To this point, we’ve dug a little bit of deeper into grazing methodologies and spent some time talking about the benefits of grazing in a forest setting.
This is awesome Andy. We’re tropical (Philippines) and we did a agroforestry system, first starting loosely inspired by Syntropic and we now run animals through it using electric fencing. A few things worth considering is having room to move animal shelters (maybe not so necessary in your climate?) between tree rows and also thinking about animal vaccinations/worming and how this could adversely affect soil life? Originally we also had a single cow being rotated through the system but returning her to her permanent shed every evening was more time consuming then I imagined so we now let her free range. This has been fantastic for her health as she self-medicated on whatever forage she needs and she is free to return to the shed whenever rain comes. However the downside is that she does like nibbling on some species of young trees and also is brutal with a few of the more established trees (jackfruit, avocados) so it was sort of good we delayed her arrival until the trees were a few years old already
Because the cow is free range and not as effective as rotational grazing I do precede our chicken rotations with scythjng. Often areas are left for 6-8 months and so go quite wild but we’ve noticed this slow system seems to be much better for wild animal nesting habitat and insect numbers.
This is awesome Andy. We’re tropical (Philippines) and we did a agroforestry system, first starting loosely inspired by Syntropic and we now run animals through it using electric fencing. A few things worth considering is having room to move animal shelters (maybe not so necessary in your climate?) between tree rows and also thinking about animal vaccinations/worming and how this could adversely affect soil life? Originally we also had a single cow being rotated through the system but returning her to her permanent shed every evening was more time consuming then I imagined so we now let her free range. This has been fantastic for her health as she self-medicated on whatever forage she needs and she is free to return to the shed whenever rain comes. However the downside is that she does like nibbling on some species of young trees and also is brutal with a few of the more established trees (jackfruit, avocados) so it was sort of good we delayed her arrival until the trees were a few years old already
Because the cow is free range and not as effective as rotational grazing I do precede our chicken rotations with scythjng. Often areas are left for 6-8 months and so go quite wild but we’ve noticed this slow system seems to be much better for wild animal nesting habitat and insect numbers.