Multispecies Grazing & Silvopastoral Systems

Understanding grazing from an ecological context

In the previous chapter, we dipped our toes into the fundamentals of silvopasture— what it is, what is the framework behind successful silvopasture practice, and how this relates to native ecosystems and their resiliency. We had discussed the basics of silvopasture and how to frame the practice of forested pasturing around native species and how to work within to mix and match type of system. From there, we need to take a look at what the landscape can handle. And to do that, we need to look towards Allan Savory’s work in restoring landscapes, and more specifically, the categorical conditions he uses to define which solutions will best improve soils. Yeah, I know he’s problematic, but it doesn’t make the research he did less useful. He talks about whether or not an environment is brittle.

Now, we traditionally think of the term brittle to mean fragile, and that’s not quite it. Brittleness is not the same as fragility. When we talk about brittleness, we are specifically talking about how easily a site can desertify. Fragile environments can exist in nonbrittle places— think like slow-growing ferns that could easily get wiped out in a forest, versus resilient environments in brittle places, like the savannas of Africa. An environment's vulnerability to desertification is often tied to low rainfall, but that’s not the full explanation of brittleness. What makes any environment's position on the brittleness scale change is not so much from total rainfall as from the distribution of precipitation and humidity throughout the year.¹

Toward the very brittle end of the scale, environments typically experience erratic distribution of both precipitation and humidity during the year. The pattern determines the degree of brittleness. A 30 - to 50-inch rainfall area that typically has very dry periods in the middle of its growing season and a long dry season, is likely to be very brittle. Toward the non-brittle end of the scale environments characteristically experience increasingly reliable moisture throughout the year, or at least during the growing season. Even though total precipitation might be less than 20 inches a year in some of them, the distribution is such that throughout the year, atmospheric humidity does not drop severely. In completely nonbrittle environments both precipitation and humidity would be constant and high. It’s not just rainfall with this impact, but elevation, winds & prevailing winds, and distribution of humidity that can further create these brittle or non-brittle environments.

If we think way back to the first episode on complex systems, we had talked about how extremes— whether in temperature, sunlight access, rainfall, and so on, reduce the complexity potential of the system because specialists develop based on specific climate conditions, which reduces overall diversity. This is the same concept played out and reflects the ease with which cascading failures can take place in an ecosystem. The core component of all life —water— drives that brittleness, not just through its existence or lack thereof, but how it exists and interacts with the landscape through time.

Some things to consider when assessing a landscape’s brittleness:

• Fragility vs brittleness in the consistency of abiotic conditions

• How does water interact with the ecosystem, what if no human management?

• Will the system continue without grazing animals or no?

• What do we need to do as stewards of the land for it to be resilient?

Savory points specifically to these brittle environments as areas where we can see the necessary role of animals in an environment to prevent desertification. How does the standing grass break down to return nutrients to the earth? It’s the grazers that come in and eat the grasses and forbs down to the ground and move on until the next year. As they stomp and leave their droppings, the soil waits until the rains come while it is protected by the crushed grasses from the hot sun, and the nutrients return back to the soil. Without these grazers, only a small proportion of the vegetation produced is able to decay. Most are left to break down chemically through oxidation—the same process at work on rusting metal, although dead plant material turns gray and then black, rather than reddish-brown—or physically through weathering, where wind, rain, and hail very gradually wear them down.

While droppings will break down in as little as a few weeks, starchy grasses can take a year or more to break down- think about the bale of hay someone leaves sitting on their front porch far past Halloween; it can sit there for months and still resemble hay, even with the rain. Humans of course can also assist the breakdown by burning the dead vegetation, which quickly returns nutrients to the soil and is another tool in managing landscapes, especially brittle ones. As the ability of plants to decompose and recycle their nutrients is crucial to the health of the whole environment, determining the degree of brittleness becomes a prime factor in the management of any environment. Nonbrittle and very brittle environments react quite differently to many of the management practices we have talked about in this podcast.

We talked about this a bit in an interview with Dr. Dan Rubenstein; he applied many of Savory’s work to see what could be proven objectively and most of it was true; not always to the extent of what Savory claimed, but there was evidence of the benefits of grazing in these ecologies. The same action— the removal of the most active animal on the landscape, has led to two diametrically opposite results. Before we can claim that Savory’s claim that we need to graze the world, we need to note that there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that, while holistic grazing can improve degraded landscapes, the improvements are still second to native grazers, and that the soil organic matter development is significantly less than what Savory often claims.²,³,⁴

But how do we identify the intensity of the brittleness of a site to know what we’re up against? The first and most obvious we’ve covered— paying attention to rainfall. We can also pay attention to the breakdown of dead organic matter— how quickly are the grasses and forbs breaking down once they’ve died? If we think about what we were just talking about, the problem with brittle environments is that nutrients are not cycling back through the system, so are we seeing that happen naturally on the site? In more extreme cases, because so little nutrient cycling is occurring, the soil will stay bare.

Now, species diversity isn’t necessarily related to brittleness. Plenty of brittle landscapes have massive amounts of diversity and are often home to some of the most unique animals and plants in the world (think of the desert). Think of brittleness being like net energy in, energy out. Like a bank account. If you just worked and paid your bills and spent no money, would you slowly go to zero dollars or slowly get rich? That’s the brittleness or non-brittleness of a site; how it responds without specific intervention. Dealing with brittle sites is slightly different than this process.

Brittle sites have their own challenges compiled on the non-brittle cycles of minimal seed dispersal in the soil, and extreme weather means that overgrazing can still happen in a few ways— one being that because of soil and plant depletion, animals often don’t get adequate nutrients from the plants they’re eating because of limited selection, and further because of limited rainfall, they may not bounce back as quickly. Animals try to forage in order to meet all of their dietary requirements, and in sites with limited nutritional availability, this can lead to overgrazing even in these types of systems or may lead to equal grazing but poor animal health, and neither is ideal.

It’s easy to forget that plants mine for nutrients and when they die they return those nutrients to the topsoil. With repeated removal of that topsoil; say, heavily baled pastures that have had their grasses sold off, or former logging sites, much of the nutritional value of that landscape has been removed. Conversely, this is another way to return nutrients to degraded soil.

But to return to the subject of landscape management with the animals themselves, very specific management of time for these animals in brittle sites, along with extensive work to rebuild the soil and plant species within the pasture, are crucial in sustaining intensive grazing systems in brittle environments, but are, despite the extra effort, the most effective process to reverse desertification outside of full landscape restoration, including the animals that graze and hunt in those ecosystems.

Animal polycultures in restoration agriculture are exercises in creating carefully designed leader-follower, mob-stocked, silvopasture grazing systems. Let me unpack that a bit. Leader-follower grazing systems are those where one animal type is let into a paddock first. Once it has eaten its preferred foods in the first paddock, it is rotated to the next paddock, and the next type of animal is turned in where the first just recently vacated. Leader-follower systems have repeatedly been shown to be able to out-produce other grazing systems for total animal weight gain because each animal is allowed to eat its optimal foods first.⁵,⁶ The pasture is allowed ample recovery time before the original grazing animal returns to the initial paddock.

Silvopasture is the intentional combining of both livestock production and woody plants. It is the intentional and intensive management of both the forage system and the woody crop. Silvopasture is not turning your animals loose in the woods to graze; it is intensively managing an open-canopy tree and forage system. I’m not going to get into what appropriate grazing systems are in terms of sustainable pasture management— we did already do 3 chapters on it, so if you want those specifics, that’s a good place to start, but I’d rather focus on how we can utilize tree crops within the confines of a grazing system, which is the ultimate goal here. 

But, to do that, we needed to articulate how we develop the tree crops in a way that creates resilient forests, which requires us to understand the local biome, its history, and how we can align our goals with the natural conditions of the soil and biology of the soil, as well as the climate, and other conditions that may impact the health of our trees— what we call agroecology. Understanding how topography and soil type can impact our tree growth, as we discussed in the forest ecology piece, is particularly helpful in considering what our mature tree size may be, and how we can utilize different topographic spaces for different species which may have unique needs, especially if we are incorporating some non-native, unrelated trees on our site. We haven’t yet covered how we should be considerate of how global warming will impact our site and our plant options, but we definitely should start thinking during this process about species that might be considered a marginal option because of heat or cold issues, and what we can do to help that tree succeed in the short-term. 

In the grazing piece, we talked a bit about species preference and the benefits of each type of grazer. We also talked about the various ways we can degrade pasture as well. Things like overstocking can degrade pastures by removing more living plant matter than what can regenerate before the next round of grazing happens. Understocking can degrade pastures when not followed up by finish mowing or grazing with other animals in order to prevent undesirable plants from proliferating and setting seed.

So, what we are talking about here is developing what’s called a leader-follower system. This system is explicitly designed based on the specifics of not just each different type of grazer, but the demands of specialists within that species. For example, if we were running cattle through, which I know most folks here probably aren’t interested in doing, you’d want to run your young calves through first, to get the most tender and fresh bits of grass and forbs, and then you’d introduce your actively milking cows in, since their dietary requirements are higher, sending your calves to the next paddock and then whatever other cows you might have. Simple systems such as this have been shown to increase total weight gain in calves and not reduce milk yields from the cows.⁷

The system can be refined even further based on the heaviest milkers, faster-growing calves that you’d want to breed, and so on. Most research on these types of systems involves cows, which I don’t have a lot of experience with, but generally, they are considered your first species for grazing, since they are more particular than other species when it comes to foraging. The order of operations generally goes like this— cows, pigs, turkeys, sheep, chickens, geese and ducks, goats. Yeah, that’s a few animals, right? But despite seemingly being a lot, each represents different parts of our ecology in a dynamic system.

While native megafauna here in North America are functionally pretty much extinct, cows are often used to fill the role of bison in the ecosystem. While a sufficient analog, the evidence does suggest that cattle do not provide as many benefits as a native grazer for species diversity.⁸ Pigs, a small forager that is quite utilitarian, fills the role of the generalist in nature. For most of us, the native version of pigs— not wild boars, which are not native to North America, doesn’t exist. Without going down a rabbit hole on the subject of evolution, we don’t have a fair comparison, but they often operate as a generalist in any ecology, and their role was often taken in the past by a number of different species like musk oxen, camels, and more.

Turkeys are, well turkeys, and sheep occupy the same space as many of our current suburban grazers like rabbits and geese. Chickens and ducks are well, birds and ducks, and goats and deer generally eat the same foods, given the opportunity. Obviously it’s a bit more complicated than this, but this is simply a way to start understanding how these species organize and utilize different parts of the ecosystem.

Much like when we covered the grazing content, we had talked about that, despite possibly getting smaller, less productive animals, we are able to get significantly more animals— that process applies here, and we are also getting more diversity in both how we are recycling nutrients but also in our own diets from the variety of species we can work across one site.

We covered the role of cows, and what they will forage— primarily grasses, and we covered which order they should forage in, so let’s take a look at what is often recommended to come through next— pigs. Pigs are, of course, one of the most broadly omnivorous livestock. Left to themselves, they graze a fair amount of green forage but prefer to root through the ground to eat grubs, worms, and plant roots. Anyone who has spent time with a pig knows it will eat fruits and nuts and they have even been known to dig up and eat snakes, rodents and even ground-nesting birds. The “plowing” behavior of pigs can be used in the proper place and at the proper time when you want to disturb the soil in order to plant a new crop, which might be a drawback if you’re working on new pasture that you are hesitant to get rooted up a bit. Some breeds of pigs, however, root less (but they all root, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) than others and thrive on pasture better than others.

Management of pigs in a silvopasture system includes using them as the cleanup tool. Paddock rotation can be timed to coincide with when insect-damaged fruit falls from the tree. Pigs will eat up the most disgusting of fruit. After harvest, whether of apples, chestnuts, or hazelnuts, pigs are rotated beneath the trees in order to pick up any fruit or nuts that were missed by the human harvesters who went through first. With a “pigs following cattle” system, a rule of thumb would be to have no more than two mature pigs per adult cow. Fewer than two pigs per cow works just fine and honestly is probably a safer bet if you’re exploring multispecies grazing for the first time. With too many pigs they’ll not have enough leftover forage to thrive, they will get hungry and begin to break through electric fences. Pigs are incredibly intelligent animals and once they learn that it only takes one zap to run through an electric fence, they will do exactly that if they are not getting enough to eat in their paddock. 

Once the cattle have grazed off their first two bites, and after the pigs have cleaned up behind the cattle, turkeys are an excellent choice to follow. Turkeys will nibble grass and forbs and there will be some left for them, but they rely more heavily on insects and bugs. Turkeys will primarily eat the insects attracted to the dung left behind by the larger grazers as well as any seeds that may have passed through the gut of the animals that went before. They will scratch around in the grazed and trampled debris in search of beetles, caterpillars, worms, and large seeds.

Many pasture “weeds” that don’t provide the best forage for cattle and pigs have large seeds. These large seeds will be gobbled up by the turkeys and ground into oblivion in the bird’s gizzard. Phosphorus, one of the Corn Belt’s most deficient mineral nutrients, was once brought into the region by the ton as migrating birds gobbled up Gulf of Mexico seafood and pooped their way up the Mississippi flyway leaving behind a wake of fertility.⁹ We no longer have passenger pigeons on the farm, so we now substitute domestic fowl and provide them with the mineral nutrients that they and the soil need. Barring the restoration of wildlife population densities, doing so is the closest thing we can do to restoring these natural cycles.

Now turkeys, especially the more intelligent, heritage breeds, are quite low maintenance and only one flock needs to be raised during the summer grazing season. They’re quite capable of surviving the entire summer without supplemental feed, better so than other livestock birds. Approximately two turkeys per hog is an adequate number.

At this point, one or more waves of cattle have grazed through it first, with the calves eating the tips of the most nutritious plants, the best cows taking the second bites, lower-producing cows taking the thirds, and dry cows the fourths. Then pigs come in and clean up the leftovers, and third, the turkeys pick out the seeds and eat the bugs. What’s left? Anyone who has watched this process happen will observe that the first plants to rebound after this grazing pressure are the ones that were the least preferred by cattle and not eaten by the hogs. The turkeys really aren’t that much of an impact on the pasture itself, and so the green growth begins to rebound.

First up from the ground are the plants, mostly biennials, and perennials, that have large, fleshy roots with lots of stored energy. Other plants left behind are the ones that many graziers would call invasives. Other plants quick to respond include dandelions, burdock, cow parsnips & thistles. With little else to eat the sheep happily graze on these broadleaf plants. Sheep, in my experience, tend to happily graze non-natives first and will hesitate before choosing many natives. Over time these weeds will become less and less prevalent in the pasture thereby providing weed control as a side benefit of the grazing system.

When these weeds no longer spring up, the grassy replacements are also an appealing choice to sheep, making sure they still have something to eat even as they graze away the competition. There are a lot of different systems in place using sheep with cows, some with significantly more sheep than cows, but as a rule of thumb, you’d want a 1 cow to 1 sheep ratio to start. Geese can be used as a replacement for sheep, depending on your goals, at a 1 for 1 pound ratio. They generally eat the same foods, while providing different produce, which further allows you to even run both animals through together if the geese will play nice. Ducks, on the other hand, play in a space between geese and chickens, not just in size, but in their dietary choices.  My ducks in particular have more in common with geese than my chickens, so if I had to find a place for them, my subjective opinion would be to run them with geese, or in lieu of geese or sheep, but do keep in mind their water requirements are a bit different than the other species, because they need sitting water.

Following the sheep or geese, come the chickens. Dealing with chickens in a leader-follower system can be somewhat challenging. Buying enough square-mesh portable electric fence to set up permanent paddocks for all of the chickens that you can raise is quite expensive. And moving mesh-fence paddocks every day is a lot of work and a nuisance. Open-bottomed, portable chicken pens are one way to deal with the issue, as are trailer-mounted, mobile chicken coops, made famous by Joel Salatin. Another, more hands-on option is to trim your chicken’s wings, and to either purchase or breed chickens with limited flight mobility. This way you can reduce your need for electric mesh netting and keep your birds from escaping without relying on technology.

You might think that you have an electric fence up, and those hot wires would knock them out, but generally speaking, birds won’t get zapped by the fence— it exists to keep predators out, not to keep chickens in. Have an alternative plan in place. As the chickens move through the pasture following the sheep, they scratch up any remaining manure from the “leaders'' ahead of them searching for insects and seeds. By the time the chickens move through the pasture, there will likely be very little animal manure left to be found, it has all been eaten or carried away by dung beetles and carrion beetles or scratched apart by turkeys and chickens. It’s worth noting that chickens will also do a fair bit of damage to your pasture if you leave them too long (and many, many grazers tend to do so), and you’ll still likely need to provide feed for most breeds of chickens.

Chickens, whether egg layers or meat birds are one of the simplest animals to raise. A rule of thumb number for chickens is really not possible. If you want to use no supplemental feed, then obviously fewer chickens could be supported at the tail end of a polyculture leader-follower system. If we use AU measurements to compare the volume consumption of chickens versus, say, pigs, a pig is considered .4 AU, while a chicken is around .014, which would give you a figure of around 28 chickens per pig AU.

A rule of thumb for chickens with supplemental food is around 4 square feet of free-range space per egg-laying chicken, and a non-free-range chicken eats on average around 5 ounces of protein-heavy feed. Trying to convert this to free range is tough, but if half a chicken’s diet is from the range, then that means they probably need 15 square feet per chicken, per day, of fresh range, given their high protein and calcium demands to lay high quality eggs. We’ll cover in a future episode why it’s important to consider targeting chickens not for their egg color or volume, but their ability to both forage, lay a fair, but not an overwhelming amount of eggs, and their ability to be kept in a system like this. For now, assume most birds will not thrive without supplemental feed.

So, to bring it all back, using these assumptions— and they are very back-of-the-napkin assumptions— you’re probably looking at close to 6 chickens per pig.

And our current tally:

• 1 cow, 2 pigs, 2 turkeys, 1 sheep, 12 chickens

I know, your first thought is that’s a lot of animals to overlap on one piece of land— I promise, we’re getting there. But before that—lastly, the cleanup crew is the goat. They are without a doubt the animal that is able to produce high-quality meat and dairy products on the coarsest, most degraded forage— outside of camels. They can eat raspberry bushes, roses, poison ivy, and worse, gain weight well, produce surplus milk, cream, and a kid or two each year. A goat’s ability to eat almost anything is what has led to countless images in children’s books and elsewhere of the bearded billy goat eating tin cans. The goat’s ability to thrive on almost anything is its greatest strength — and its greatest curse.

Goats can be an extremely useful tool to manage the succession of a site by browsing economically undesirable plants such as honeysuckle, multiflora roses, and autumn olive. However, goats can be the bane of a farmer. If there’s something you don’t want them to eat, no matter what you do — they will escape. If you are just starting out as a farmer and have not quite mastered the subtleties of multispecies grazing and pasture management goats are best avoided. I personally do not recommend goats in an agriculture system until that system is quite mature — 15 years old or more, unless you’re simply bringing them in to clear out a site filled with invasives, briars, or something else that needs to be cleaned out before the other animals and come through.

While that seemed like a lot, it’s all pretty logical, and this is by no means a hard rule. But there are some rules to consider. For example, you might also have thought it was a little odd that we didn’t talk about running the sheep and goats together or in succession, since they’ll both pretty much eat anything. There’s a reason for that. Sheep and goats share the same internal parasites. (Another reason to not use goats!) As do pigs and chickens. Some parasites can subsist externally from their host animal in the form of suspended animation as dehydrated cysts. The best way to limit parasites in a multispecies livestock operation is to understand what the parasite potentials are, understand the parasite life cycles, and not combine livestock with similar parasites in the same or even the following paddock. Always have a species break between one host species and the next susceptible species. Parasite problems can also be limited by maintaining a diverse pasture mix and especially a mix that includes perennial plant species that are known to be parasiticides. Some of these species are wormwood, members of the sage family, garlic, fennel, and other strong herbs.¹⁰ These can be planted along main fence lines, alongside walnut, hickory, willow, and oak species. If winter squash and pumpkins are grown on the farm, rejects can be fed to livestock both for their carbohydrate and mineral gain as well as the antiparasitic effects of the seed skin. Willow leaves and bark also has a similar effect and are loved by sheep in particular.

A: Well here’s the thing, it’s never that simple. If we think about the stacking we had talked about earlier on, trying to integrate these different concepts; silvopasture, multi-species grazing, keyline designs, and water management, layering all of these over one another can become a bit overwhelming if you don’t think about it in the right order. So for example, In a simple beef leader-follower system, the young stock is fenced separately from the older animals. Two active paddocks worth of moveable fences need to be maintained. When pigs are added to the system, since they’re significantly shorter than cows, an additional strand of fence wire needs to be strung quite low and weeds need to be eliminated frequently from beneath the lower strand so the fence doesn’t short and the pigs become residents in your home garden or your neighbor’s. Sheep may need a third strand, or at a minimum, the fence wire will need to be moved higher or lower as the next type of livestock is moved in. since you generally want to have a wire around face height so they see it.

When the farm is designed in order to optimize water capture using swales or terraces on or near contour, more fence posts are needed in order to work around the curves rather than straight lines. This is even more necessary if you’re putting trees on the contour lines, especially if they need to be protected from grazers. Chickens and ducks won’t respond as well to electric wiring and will likely need the netting or an alternative grazing system to keep them in check. The layers keep adding up, but as long as you have the right framework everything will stay on track. Things start going off the rails when you don’t understand the fundamentals, which we’ve covered throughout the podcast.

So at this point you’re probably thinking that all of this is making some sense, but the challenge really becomes about implementation. What comes first, the grazers or the trees? How do you protect the trees as the grazers work their way through? It’s one thing to take an orchard and let animals have at the grasses flowing through the alleys, it’s another to take a couple acres of grasslands, or even more challenging, an unproductive forest, and turning it into a multifaceted food system that improves the local ecology. And that conversation is a long, complicated one where there isn’t as clear of an answer as what we’re doing here. It will depend on your comfort with animals, the soil quality, the size of the site, how much you want to annoy your neighbors, the money you’re working with, and so on.

I will say this; expect to make mistakes, and don’t trust anyone who tells you that there’s a right way without having seen the specific site you’re working on. If the soil is degraded, no amount of watering is going to help the trees grow large enough to shade the soil and add enough biomass to allow for grasses to take over within a reasonable amount of time. If you don’t spend the time to learn and deal with animals, their escaping, and getting comfortable handling them, you’re never going to get to a point where you will keep your trees protected. These systems are complicated and often you’ll feel like you’re constantly juggling and dropping pieces as you try to make the systems come together because what we’re trying to do is essentially accelerate natural systems through the supplemental feed for our livestock and managed to plant to increase biomass and diversity while jumping forest succession while at the same time keeping a system mostly closed. We’re trying to make 100 years of natural succession happen in like 25 years. Of course, it’s going to be hard and messy.

With all that said, what are your options then? Okay, so you want to get some animals grazing, you’ve got a large backyard of sad looking forest with some grassy spots, what do you do? If it’s your first time dealing with animals, start small. Chickens. Ducks. Geese. Get used to the idea of handling them, and they won’t do much damage. This is a great time that if you need to cut down some stuff, get it done. Work your way up. If you’ve got trees, start them in planters if you can. Buy yourself an extra year or 2 before they go in the ground so they’re stronger, more resilient, and the animals can graze the lands and increase soil biology and organic matter.

When the trees go in, tree guards are a great option. If you don’t want to buy tree guards, because they add up quickly, get some old pvc, cut it in half, drill some holes for aeration, and tie it back together with twine. This way, the tree won’t grow and fill it out too much, making it difficult to take them off. If that seems like a lot of plastic waste, consider running temporary fencing that blocks off the tree areas, although you’ll likely have to go back through and cut down any grasses in these areas after, which could serve as some hay for your animals during the winter months.  This is just a basic idea of how to think about this process, and what you can and should be thinking about to classify these two different projects that will eventually form the bigger picture.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, which is equal to a 23 page chapter, of (so far) a 649 page book with 304 sources, you can support our work in a number of ways. The first is by sharing this article with folks you think would find it interesting. The second is by listening and sharing the audio version of this content, episode 59, of the Poor Proles Almanac podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to financially support the project, and get exclusive access to our limited paywalled content, you can become a paid subscriber on Substack or Patreon, which will both give you access to the paywalled content and in the case of Patreon, early access to the audio episodes as well.

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