dwelling microbes and incorporated back into the topsoil. “Rotational grazing” is a lot more work than keeping animals on the same pasture all summer but it’s wonderful for the soil, the grass, and the sheep. It also keeps the pasture in a constant vegetative state, which draws down more carbon from the atmosphere where it’s safely sequestered in the roots and soil.
Grassland ecosystems evolved with dense herds of herbivores grazing areas intensively for short periods of time before they were chased off by predators.
Grazing, in fact, helped make this planet what it used to be, and I strongly believe it could be a key part of its recovery.