Sheep and goats in forest pastures
Sheep
and goats are a bit more difficult to grow in a forest pasture
situation since they like to eat twigs and thin-barked trees.
There is also less data available for good ways to combine these
livestock with trees, but I've got a couple of thoughts.
First, I suspect that
sheep and goats would work very well in the power
line cut if I planted it with trees that don't mind being coppiced
(willows, alders, hazels, and elders.) By rotating the sheep and
goats through small pastures, we could give the shrubs time to grow
back rather than being decimated by gnawing teeth.
We might also get away
with grazing sheep along with pigs amid large,
widely spaced trees. Unlike goats, sheep can live entirely on
pasture and they might eat up the woodier plants on the forest floor
that pigs would ignore.
| This post is part of our Forest Pasturing lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.