Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.
After more than a decade of moving animals across pasture, I still have so much to learn about how to manage for species composition and forage availability. It’s partially about the level of effort and consistency that it takes to work animals on the landscape, and also about weather patterns, how much disturbance, and what types of animals are interacting with the pasture.
This year with the wet, mild winter, we saw an explosion of Medusahead, an invasive, fast-growing annual grass that makes for poor forage and can outcompete native grasses. I see now that we were too lax in how we managed the sheep, giving them too much space instead of containing them in small spaces and moving them regularly. As a result, they chose the plants they wanted to graze, leaving the medusahead to explode because they prefer other forage.
It’s always hard to realize mistakes, to look at a space and think “I could have done a better job with this.” Yet this is how learning happens, and after doing a little reading, I’m seeing that more intensive winter management will help to control the fast-growing annual grasses so that the perennial grasses have a better shot at outcompeting.
Walking the pasture, it’s clear that the sheep have returned again and again to the more nutritious bunchgrasses, grazing them all the way down while mostly ignoring the annuals because they had enough space to do so. When they’re cinched down into a smaller area and contained by electric fencing, the mob stocking effect forces them to graze everything evenly, at which point the perennials with established root systems to draw upon can make rapid growth.
This is the time of year when we also have meat chickens on pasture, moving the chicken tractors (huts or carports) each day so that the birds have fresh forage to eat that isn’t fouled by their waste. The chickens do a great job of managing shorter forage, which is available in part because of the sheep moving through grazing earlier, so there is benefit from the winter sheep grazing, it just needs to be managed more intensively to even out the impacts.
The pasture slopes down to a drainage that cuts through from north to south, bisecting it with about three acres on the east side and two to the west. The high sides have much poorer soil that holds less moisture and is already beginning to dry out. Today we’ll be deploying the sprinklers that I packed away in the barn last fall after the rains. Irrigating the high sides lets us encourage the forage plants we want, and we’ll set electric sheep netting to keep them contained in the lower areas to focus on the taller forage there.
I’m also realizing that this is a good time of year to let the pigs back into the south pasture as well. The ground cover is good enough that they won’t tend to root because they’ll have plenty to graze on, and they can work with the sheep to help tromple and eat down the taller forage while it is still nice and green. Kunekunes, a small thrifty breed from New Zealand, don’t tend to root so long as they have enough protein in their diets, so I’ll just have to keep an eye on their behavior and supplement if they start tearing things up.
We’ll also be working on hand-pulling the patches of Italian thistle that have sprung up as they are approaching seed production, and we want to remove them before they can do so. This form of thistle is often an indicator of higher nutrient levels, which can occur from the heavy application of nitrogen from the chicken tractors. The thistle will work nicely to make a fermented plant juice that we can then feed to other plants as part of compost tea or liquid fertigation, so that we stack functions and draw some additional benefit from pulling the spiky bastards besides getting rid of them from the pasture.
It’s also time to clean out the built-up straw and chicken shit in the laying hen’s coop in preparation for moving it to a new space on the pasture. We move the layers less often than the meat birds, but they get a much larger space to work with so their impacts aren’t as intensive except for the space right around the coop. Once we move them to a new space, we’ll seed and straw the bare space where the coop was and the heavy fertility they’ve added will grow excellent forage for subsequent livestock rotations.
Over time, the pasture will be able to grow more abundant forage, and I’m slowly learning how best to manage to emphasize the species we want and avoid the negative impacts of less desirable species. The learning lessons come with extra labor, like hand-pulling the thistle, but we’re seeing less starthistle each year, and I’m hopeful for our ability to control and eradicate it over time. I’m excited by the potential and try not to be daunted by the lessons. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!
Casey O’Neill owns and runs HappyDay Farms, a small vegetable and cannabis farm north of Laytonville. He is a long time cannabis policy advocate, and was born and raised in the Bell Springs area. The preceding has been an editorial column. The Mendocino Voice has not necessarily fact-checked or copyedited this work, and it should be interpreted as the words of the author, not necessarily reflecting the opinions of The Mendocino Voice.