Making Hay While the Sun Shines

When I heard Joel Salatin (@polyfacefarm) and other pasture based farmers refer to themselves as grass farmers I understood what they were saying but I did not have understanding!

Growing vegetables and trees is one thing and many farming principles apply the same to grass but now that I've grazed sheep in each season once I'm really starting to grasp a new type of synergy.

One that I've never been able to witness before because only people who rotationally graze animals would ever notice it.

It's like when you start gardening and notice the sun's position throughout each season for the first time in your life.

Only now I'm not balancing just light, water, nutrients, seasonal growth variance, I'm also payining attention to animals that eat the grass I'm trying to grow, which in turn grows the sheep. This synergy includes many more variables of nature.

If they eat too much the ground takes months to recover, eat too little and non ideal species flourish. With near perfect stocking density and moves you get incredible forage growth and diversity of all life in the field.

Since I don't have the stocking density required to mow this field down in time before senescence, hay is the perfect option to store that food and soil fertility. It will either come out the back end of a sheep or decompose as carbon trampled into the soil by sheep.

Farming with nature is a constant push/pull ebb and flow. The best farmer's find the balancing point, where opposing forces mute each other. This is where natural resilience is found.

#pastureraised
#grassfed
#grassfedlamb
#rotationalgrazing