Another offer on our land

Another offer on our land
Lusciousness in the field

I'm not sure how typical it is to get at least one drive-by offer on your land a year.  Since we moved here in 2018, we have had a truck or two a season roll down the gravel drive to ask to farm our land or buy it.  I remember being in my pajamas around 8 pm one night, with baby Jack crawling in the yard while I watered in my trays of plants, when a big ol' pick up ambled up to the house.  Bra-less on a Sunday evening, admittedly I was a bit grumbly to field questions.  

A nice enough gentleman farmer who hays fields around the neighborhood, wondered what in the world we were doing with all the lush pasture just growing, some of it to seed-maturity.  To him and others it appears to be a missed opportunity.  You see...you can get multiple pasture/hay harvests off of a field every season.  Cut it before it goes to seed and bale it.  Let it regrow, cut and bale it again.  In this system, there are no animals on the land to give a pasture mild disturbance, aerating soil and encouraging regrowth.  Without those animals, there is also no passive fertilization-manure, stuff that returns to the soil what is taken by the grazers when they 'harvest' the top growth.  Instead truckloads of manure or more typically synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers are brought in by the truckload in order to grow more hay.

These are two different ways of thinking about land management.  And it's fun to share ideas and to divulge our intentions and field plans with people who have different farming styles.  We run our sheep over the land, moving their mobile fencing every other day.  This allows them to graze an area well, lightly disturb the ground, encouraging growth, and also returns what was taken in the form of their pelletized manure.  Our ovine friends are moved before they cause too much disturbance and are beckoned to the next area, lush with green growth: a grassy, forby, leguminous feast for them.  And what's the result of three years of this plan?  Pasture so lush and vigorous, that we have onlooking farmers coming over to ask why we aren't baling it.

In the meantime, we are starting to 'stockpile' pasture forage... allowing the pasture to grow nice and tall so that when growth slows in the winter months to near dormancy, there is a store of grass available, whether the sheep need to paw through snow to get to it or not.  Inevitably we tap into that precious resource of hay, baled by folks such as the gentlemen who have come knocking at our door--last year we fed out about 12 square bales over the course of the winter...largely due to a carpet of layers of ice that encapsulated our earth for a few weeks, AND coddling the sheep while we are out of town so as to avoid The Great Escape.

To me, that's coexistence at its best.  Rather than investing in haying equipment to hay our wee 27-acre property to provide these bales in the winter, we look to our neighboring farmers who spend their whole summers baling for sale.  It's a sweet relationship.

But the answer remains...no, our land is not up for grabs.  We hope to see new species appear in the fields as the years go on, little gaps to fill in as the soil health evolves, and wildlife to become that much more abundant as the land is regenerated.