Integrating livestock into your gardens, orchards and back yard
Its nice to have a little butter with your kale, particularly if it comes from your own cow, and the soil the kale grew in was well cared for with composted cow manure. Keeping a family cow or goat, a flock of chickens, a couple of sheep, pigs and even turkeys can bring many benefits to your family and farm. The manure, when mixed with a carbon source like straw or hay makes fantastic compost, and animal manure brings many special qualities to your farm which you can’t get from plant based compost. Livestock in an around your gardens can also be used to “mow” cover crops, eat insects, and pigs can even provide tillage. Meat, milk and eggs from grass-fed animals are high in nutrients including beta-carotene, vitamins A and D, omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA).
Chickens: If you don’t want the year round commitment of livestock, you could set up a summer chicken raising project. You can order chicks through the mail, start them in a brooder for 3 weeks, and then move them outdoors to a chicken tractor, where they can graze and fertilize your gardens and pastures. At about 8 weeks, most modern breeds are ready to eat. Supplies needed are organic poultry grain, a chick brooder box with a heat source, a waterer and a chicken tractor.
If you don’t like the modern fast growing meat breeds, then try some of the slower growing old style heavy layer breeds. Start a batch of both male and female chicks in the spring, and by late summer you can put the males in the freezer and keep the females as your layer flock.
Turkeys: Turkeys take 16 to 20 weeks to mature, and usually don’t have enough feathers to go outdoors for 4 or 5 weeks after hatching. Newly hatched turkeys can be more difficult to raise than chickens, so you can often buy them as older poults. Turkeys are better grazers than chickens, and will need more space to run around and graze.
Our turkeys are moved from the brooder to chicken tractors, where they stay for a week or so. After they are accustomed to being outdoors, we open the door of the chicken tractor and allow them to range inside a fenced turkey pasture. They get moved to fresh pasture several times each week. They can return to the tractor for shade, shelter from the rain and grain. Some turkeys will stay in behind regular sheep electric net, but others will only stay in if you use the taller smaller meshed lamb and poultry net. I’ve also seen ducks and geese raised in similar systems.
Layer Hens: If you want eggs, you’ll need a chicken house or an eggmobile which is warm enough for the winter. Chickens lay better in winter when provided with supplemental light, and some people sprout grains or feed them organic alfalfa meal to improve the nutritional quality of the eggs in winter when pasture isn’t available. Layer hen chicks can be ordered through the mail, but won’t start laying for 4 to 6 months.
Cows, Goats and Sheep: Cattle, either beef or dairy are one of the easiest animals to fence. They train well to a single strand of electric fence wire, even polywire on portable lightweight posts. Cow manure makes excellent compost, and cows will also provide milk and meat. Cows are central to a biodynamic farm, where their manure, horns and many other parts are used to make the biodynamic preparations and maintain soil fertility.
Cows milk is easier than goat milk to make butter from, and it contains a few additional vitamins. Cows are also easier to keep fenced out of your gardens. However, cows will eat a lot more hay in the winter, and take up more space in the barn. Goats and sheep will need to be fenced with electric net (extra tall if they are jumpers) or with multiple strands of wire or polywire.
Cows, goats and sheep are all ruminants, which means they are adapted to eat grasses and other plants that we humans with our single little stomach can’t digest. If you select a hardy older style breed of ruminant, there will be no need to feed them any grain. In the summer, cows and sheep will thrive on pasture with a source of good drinking water and some minerals (we feed a mix of mineral salt and kelp). They also love to eat pumpkins, kale, turnips, carrots, parsnips and other garden produce. In winter they do best eating plenty of hay (either dry bales or balage (fermented). Ruminants also enjoy eating “leaf-hay” in the winter months. Leaf hay is made in June by cutting tree branches and saplings and drying them in bundles in the barn rafters. Throw down a few bundles each week in the winter and they will eat them stems and all.
Goats are more susceptible to parasites than sheep and cows (although in some situations parasites can be a serious problem for sheep also), and goats enjoy more browse (brush and trees) in their diets instead of just pasture. If your farm is rough, rocky and brushy, it may be ideal for goats. Most goats also need warmer winter housing, since they don’t store as much fat between their skin and muscle as cows and sheep do. Sheep will need to be sheared once each year, and you’ll need a ram if you plan to breed them. Many of my neighbors who have a just a few goats load their doe in the back of their station wagon once a year when she comes into heat and drive them to visit a neighbors billy goat for a little romance… This obviously isn’t possible for breeding cows, but you can use AI or may be able to borrow a bull from a neighboring farm.
Most pigs prefer to root instead of grazing, so you can use them to do some of your tillage. An area that they “till” will often be quite rough and need harrowing smooth before you plant a cover crop. Pigs can be very effective at removing quack grass roots and other invasive weed species, however they can also overwork the soil and cause some compaction if they are in an area for too long. Cover cropping for a year following pig-tillage is a useful rotation.
Lard from pigs that are raised outdoors with access to plenty of sun is very high in vitamin D. The only other food source of vitamin D that is higher than lard is cod liver oil. So fry your potatoes in lard over your woodstove this winter and think about all that stored solar energy you are using in the wood, the lard and the potato.
Grazing Management: If you are planning to graze animals through an area where you will be growing vegetables or a cover crop the next year, how you manage the pasture is less important than other issues, such as soil fertility and weed management. However, if you plan to graze the animals in pastures which will be permanent, you will need to pay some attention to pasture management so that the grasses and clovers stay productive over time. A simple grazing rotation will be better than no rotation, and it is very helpful to understand the basics of management intensive grazing.
A well developed farm should function as a healthy organism, with all the parts in balance and harmony with each other. Pigs till the soil where cover crops and vegetables are grown. Cows graze the cover crops as well as the nearby pastures and produce manure, which is made into compost to fertilize the gardens. The pigs are fed with skim milk and whey from the cows, which is left after butter and cheese are made. The pigs eat garden produce and dropped apples from the orchards, which are grazed by sheep. The sheep manure fertilizes the apple trees and they help disrupt the life cycles of the insect pests along with the chickens scratching under the trees in the fall. The pastures are grazed by sheep and cows which maintains a diverse mix of plants, which when flowering provide nectar for the bees. The bees pollinate the gardens and meadows and make honey. The farmer collects some honey to eat and makes mead and has a party. The chickens are grazed in the gardens in fall to add fertility, and graze near the gardens in the summer to eat insects, and the farmer eats lots of eggs. The farmer makes butter and cheese and has beef and lamb and pork in the freezer for winter. Apples are collected in fall to store, and make cider, and apple waste is fed to the pigs. In summer the farmer makes hay, which is either dried or fermented for winter feed for cows, sheep and pigs. In the fall, vegetables are stored in the root cellar and lacto-fermented to make sauerkraut and kimchi. Some vegetables are also stored for the animals, who love to eat cabbage and pumpkins in the winter.