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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] food for thought?

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Pumpkin Lady <pumpkingal@clearwire.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] food for thought?
  • Date: Thu, 06 May 2010 06:57:52 -0500

mdnagel@verizon.net wrote:

Someone remarked that it's not good to have a lot of animals on a small amount of land. This is misguided. The NATURAL tendency was for animals to be in herd, closely contained/maintained for protection. They tended to eat more of a variety of forages while recycling nutrients for the microbes: and their hooves helped stomp grass and other organic material so that it came in contact with the soil (within reach of the microbes).

And then they moved on, don't forget that bit. The vast herds were constantly moving. They ate it down the the ground, dumped a load of fertilizer on it and moved on so it could recover.

BUT that's not the way a lot of people do it with their animals. Yes, I should have said "It's not good to have a lot of animals continuously on a small amount of land", but let's face it - That's what I SEE every time I go shopping for an animal. It's obvious they are kept that way, too. Not that the ones that are for sale are kept up so the buyer can see them and the rest are grazed.

Several articles have said goats are a much better choice for meat because they are free grazed. I'm sure a number are, but most people I have seen pen them up in tiny pens and feed them hay because it is easier than putting them out to graze.

There are two (small) ponies next door in a 2 acre pen. They almost never have any graze, even though their pasture has green stuff in it. It's all stuff they won't eat. When there IS stuff they will eat, they walk all over their pasture and kill it snapping it up just as soon as they can find it. If their owner would fence it into 3 or 4 sections and only let them have part of it at the time they would have much more food for a longer period of time, but it's not worth their time. They'd rather toss the ponies hay every day. The land is degraded, now part of that is that they till it up every couple of months for weed control, but the weeds are there because the ponies eat any grass that manages to sprout. Between those two things that land is badly abused, IMO. It doesn't even take a large number of animals to screw up a pasture, just a few handled badly.


Whether any one of us can practice it or not, this plant + animal connection is important and shouldn't be so readily dismissed. Scale and situation should always be taken into account, broad brush strokes (which is what big Ag have slapped us with) isn't good.

I graze mine in small movable pens. They eat where I want them to eat and get removed before they damage the land. Their "home base pens" aren't in the best of shape forage wise, but they have stuff growing in them, which is more than I can say for anywhere I bought them from.

Morgan




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