Two visions of forest pasturing
The USDA National
Agroforestry Center
is experimenting with ways to combine trees and pastures.
Livestock (primarily cows) are grazed between widely spaced pine trees
that are grown for timber. The cows don't eat the trees, but they
do benefit from the shade and wind shelter. If I was a large
scale farmer rather than a homesteader, I would find this idea
enticing, but I'm really looking for a system in which the plants and
animals are more intertwined.
While looking into the
history of forest gardening, I stumbled upon Forest
Farming,
by J. Sholto Douglas and Robert A. de J. Hart. The book isn't a
riveting work of art and it spans too many climate zones to be a
useful how to book, but I was inspired by the presence of livestock in
the forest farm systems. Douglas and Hart suggest planting
pastures of trees that drop edible fruits and nuts to feed the
livestock. The multi-layered nature of the forest allows for
higher productivity than a single layer pasture can produce, and the
livestock add fertility back to the system with their manure.
| This post is part of our Forest Pasturing lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Anna
There was a comment regarding the grazing with cattle and having to mow the grass after. Best results would be to have sheep follow the cattle to eat the grass that cattle cannot get down to. This would reduce the mowing and should make it easier to maintain the pasture.
Best Regards
Ron Duncan