Back in February I wrote about my ambivalence toward thistle in the pasture; lately, as the plants start to look like small Christmas trees, my ambivalence is melting away. So when my friends Nancy and Mary Lou offered to come out to the farm for a work day, I was very excited to have some extra hands to help with thistle remediation.
Later in the day, I collected the fallen.
Tagged: clearing the dead, Nancy Kaufman, pasture, remediation, removal, Thistle
Though the winter lambs are now close to surpassing their mothers’ weights, some are still trying to nurse when they can sneak a drink. The cute is off the lamb.
And for those keeping track, today is the halfway point in my yearlong chronicle of the farm. The change seems enormous since the first of January — I’m starting to feel less like a pretender — but I wonder how naive today’s me will look in retrospect at the end of the year. Thanks to everyone who has stuck with my stories so far.
Today my sheep were actively converting first-succesional forest back into grassland. The edge of one of the fields was starting to grow in with a thick stand of (I think) quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides), and I’ve been meaning to let the sheep have their way with it all season; I finally got the grazing sequence to align with that patch today.
The sheep were as enthusiastic about the aspen leaves as I’d hoped.
By this afternoon, they had mostly denuded the saplings. I’m hoping another couple of passes like this and the encroaching forest will rethink its advance on the pasture.
Tagged: browsing, forest, grazing, pasture, Populus tremuloides, quaking aspen, saplings, sheep, succession
I’ve been thinking lately about the funny relationship between sheep and pasture. When I imagine symbiosis — literally “living together” — the image of the Egyptian plover and the Nile crocodile comes to mind: croc opens his mouth, plover eats the bits of meat stuck between the croc’s teeth; bird gets food, and croc gets free dental care. That the story is made up* doesn’t weaken the power of the archetype — two creatures in a mutually beneficial partnership.
With grazing, it’s clear how the sheep benefit — they derive sustenance from the plants they eat — but what about the pasture? The individual plants would arguably be better off without sheep consuming the products of their photosynthetic efforts. But the pasture as a whole would quickly revert to forest in a place like New Hampshire when tree seedlings grow and shade out understory plants like grasses. So at the ecosystem level, sheep and grasslands are crucial for each other’s existence, while the individual plants engage** in a kind of altruistic sacrifice — if their leaves weren’t consumed by herbivores, they and their ecosystem would cease to exist.
Things get even murkier on a farm, a manufactured ecosystem where the farmer is constantly putting his thumb on the scale of evolution, choosing the principal herbivores and some or all of the members of the plant community. But despite the farmer’s attempts at control, nature asserts itself in the pasture, and the wild organisms of a grassland establish themselves — bobolinks and grasshoppers and strawberries and all the rest.
As the new guy inserting himself into this complex dance, I’m trying to understand how my decisions are tipping the scales, which ways I’m nudging the ecosystem. My sheep have more catholic dietary preferences than the cattle that used to live here, and my intensive grazing management encourages them to be even less picky. In theory, this should increase the diversity of the plant community, since the sheep won’t have the opportunity to eat their favorite plants into oblivion. My biases also weight the outcomes. Every time I discover that my sheep have a taste for an “invasive” plant, I allow them to devour it more completely than I would a “desirable” plant. When I saw that some of the ewes were particularly fond of the leaves of oriental bittersweet vine (Celastrus orbiculatus), I felt a little thrill of glee, though I’m not sure I can make a compelling argument that bittersweet is “worse” than the popple tree (Populus tremuloides) it’s climbing on.
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* Herodotus made reference to this mutualistic relationship, but it’s never been documented in nature.
** I realize I’m veering into problematic territory by ascribing agency to plants, but language, shaped in our own image, feels like it’s fighting me here.
Tagged: ecology, evolution, grassland, hand-waving, invasive, mutualism, oriental bittersweet, pasture, sheep, symbiosis
This is the sheep riot I come home to if I underestimate the size of the flock’s grazing rotation for the day.
Sorry for the shaky video as I walk backwards with hungry sheep bearing down on me….
I’m probably anthropomorphizing again where I oughtn’t, but the shorn ewes looked particularly put-upon today.
Shearing today went remarkably smoothly, though I suspect the shorn sheep might have a different interpretation.
We needed extra help at the beginning to convince the sheep to cooperate with the gathering and sorting process, and folks stayed on to watch the start of the shearing. We had sheep crowded into a pen just beyond the shearing floor so it was easy for Bruce to grab the next customer.
For me, the most remarkable part of the process (other than Bruce’s stamina, shearing 31 sheep in less than 3 hours) was seeing what my ewes look like under all that wool.
In these two images, Bruce is shearing the mother of lamb #701, who I recently wrote was getting nearly as big as her mother. Without her fleece, it’s not at all clear that the ewe is bigger than her lamb.
And as I imagined, we ended up with an impressive pile of fleeces by the end of the morning.
My next project is to figure out if anyone wants to buy the wool. Bruce was very pessimistic about the prospects, pointing out that the synthetic fiber industry had not only stolen the market for wool, but also the name, since most people no longer associate “fleece” with a shorn sheep. To be continued…
Tagged: border collie, Bruce Clement, fleece, pasture, shearing, sheep, shorn, shrinking sheep, wool
All three competing for my attention. The ewe lamb is particularly persistent.
Tagged: 702, attention, bravo, Cleo, competition, ewe lamb, Great Pyrenees, livestock guardian dogs, maremma, pasture
Lots of folks sell wildflower honey, but you never hear about wildflower mutton.
Tagged: buttercup, honey, marketing, mutton, pasture, red clover, sheep, wildflowers
It was a risk to bring Cleo to the farm — I didn’t know how she’d do with Bravo, with the border collies, with the sheep, with me, with living outside full time. I had a feeling that it would work out eventually, but I’ve been shocked at how many things have come together in a short time. She and Bravo clicked right away, but she was still pretty reserved with him at first. Now she takes the lead on their post-prandial romps every evening.
I was worried that she might get protective of the sheep when the border collies were moving the flock, since she’s never worked with herding dogs, but she’s been completely relaxed during our twice-daily moves to new pasture. But perhaps the biggest change has been in the way the sheep relate to their canine protectors. My sheep had never been around a guardian dog before Bravo arrived, and they were understandably wary of him at first. While things had certainly improved, I still saw the sheep get tense when Bravo moved around them. Since Cleo’s arrival, that tension has disappeared. I’m not sure if she has calmed Bravo down, or calmed the sheep down, or if her presence somehow fixes an imbalance — single male dog is scary but male-female pair is not? — but the sheep now intermingle and brush shoulders with the dogs with absolute ease. Whatever the case, I’m grateful that she joined the team.
Tagged: bravo, Cleo, completion, farm, Great Pyrenees, livestock guardian dogs, maremma, pasture, relaxed, sheep
