You can almost hear the soil singing in this photo. And you can almost feel the lushness of the
grass through the screen. We are finally beginning to reap the benefits of a decade of careful land management. Feeling our fields vibrate with life is one of the most rewarding parts of farming.
I took this photo while bringing cows in from the pasture. The short grass on the right side of the photo is where the cows spent time night grazing. The tall grass on the left side of the photo is where the cows will be grazing throughout the day. We use a series of temporary fences and crosswires to break our pastures and fields into small paddocks. Each paddock is sized so that the cows spend about 12 hours grazing before moving on to the next section. This short-duration, high-intensity grazing mimics natural systems and allows us to maximize the amount of high-quality forage our cows can graze while building our soil health, sequestering carbon, and preventing erosion.
A well-managed, intensive grazing system has many benefits. Combined with cover crops and no-till, management-intensive rotational grazing is one of our favorite tools to increase our soil health. We are able to produce quality forage for our cows while improving soil organic matter levels, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration. Not to mention we are able to reduce our costs of machinery and fuel.
Where many large farms continuously plow the earth, demanding corn and soybean from the soil and providing the land with nothing in return but synthetic fertilizers, farms like ours are able to use strategies like management-intensive rotational grazing to improve soil health, retain nutrients, and foster healthy ecosystems.
My fervent hope is that we are always good stewards of our land and that whatever mark our animals leave on the earth is a good one.