Leagues, Hectares, & Feeds

A friend said to me recently, "I am more interested in wild animals than farm animals." I have a lot of sympathy for this position. Wild animals are, after all, more resourceful, unpredictable, less uniform, less domestic." On the other hand, someone I read said, "think of domesticated animals as kin to their wild brothers and sisters, rather than what you own." That way you think more critically about what the critter's needs are and ultimately treat her with more respect.

Brian and I are trying to implement Intensively Managed Rotational Grazing (IMRG) on this ranch. This is the simple idea that the natural tendency for grazing animals is to move, on a daily basis, away from browsed forage and waste and towards fresh pasture. So the manager's goal is to make the pasture size equal to one day's eating capacity of the herd. Yesterday morning we put about 44 cows on 1.5 acres of 5"-7" grass. By this afternoon they had chewed through all this and were dry humping each other out of boredom. So while we had predicted the field would last three days, in fact they were eating faster, and my rough cut grazing coefficient is that 10 cows of mixed age can eat 1/3 of an acre of 5"-7" grass in one day.

As I draw this post to a close I am struck by how much I enjoy this simple exercise of mathematics applied to the agricultural system in which I am living. Now I am thinking about an experiment that would query for a similar grazing coefficient for wild elk, and I'll be danged if I don't recall a former field partner saying that he actually did something like that in Washington State. So the western empirical mind of science is being applied to both wild and domestic animals. But this is reductive, and I have now converted both from grunting foragers to abstract mental concepts. Since I can recognize the false logic employed therein, I have the opportunity to pause and see the creatures for what they are, whatever that is.