August 5, 2022
We haven’t kicked our sheep off pasture yet, but without a lot more rain, I know it’s coming soon. As an exasperated dairy farmer told me yesterday - “our pastures are toast.”
“Burnt toast” I agreed.
Most years we can graze our sheep into December, but this week we begrudgingly ordered a load of hay and filled our hay loft in anticipation of yet another short grazing season.
Someday - and it’ll probably require an additional lifetime to get there - I’d love to have all our animals able to get all their food from our land. Each year we make incremental progress, and our inputs per animal (as measured by the number of days they are not on pasture) are a little less. Considering that the price of hay and grain have both doubled in the last 4 years, our efforts are well worth the time we’ve spent.
For years we have been planting trees and perennial forages along the fence lines, creating hedgerows. We’ve planted chestnuts, hazelnuts, mulberries, linden, willows, and comfrey. So, even when the majority of our pastures are “burnt toast,” we still have “fence line foraging” along the hedgerows which might just carry us through.
The creation of hedgerows was a standard practice a couple generations ago but fell out of favor as “wasted space”. Personally, I don’t think there is anything wasted about them. They provide habitat for birds, beneficial insects, and wildlife, and they offer heavenly shade, and additional forage for our animals. They literally add another dimension to our pastures.
In our fields, the grass collects sunshine from above, and through photosynthesis it magically turns carbon dioxide into food for our sheep. The blades of grass quite literally act as (edible) solar panels. In contrast, the trees in our pastures and hedgerows also collect sunshine, but their edible solar panels are 40 feet high! That’s potentially 40 feet of additional forage. Our sheep love to eat the leaves as they fall off the trees, or to browse the leaf laden branches as I trim them.
We’ve already extended this truncated grazing season several weeks just by feeding them trimmings and fresh leaves. “Tree hay”, in fact, was used as animal forage long before the advent of grass hay. A Chinese proverb advises us that “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second-best time is now.”