It’s been said that keeping cows, sheep, and other grazing animals is really more about “grass farming” than it is raising animals. Keeping a healthy, productive pasture is key to keeping healthy, productive animals. Of course, in this day and age, you can always buy hay or grain-based feed, but given the choice between grass grown right in my back yard at no additional cost to me and feed grown somewhere far away and $13/50 lbs, I know which one I’ll take.

It’s common to simply put the animals out to pasture and let them roam around, eating as they will. This time-tested technique works, but some people argue it’s not ideal. Joel Salatin says that, given her choice, a cow will eat the yummiest stuff (the “ice cream”) and move on, only coming back for “the broccoli” if she’s really hungry. What this can mean is that the pasture is grazed unevenly. Free-grazing also results in uneven manure distribution, with lots of manure put down in areas where the animals congregate, and little manure put down in areas where they don’t.

Finally, and most significant, free-grazing usually means that parts of the field never get a chance to fully recover. Joel Salatin talks about the “law of the second bite.” Grass follows an S-shaped growth curve. Immediately after it’s grazed, it takes some time to recover, then it goes through a blaze of fresh growth. After a while, its growth tapers off and it begins to put its energy into making seeds. The “law of the second bite” states that you can’t let the grass be grazed again before it has fully recovered from the first grazing. Unfortunately, the tender new shoots are the most delicious, and so, left to their own devices, animals would violate that law and eventually degrade the health of the pasture.

Here at The Wallow, we’re attempting to practice Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing (MIRG). I say, “attempting,” because our lack of experience and actual knowledge makes me hesitate to actually claim that what we’re doing is MIRG. With MIRG, you confine the animals to relatively small paddocks for a relatively short period of time, then move them to a new paddock when the old one is “used up.” This is purported to have several advantages:

• The animals are left in the area until it is thoroughly grazed, meaning that they consume the “ice cream” and the “broccoli” plants.
• They are prevented from returning to the area until it has totally recovered, preserving the “law of the second bite.”
• Their manure is put down more densely and evenly, making for good fertilization.
• They are moved away from their manure before parasites have time to take up residence, and not returned until the parasites’ life cycle has run its course. This means that when the parasites find the manure, there are no yummy sheep nearby for them to infect, and they die off or move on.

In the image above, you can see an example of our attempt at MIRG. The area labeled “1″ is about four days post-grazing. It has already started to recover, and is a little taller than the area labeled “2″. The area labeled “2″ has had the sheep on it for about 4 days and has been grazed down to an acceptable level. The sheep have been moved onto a new area (unlabeled). The area labeled “3″ is un-grazed and is waiting for them to get to it.

One of the challenges with MIRG is knowing when to put the animals onto the land and when to take them off of it. For sheep, we’re using the “boot rule”: put the sheep onto the land when the grass is about at the tops of your boots (8-10″) and take them off it when it’s down to the toes of your boots (about 2-3″). Because sheep cut off grass with their teeth instead of ripping it off with their tongues like cows, sheep are more likely damage the crown of the grass if allowed to graze it low enough.

Another challenge is creating the paddocks that the animals use. Building permanent fences is expensive, and that has been one of the major disadvantages of MIRG in the past, but electric fencing has largely alleviated that. With portable electric fencing, it’s possible to quickly and easily set up a new paddock every 3-5 days. Cows can be kept in with a single strand of electric wire. One blogger I read uses rebar poles, plastic standoffs, and a spool of electric wire to fence her cows. The wire isn’t even particularly tensioned, just run from pole to pole and wrapped around the standoffs. This method isn’t reported to work for sheep or goats, however, because they’re small and wiggly enough to go over or under a single strand of wire. Also, sheep at least are more prone to predation, so the wire needs to be enough to keep predators out as well as sheep in.

Electric net fencing to the rescue! Electric net fencing is made of about 1/8″ twisted poly rope, with thin conductive wires braided into the rope. It is attached to an electric fence energizer like traditional high-tensile wire, but it is much easier to put up and take down (it’s also more expensive, lest you think it’s all pro and no con).  It’s also less penetrable, doing a better job of keeping wily animals in and predators out. Of course, you can get the same effect by setting up high-tensile wire in multiple runs 6″ or 8″ apart, but this only makes sense with permanent fencing; it would be too labor-intensive for temporary fencing.

I’m excited to see how this is all going to work out. Currently, it looks like it will take the sheep about 5 weeks to go through the field they’re in, after which we’ll move them to the front yard, and then the side yard, and then if necessary, the top of the hill. The goal is to have them back onto the beginning of the rotation as soon as possible after the grass has finished its growth spurt and recovery from previous grazing. The timing will, of course, change, as the grass’s growth rate increases during the summer, but currently it looks like we’ve got pasture to spare. We’ll see…