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For three years, Nathanael Gonzales-Siemens drove up California’s coast for 14 hours every month for a routine task: milling his grain into flour. “I We’ve got 150 acres of grain.” He found this disconcerting, not only for himself but the future of small-scale grain farming in California, once known for its golden hills of grain.
Over the next 20 years, much of the country’s southern landscape was transformed into a lush, evergreen pasture capable of supporting a robust cattle industry. When scientists engineered a version of fescue without the fungal endophyte, in 1982, its hardiness disappeared and ranchers saw it die out among their winter pastures.
They ate grains that couldn’t be sold.” Photos courtesy of Wendy Johnson) The sheep were getting sick from eating too much grain, so Johnson worked to reestablish a natural savanna, a mixed woodland and grassland ecosystem that had once been prevalent on Iowa’s landscape but was destroyed by grazing and row crops. Johnson laughs.
However, as with all social-ecological systems , change in any part of the system necessarily requires or causes change in other parts of the system. Who manages land determines which scientific perspectives, crop choices, traditions, and skills shape the landscape, with profound implications for its ecological sustainability.
When the sheep go to pasture, someone is with them at all times—armed. As soon as the lambs can quit drinking milk replacer, they go on grain to grow as fast as possible. The ewes get hay and grain too to keep their body condition up and make them cycle fast for rebreeding. As a result, all farms have 24 hour security.
Today, Rod and family raise Angus cattle and a flock of Katahdin sheep on open native and annual forage pastures. They’ve adapted an integrated approach to land management, practicing rotational grazing to improve the quality and biodiversity of the soil, which in turn has provided fertilized soils for growing grain and forage crops.
CSP pays producers to improve, maintain, and actively manage conservation activities already in place at the time of application and to adopt new conservation activities during the life of the five-year contract.
As a renowned environmentalist, his cattle farm coupled with ornithology give him unique authenticity in the ecology-farming debate. An avid lover of grassland wild birds, over the years he has developed credible protocols for grazing, mowing hay, or clipping pastures in a way that preserves grassland birds.
While a small number of winter crops such as small grains (wheat, oats, barley) and forage and pasture crops such as alfalfa can use some winter rain and snow, western agriculture largely depends on a steady supply of irrigated water that has led to extreme groundwater mining.
In its place, ‘agroecology’ was more explicitly recognised as a broad moniker for a range of practices that are grounded in biological / ecological farming; this has made the term more distinct in its definition. Kumar calls for “a new trinity for an age of ecology which has wholeness, integrity and cohesion”.
We decided to call the farm ‘Redtail Farms’ as an ode to my father and his love for birds and ecology — and the way he farmed as closely with nature as he could,” says Griebel. They are committed to farming with nature, not against it, and restoring the natural grassland ecology. Pigs can’t survive on pasture alone,” he explains.
The carbon is being used by the microbes—the ecology of the soil—to do all things: build organic matter, soil structure, increase infiltration, and feed life.” Many cattle ranchers were forced to sell animals and import hay, while grain farmers suffered major crop losses. “We
Holistic land management that builds diversity of crops and livestock , adds perennials in the form of agroforestry and deep-rooted perennial grasses like grains, keeps the soil covered and living roots in the ground , and integrates livestock into the landscape all represent highly effective climate and agriculture solutions.
But as we understand ecological systems better, we have come to realise that, while they can be very resilient, at some level of degradation they reach tipping points at which they flip into new states far less conducive to human life. Our cattle are outside all year, and we don’t feed any grain.
Behind them, green pastures stretched into the distance toward looming, sand-colored peaks. How do you do that and create ecological change, economic value, and social benefit? Will Harris’ White Oak Pastures in Georgia recently raised $1.2 How do you make the best beef business in America?”
As with all programs, NSAC will continue to analyze the RPFSA’s CSP provisions, including a proposed one-time CSP subprogram focused on enrollment of up to 500,000 acres of native or improved pasture land used for livestock grazing in the Lower Mississippi River Valley to address water quality issues leading to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.
Blessings, joel HILLSDALE COLLEGE PARALLEL ECONOMIES—AGRICULTURE Joel Salatin This spring when Russia invaded Ukraine, fertilizer prices increased in some cases 400 percent and global grain shipments sputtered, our farm didn’t feel anything because we don’t buy fertilizer and we don’t buy foreign grain.
Against the backdrop of a carefully managed perennial pasture, the gathering focused on legislative approaches to promoting regenerative farming and ranching practices, which the group believes can galvanize support across partisan and rural-urban divides.
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