Can Ruminants Save the Planet?

Valley view. Hillside = blackberries, lower field = dead RCG.

I want to point out a really amazing TED talk that came out recently, about using ruminants to restore the land and offset global warming. But before I link to it, I’d like to set up the topic with my own observations of running ruminants in the microclimate of our farm. My friends were just discussing on Facebook how different our farm looks from when we began (picture above). I believe the video partly explains why.

 

Green

First of all, apologies to our friends to the East, who have this:

Here in the Pacific Northwest, things look a little different. About this time of year, Mother Nature says, Ding! Your grass is ready to eat!

 

Annual Barn Scrub and Freedom to Ewes

I turned all the sequestered ewes out into the pasture yesterday. The older ewes have been in the barn for a month; the younger ones, for two. It’s roomy enough in there, they aren’t overcrowded, but it’s likely boring. Each evening as I prepared their grain, they’d kick up their heels in anticipation, doing fancy twists and sideways jumps. Life is easy in the barn, and yet, it’s just not the same as being outdoors with room to roam, apparently.

 

Ewe Shuffling

Wintertime is boring for a period, while the sheep quietly eat and gestate. I’ve been jealous of all my friends posting Facebook pictures of lambs, since I still have six more weeks to wait. I lamb later than most people, since I don’t creep feed, I try to time everything around the best grass. But in the last few weeks, some rearranging has been happening.

 

Flooding When It’s Not Supposed to be Flooding

Thus far, knock on wood, this hasn’t been a “flood year,” but we did have some flooding right before Christmas. We live in a dike district- our house is on the hillside above the floodplain, but our pastures are river bottom land. We pay “special assessments” on our property taxes to be part of a flood control district. The district manages not only the dike which protects our valley from the Snohomish and Pilchuck Rivers, but also a huge network of old drainage ditches which are designed to keep our pastures dry year-round.