Amy,
Having grown up in east-central AL, I'm familiar with The Vine That Ate The South. Kudzu is great high-protein forage for ruminant animals - and the young leaves are tasty if you batter 'em and fry 'em.
It's great, so long as there are no trees for it to climb into or fences to conquer and drag to the ground.
Doesn't take long for a hungry herd of cows to completely defoliate a field - but it re-leafs/regrows pretty quickly once you pull them off to another field.
Back in the day, before the advent of effective herbicides, constant overgrazing was the only effective means of eradicating it - but those big fibrous roots went deep, and held quite a bit of reserve capacity - and if the vines ever got above grazing/browsing height into the trees...it was a lost cause.
I've got photos of my dad, when he was in his late teens/early 20s, along with an older farm worker, mowing a kudzu field for hay with a horse-drawn mowing machine; would have been prior to 1950...
Lucky
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