Connection is health: Lessons for the pasture
Wendell Berry argued that “true health is not complicated or exclusive; it comes from recognizing how everyday actions link together.” He poignantly added, “Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.”
His sentiment inspired the 50 farmers, subject matter mentors and conservation partners who attended the sold-out National Grazing Lands Coalition (NatGLC) Northeast Ultimate 2-Day Grazing School, hosted by the Burns family at Evermore Farms in Lindley, NY. The completely in-field event was based on learning from the land, plants, animals and practitioner experiences when grazing management practices are applied.
Host farmer John Burns shared this knowledge in his family’s context of “working in nature’s image and not against it.”
Billed as an observational learning experience, it didn’t disappoint the audience from Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Connecticut and Canada.
Since March, Burns and Northeast NatGLC Regional Manager Troy Bishopp have been keeping grazing records, watching the weather, planning grazing impact techniques, performing over-seeding trials and grazing silvopasture areas which would visibly highlight before-and-after results in September so farmers could evaluate impacts with their own eyes.
The strategy also called for establishing a pasture walk trail each day, where “stations of learning” featured a dynamic, regional team of experienced mentors targeting specific topics to engage deeper thinking, relationship building and stimulate conversations from attendees within their own contexts. The goal was to provide knowledge and gain operational resiliency from people’s shared experiences that live it every day.
On Day 1, Quebecois grass farmer and “Radical Grazier” Brian Maloney started the event with his rousing, signature “people mimicking animal behavior” exercise where he assessed flight zones, interest in becoming a herd and gauged attendees’ energy levels while inviting them to take off their footwear to “ground” themselves with the land anytime they felt stress.
The walking classroom was a journey in the art of segue, as the large group would be asked to examine a subject at each station. Burns really brought his context and experience to bear in describing how he grazes his “flerd” (cattle and sheep together) that yields over 325 days of grazing using planned grazing impacts, recovery periods, hay harvest, stockpiled forage and silvopasture areas to grow pastured protein for consumers. He listed his three tenets for successful grazing: “Don’t take more than half the pasture mass, leave before it starts to regrow and don’t return till the sward is fully recovered and more.”
Cheryl Bruce, senior consultant with Agricultural Consulting Services (ACS) in Vermont, was the resident “plant whisperer” as she helped the group identify common and diverse pasture species at every station, and their nutritional attributes for livestock, while highlighting examples of how diverse roots contribute to soil health.
There were stops that looked at how “grass grows grass,” the efficiency of the pasture solar panel to collect photosynthesis, measuring grazing residual heights and frequency and how that affects grass growth rates and using monitoring tools in determining forage production per acre. Folks also received practical training on managing paddock shapes with portable fencing to get a predictable grazing impact outcome using grazing behavior.
Each day the contingent ate a local lunch provided by the Addison Church Community near the Burns’ family pond where they had time to relax, network and form lasting relationships during the event.
Day 1 continued with looking at bale-grazing results from last winter and a 500,000 lbs./acre stock density experiment where Burns moved the “flerd” 14 times in a day. The results in forage production were astounding. As Betsy Hicks, beef farmer and regional dairy specialist for Cornell Cooperative Extension found out, the Brix level in the plants was four points higher than any other sward on the farm.
Hicks also guided practitioners on how to judge body condition and look for the “triangle of death,” which refers to the hollow depression on a cow’s left flank, just in front of the hip, that is used by farmers to visually gauge rumen fill, health and contentment, as the animals moved into a new paddock. That new paddock size was measured and allocated by the 50 attendees as the last exercise of the day to be judged on Day 2 by Professor Burns to see how well the group paid attention to a day of developing their “grazier’s eye.”
Day 2’s first stops highlighted the nuances of stockpiling forage for winter grazing and a site visit to an in-pasture tree planting area with narration by Joshua Greene from Trees for Graziers. He spoke on what species work well and how they protect them with six-foot tubes and an electrified “highline” wire from tree to tree above livestock height, with wrapped individual wires around tree tubes.
The wagon train stopped in the 60-acre silvopasture area that was strategically harvested to provide forage growing conditions under the dappled canopy for the “flerd.” This was of high interest to the group as Burns and Brett Chedzoy, CCE regional Extension forester, explained the many facets and financial considerations in undertaking the management-intensive practice. The value to the story was actually seeing the lush grass between the trees and being able to ask pertinent questions of how to achieve a positive result. As an added bonus, Burns detailed using the harvested slash to produce his on-farm “big box” biochar for his bedding pack and fertilizing his fields.
A highlight was using sensory skills to touch the soil. This was led by “Soil Joe” Amsili, director of the New York Soil Health Program based at Cornell University, and Dan Ufnar, New York’s State Soil Scientist for USDA-NRCS. Practitioners got to “go below ground” to examine how the pasture root systems under two grazing strategies interacted with the Volusia soil profile. The group shared strategies to mitigate soil compaction, learned how to use farmer-friendly tools to monitor water infiltration rates and discussed how to use soil health testing to monitor fields and make informed decisions.
Burns led the group through his emerging winter grazing area where he is experimenting with growing bamboo and honey locust, using the tree fodder to feed the sheep for 30 days. Although it’s a slow establishment period, he hopes his long-term investment pays off. At the bottom of the fallowed ground, he performed an over-seeding trial using 130,000 lbs./acre of animal impact and Ray’s Crazy Mix from Kings AgriSeeds to bolster diverse growth for next year.
The final experiment was to evaluate the group’s decision to allocate enough forage to feed the “flerd” while leaving enough residual to grow the next plants before frost. Burns was happy with their conservative approach that leaving grass behind is not a waste and adds to the resilience of the year-round grazing context. The grazing family earned an A+.
Did the in-field, peer-to-peer grazing school pass the test? Surveys said, “The family atmosphere was a fulfilling experience,” “very practical” and a “great way to connect with other practitioners to see before and aftereffects of grazing practices.”
“It was inspiring to hear from some of the sharpest, intellectual minds in the field, thank you,” noted Jeff BeGell.
The school wouldn’t have been possible without support from the Farm Credit Northeast AgEnhancement Program, NatGLC, Evermore Farms, the NY Soil Health Program, the Upper Susquehanna Coalition, Trees for Graziers, Kings AgriSeeds, Country Folks Newspapers, Agricultural Consulting Services, NRCS-NY, CCE, Vermont Grass Farmers Association and Ferme Brylee from Quebec.
For more information, visit grazinglands.org or contact NatGLC Northeast Regional Manager Troy Bishopp at Troy@grazinglands.org.
