Livestock Ballet

The natural dance of grass and grazers

ature never farms without animals is an old saying in organic

agriculture.
Over the past 66 million years, North American grasslands evolved
under grazing pressure from herds of ruminants (bison, deer, antelope)
and other herbivores. The animals would graze areas for short periods
of time, move on to fresh grass, come back later if the conditions were
right, and then go away again, in an ancient and sophisticated dance of
sunlight, soil, and rain. For its part, grass reciprocates the dance steps.
When old, dormant, or dead grass is removed by grazing animals (or
burned off by a natural fire) new grass emerges and grows vigorously,
as long as there is sufficient snow or rain. Grass and grazers need each
other, in other words. The rhythm of the performance changes from
year to year and place to place, depending on the needs of the dancers,
but when there was enough moisture the result was always the same: a
photosynthetic standing ovation.
The holistically minded ranchers and farmers that Ive had the
honor to meet, most of whom credit pioneering biologist Allan Savory
for their inspiration, know this dance by heart and have become choreographers on their own properties, mimicking nature as closely as
possible. The dancers (wild and domesticated) might be different, but
the goal and the basic dance steps are the same: healthy land and the
ecological processes that sustain it. Like any good performance, the key
is timingin this case how long the grazing lasts in any one spot. Too
much and the land suffers, too little and the grass struggles to reach its
potential. Call it the Goldilocks principle: the animals shouldnt stay
too long or come back too earlyeverything has to be just right.
For some ranchers and farmers, the dance is a quiet pas de deux,
but for others its like having two or three different marching bands

Ranching
constantly rotating on and off the stage, requiring more complicated
choreography. One such dance master is Joel Salatin, a well-known
maverick farmer and evangelist for agroecological practices and profits. On his familys Polyface Farm, located in western Virginia, cattle,
chickens, and pigseven rabbits and turkeysare carefully rotated
across the farms 550 acres in what Salatin calls a livestock ballet.
Its an annual performance that earns rave reviews. In his best-
selling book Omnivores Dilemma, Michael Pollan admiringly describes
Salatins ability to choreograph the symbiosis of several different
animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as they
evolved and thus nearly eliminate the need for machinery, fertilizers,
chemicals, or mechanical waste disposalall of which has important
positive implications for the carbon content of the farm.
The ballet starts in the barn in winter, where Polyfaces cattle are
fed hay harvested during the previous growing season. Unlike other
farms, however, the manure isnt shoveled out. Instead, its covered
with wood chips and straw every few days and salted with corn.
As the compost pile grows, the heat generated keeps the cattle warm
while fermenting the corn. When the cows turn out in the spring,
several dozen pigs are brought into the barn to do their thing: dig up
the compost with their noses. Pigs love fermented corn, and as a result
the compost pile is thoroughly aerated by their rooting. This process
transforms compacted, anaerobic (oxygen-less) dirt into fluffy, aerobic
(oxygen-rich) soil, full of biological life.
These are Salatins famous pigerators at work, employing what he
calls the pigness of the pig to get the job done. When the pigs are
finished, Salatin spreads the carbon-rich compost on Polyfaces pastures, where it feeds the microbes that will feed the grass that feeds the
cows. Next in the ballet, Salatin grazes the cattle as a herd in small
paddocks ringed by electric
fencing, often for only a single
day before moving them to
fresh grass. Employing the
cowness of the cow, Salatin
calls this procedure mobbing,
mowing, and moving.
Herbivores in nature exhibit
three characteristics, he said
in an interview with Acres magazine, mobbing for predator
Innovative farmer Joel Salatin employs his famous
protection, movement daily
pigerators to help turn cow manure into high-
quality compost. Photo courtesy of Polyface Farms
onto fresh forage and away

Livestock Ballet
from yesterdays droppings,
and a diet consisting of forage
onlyno dead animals and no
grain. . . . This natural model
heals the land, thickens the forage, reduces weeds, stimulates
earthworms, reduces pathogens, and increases nutritional
qualities in the meat.
The next performers in the
Polyface ballet are chickens.
Five hundred hens are brought
into a field three days after the
cows leave. They arrive in an
eggmobilea large covered
coop on four wheelsand proceed immediately to express
their chickenness by scratching apart the manure patties
left behind by the cattle. This
sanitizes and recycles the waste
very efficiently. The hens also
consume lots of bugs, including
A typical eggmobile moves the flock daily so the
crickets and grasshoppers, in hens can range on fresh pasture (a farm in New
fields prepped by the cows who Hampshire in this case). Photo by Courtney White
have sheared the grass short for
them. All the while, the chickens are producing lots of healthy eggs. Its
a similar process for Polyfaces broiler chickens, rabbits, and turkeys,
all of which are shuffled around the farm in small portable pens placed
directly on the ground and moved every day to fresh forage.
As Salatin likes to point out, this is how potential liabilities (animal
waste disposal) are turned into profitable assetsorganic, grassfed
food in this case.
In another part of the ballet, the pigs are released into Polyfaces
woods for a month or more, during which they root for food in the soil,
creating a healthy disturbance in the forest floor. Trees are part of the
dance too. When left uncut, they soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide
(CO2), thanks to photosynthesis; when cut, they provide firewood
for the farm and wood chips for the compost. The woods also shelter
songbirds, which eat bugs and provide prey for predators, which then
leave Salatins chickens alone.
Its all part of a holistic vision for the farm.

Ranching
The carbon from the woodlots feeds the fields, Pollan wrote about
Polyface, finding its way into the grass and, from there, into the beef.
Which it turns out is not only grass fed but tree fed as well...a hundred
acres of productive grassland patchworked into four hundred and fifty
acres of unproductive forest. It was all of a biological piece, the trees
and the grasses and the animals, the wild and the domestic, all part of
a single ecological system.
Its a system that is very good at creating topsoil, which in turn can
soak up lots of CO2. During photosynthesis carbon (C) is separated from
oxygen (O2), and a lot of this carbon makes its way underground via
plant roots, where it can safely be stored for long periods of time. The
key is promoting and maintaining the dance of life in the soil, which
requires beautiful music created by an orchestra of animals, humans
included. When everything harmonizes, the effect can be amazing.
This is all extremely symbiotic, said Salatin in the Acres interview,
and creates a totally different relationship than when youre simply
trying to grow the fatter, bigger, cheaper animal.
In other words, just like a dance, farming and ranching done right
are all about diverse, strong, and reciprocal relationships. We need each
othergrass, grazers, eaters, producers, the domestic, the untamed,
the dance steps, and the music.
Relations are what matter most, Pollan summed up, and the
health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild.

TO LEARN MORE
Joel Salatins publications and videos are available on the
Polyface Farm website: www.polyfacefarms.com
Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision
Making by Allan Savory with Jody Butterfield. Island Press,
Washington, DC, 1999.

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