Adventures in Silvopasture

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Let’s start at the top. What is silvopasture? To put it simply, it’s when you graze your farm animals in the woods.

Wait, don’t farm animals graze in big open pastures? Well, that is what most people think of today when they think of grazing animals but there is some history of animals grazing in the woods and there can be some definite benefits.

Why doesn’t everyone graze their woods? It fell out of popularity in many farming cultures and as history went on, farmers kept doing what they knew, which was to graze their animals in a big wide open pasture.

So why are you choosing to try out silvopasture? We have several acres of wooded land. The trees aren’t a good enough quality to harvest them now and create new open pasture. In addition, there is a 1 acre area that is currently open and steep. It is so steep the mowing is difficult so we’ve been thinking about what we can plant in that area to keep us from having to mow it and we’ve landed on trees.

If you live in Virginia, you also likely know there was a pretty good drought this summer and we found that the parts of our pasture that received at least some shade from the woods around them, did much better than those with no shade. One of the many benefits of silvopasture is that it is more drought resistant. We anticipate warmer summers for the foreseeable future so having at least some pasture that is more drought resistant will be a good thing.

Image of pasture. Brown grass where not protected by the shade.

You can see from this image, our front field, the left part of the photo has green grass, that’s the part that gets some shade and then further back in the image you can see a hard line of brown grass, that’s the area that gets no shade. In drought conditions, having some shade appears to be helpful.

There are other benefits too! For instance, did you know that sheep really like mulberry and black locus leaves? And that they also like pecans? As another way to insulate us from drought and/or to reduce the amount of hay we use, we’re planting mulberries, black locusts, and pecan trees. When the trees mature, we can cut down limbs and let the sheep have some snacks in addition to the grass.

But, it’s not just the sheep that are going to get some snacks, while we’re at it, we’re going to plant some apple, peach, and plum trees for ourselves. The sheep will get to enjoy the shade of these trees when they aren’t producing and then we get to enjoy the trees when they are.

This is the first, and easiest way to start a silvopasture, taking an open area and plant it with trees that will suit your goals. Our goal is to create some additional fodder for the sheep and the people on the farm, while creating more dedicated grazing area. We hope that the plan we have in place will meet those goals. We’ve been working with the Appalachian Sustainable Development to help us with the planning and financial commitment needed for this undertaking. If you are interested to find out more, check them out: https://www.asdevelop.org/programs-resources/agroforestry/. We’ve been quite pleased so far and can’t wait to get into planting.

I’ve been reading up on silvopasture in a book by Steve Gabriel, I would suggest giving that a read before you start your own project. There is so much to learn and I find it kind of fascinating. I’ll continue to keep you updated on the silvopasture planting as well as our second silvopasture project where we are converting woods into silvopasture. Stay tuned!

/Open pasture

Above is our pasture that is open and will become (hopefully) silvopasture in years to come.