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But when livestock graze on the same pasture repeatedly, plants don’t have the opportunity to recover and will die. Now, they absorb up to 16 inches of rain per hour,” says Jack Algiere, director of agroecology at Stone Barn. The need for fertilizer is lessened as the livestock service the soil through their manure.
Next, they purchased a no-drill seeder together, and it allowed them to plant rows of grain directly into orchards and pastures without tilling, a practice known to benefit the soil. Prior to that, they had all either harvested by hand, an intensely laborious process, or hired someone with a combine.
Diversity within livestock systems, as with having chickens or small ruminants follow cattle in a pasture-based rotation, also provides multiple benefits, including pest suppression. The mix fixes nitrogen and livestock can graze the mix directly in the field, returning nutrients to the soil via manure.
In response, the chapter centers agroecological solutions like enhanced soil health and diversified landscapes. However, solutions to livestock methane center on feed supplements and energy capture from liquid manure systems rather than grazing systems. Fortunately, a focus on agroecological solutions has been gaining some traction.
This has helped immensely when weather conditions are not ideal, particularly as they grow large amounts of green manures which, when incorporated into the soil, help to boost organic matter and retain moisture beneath the surface. And for agroecological farmers and growers, this poses some difficulty.
The US agriculture sector covers 654 million acres of pasture and rangeland for grazing cattle and another 391 million acres to produce corn, soybeans and other field crop monocultures—and all of them pollute one way or another. Let me give you a better idea of what we’re up against.
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