Animals have a specific set of needs - how do you integrate them with you vegetables?
Some of you may wonder about how to integrate livestock and vegetable production. Many people farming focus primarily on vegetables or on livestock and “never the twain shall meet” if they happen to keep both. It can seem paradoxical to consider putting these two things together, but if you shift your livestock focus to primarily grass-based animals (like cows), your recurring feed bill is minimal. But what do animals bring to the soil that plants don’t bring? Animals complete an ecosystem. Even in a “vegan” setting, soils are benefited from the ongoing metabolism of earthworms and microbes, not to mention wild birds and deer. What is produced as manure is not just old plant material, it is old plant material animalized and transmuted. The value of a handful of grass is negligible, but the value of a handful of manure is incalculable.
It took us a while to figure out how to integrate our livestock with our garden. In the first place, animals walking on the ground leads to compaction, so there’s the added requirement of specialized modes of conservation tillage to glean the benefits from animals without suffering the negative effects of their grazing. Though counterintuitive, if we were to start over farming, we would begin with cattle and only keep as many hogs and chickens as the farm could feed itself (without buying feed). The goal is a self-sufficient farm “organism” which is relatively autonomous, but, most importantly economically self-sustaining. After twelve years of trial-and-error farming, we can speak from experience about what works for us and what doesn’t. Therefore, any recurring expense that can be eliminated should be reduced to a minimum. Money saved is money earned. By learning to live off this year’s sunlight, we come closer to the ideal of the farm organism, which is something our entire planet needs now.