permaculture

[John Schinnerer <eco_living@yahoo.com>]

Aloha,

> they will kill lone trees eventually, mash the roots all to hell and
> rub off bark.

They never killed the huge lone apple tree behind Grandma & Grandpa's
house (they'd rest in the shade there, and eat lots of fallen apples,
which Grandpa claimed gave their meat a certain sweetness...).  

'Course, there were never more than five, six, maybe seven some years
cows on about 7 pasture acres (N. CA, Humboldt Co.), and they had a
number of other shaded resting places at pasture edges (redwoods,
willows) to choose from.  They weren't 'managed' at all; they just
wandered around eating grass and fallen fruit or rested in the shade
when too hot or wherever they were when not too hot.

Probably not 'economically viable' for wholesale beef production, I
suppose.  A couple of 'em would be butchered and fill family and
friends' freezers for a year, though, and he'd sell the others on the
hoof (afaik) and then buy a few young replacements at auction.  So it
would have worked well for small localized "CSA" style beef production,
I reckon.  His main livelihood was commercial fisherman (back when it
was still a pretty darn good livelihood), so he never bothered to try
and sell butchered beef (and of course back then the niche markets for
stuff like organic free range beef didn't really exist).

He never did anything with/to/for the pasture other than get the hay
cut once a year, stash enough in the barn and sell the rest.  Once in a
great while the berry vines would encroach a bit more than the cow
trampling could keep up with one place or another and he'd cut and burn
some.  

Once the 'casual' grazing ended after he died, berry vines and in one
area willows started taking over from the edges, eventually filled
(except for deer trails) the bottom 1/3 of the pasture and reduced the
rest more slowly before a tenant started brush-hogging them.  Alders
started popping up in the midst of the berry thickets too (in the
wetter area of what had been the pasture, where there was a bit of a
spring-fed bog along one edge).

Dunno if Grandpa was just lucky, just smart, or if growing up on a farm
in rural Finland had anything to do with his methods (or apparent lack
thereof :-), or what.  

I guess my point, if there is one, is that most of this thread sure
makes grazing sound like a whole lot of complicated work and I kinda
like how Grandpa did it better... ;-)


=====
John Schinnerer, MA
-------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
Food - Water - Shelter - Community - Technology
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net

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