by Gene Logsdon
A meadow is more than just the plants and their variously splen- doted blooms. The greater the variety of plants, the greater the variety of insects that can be seen humming above them. And the more diverse the insects, the more kinds of birds will come to catch them. One of my pasture delights is watching the barn swallows swoop low over me when I mow-the chugging tractor and clattering mower chase bugs into the air, and the swallows know. As soon as I enter the pasture with the tractor, they wing into view from nearby barns.
In my boyhood, I spent hours in a meadow a mile from the one I am now describing, watching the tumble bugs (dung beetles or scarabs) form marble-sized balls of manure from pasture droppings. Mother beetle would deposit an egg in each ball. Mother and father beetle would then roll the ball a few yards down a sheep path and bury it in the adjacent sod. Dung beetles can get rid of prodigious amounts of cattle manure, researchers say, and in doing so they help control pesky face flies, which also lay eggs in the manure. In Texas, the beetles have been introduced to cattle ranges where they effectively bury droppings that would otherwise smother out significant amounts of grass temporarily. Strangely the beetles have disappeared here and no one can tell me why for sure.
Other meadow insects I've watched since boyhood are still here, their food chain connections to both plants and birds intact. Grasshoppers and crickets still provide one of the main sources of food for birds such as meadowlarks, song sparrows, bobolinks, bluebirds, pheasants, and quails. Bumblebees and honey bees love the clovers with their abundant stores of nectar. The elegant kingbird tries to catch the bees but usually gets only the slow-moving drones. On milkweeds dine red milkweed beetles and monarch butterflies. On dogbane, which is somewhat poisonous, the breathtakingly iridescent copper, blue, and green dogbane beetle chews away. The birds learn not to eat monarch butterflies or any bug that eats milkweed, since these insects taste of the bitterness of the milkweed juice. Or so naturalists reason.
In the meadow you will also see occasionally a viceroy butterfly darting about, and the viceroy keeps a secret that science cannot yet unravel. The viceroy's larval form is so ugly it suggests a bird dropping, and its chrysalis is not much more attractive, while the monarch larva is a crisp black-ringed green in color and its chrysalis glistens like a jade jewel. The viceroy larva feeds mainly on willow, aspen, or poplar tree leaves; the monarch larva feasts exclusively on milkweeds. The monarch migrates; the viceroy does not. Yet the two insects look almost exactly the same when they metamorphose into butterflies. The common explanation is that the viceroy evolved this way-by mimicry protected from birds, who mistake it for the bitter-tasting monarch. But so many conditions would have had to be present concurrently through the parallel evolutions of the two insects that this explanation hardly does more than beg the question. The truth is that no one knows why the viceroy and monarch are look-alikes. It's meadow magic, I say.
Queen Anne's lace or wild carrot draws the gorgeous Eastern black swallowtail butterfly. Eastern tiger swallowtails and spicebush swallowtails wander into the pasture sometimes, alighting on thistle and clover blooms. More often you see the painted lady butterfly on the purple blossoms of bull thistles and Canada thistles. The smaller sulfur and copper butterflies can be depended upon to reward the sharp eye if nothing else is in attendance.
The birds mentioned earlier and many others are on the lookout for not only the winged insects but also their larvae. The birds, especially quail, walk through the grass looking under weed leaves where worms like the potato beetle worms that chew on horse nettle, a relative of the potato, think they are well-hidden. Flickers patrol the meadow floor for ants.
High above wheel the hawks and buzzards. The buzzards hope that I will shoot the groundhog that has emerged from its hole on the brow of the hill. Buzzards find dead groundhog to be a tasty morsel, especially the rodent's eyes which the witchy vultures invariably pluck out first. Buzzard hors d'oeuvres. Or perhaps they circle above me because they think I am dying. They are not accustomed to humans who sit still in meadows. They wait for my breathing to stop, relishing my eyes too.
The hawks scream, protesting my presence. They want to come wheeling low and swiftly over the field after mice or slow-moving mourning doves, but not while I am watching. Their vision is so keen that even from far in the sky, I'm certain that they can see my eyes blink.
The addition of livestock to the meadow (replacing the wood bison and elk of earlier times although the deer have come back) also draws more wildlings. Cowbirds perch on top of cows and sheep, hankering after flies and ticks. Ground wasps whiz over the cows, grab flies, and take them to their underground nests along the pasture fence for larval food. Close to water, damsel flies and dragonflies hover above the grass, hunting mosquitoes that are lured by the cows and the promise of blood.
The most comical sight in the meadow is mother skunk, followed in single file by her three children, all of them grunting and complaining about problems known only to skunks. Body odor, perhaps. They tip over cowpies for the earthworms underneath. At night they dig up the ground wasp nests and eat the larvae. Woodcocks also tip over cowpies and plunge their stout beaks into the soil for nightcrawlers sure to have slithered down their holes the moment the cowpie moved.
Know that I am but playing half way through the overture to this wondrous piece of meadow music. I won't last long enough to play the whole score. But I continue to play at it, in reverie or at work, perhaps hoeing in the corn patch nearby if not nestled in the grass, my ears as well as eyes taking in the harmonies.
The ecology of this small, eight-acre pasture is a puzzle that can never be completely assembled. Every time I fit a piece into its proper place, new holes open up. As a puzzle, the meadow's interrelated forms of life remind me of the fractal clusters that Chaos scientists conjure up on their computers, seemingly random patterns that merge and emerge into beautiful, orderly designs on the computer screen. All my life I fill in random pieces while I wander dazedly through fractal patterns that are real, not computer-drawn. The missing connections multiply faster than the found ones. I do not care. It is here, in these empty spaces that magic reigns.
Managing a Meadow
Reverie will not put food in the baby's mouth. 1 observe the natural life of the meadow not only for pleasure, but to learn what I can about how to combine this wildness with domestic animals, to the advantage of both. Obviously, this kind of management is more passive than active. Essentially, I divide the pasturage into parts (paddocks) and then I and our grazing animals take turns mowing the sections. The "what" to do is simple; the "why" and "when"-the knowledge behind the "what"-en- tails great ecological and botanical complexity, never wholly grasped. If you want to get commercially intensive with controlled rotational grazing, a good source of information is The Stockman Grass Farmer, already mentioned in chapter 4. For the cottage farm, I believe in a more laidback approach.
The reason I advocate moving forward slowly is not only because I do not believe that short-term profit should be the cottage farm's first goal, but because without a history of experience in this new kind of farming, we do not know its potential. That is why grassland farming is so fascinating and challenging. This approach changes farming from a machinery-based activity to a knowledge-based activity in which the graziers' sensitivity to the natural world is at least as important as the scientific facts that guide them. If agriculture is an art, and it is, then grassland farming is the most artful kind of agriculture.
The artful complexity is twofold. On the first level of management, you consider the mixture of grasses, weeds, and legumes in your pasture from the practical perspective of farm production. When are the plants ready to be grazed? How long can they be grazed without harming their vigor for regrowth? How many pounds of meat or pails of milk or dozens of eggs will an acre of grasslands produce? Which are warm season plants, those that grow well in hot, dry summer, and which are cool season plants, those that grow profusely in wetter, cooler spring and fall? Which grasses can
he "stockpiled" in summer (that is, left ungrazed) for winter pasturage? Which grasses and legumes grow best in a particular climate or soil? Which can be counted on for a hay crop in addition to grazing? (The answer to all these questions is, "It depends," but I shall try to be more helpful as I go along.)
On a second level of consciousness, if you will, you must consider the relationship between grazing as an agricultural practice and grazing as a way to maintain ecological wholeness. In this regard, the first important "law" to keep in mind is that where rainfall is plentiful enough to support forests, grazing makes the meadow. Seedling trees quickly populate a meadow in woodland regions, and will in the space of about forty years turn the meadow into a forest unless the seedlings are killed by fairly heavy grazing and routine seasonal mowing. Sometimes, as in the case of white thorn (wild hawthorne), hand-weeding is necessary. White thorn is the characteristic seedling that, in this northern Ohio region anyway, comes first in the normal succession from grass to briars to forest, and not even grazing and mowing will stop it. I cut them down as grown trees, and cut out seedlings with the spade when they are tiny. White thorn makes a pretty tree actually, and in improved, horticultural varieties is a favorite ornamental. Seeing one on the lawn of a courthouse in a large city, Dave, my neighbor, stopped dead in his tracks and muttered: "Where's my axe?"
A second "law" of controlled rotational grazing is that, without rotations, even a few animals on an uncrowded pasture might eventually depress those plants they like best because they wander over the whole pasture in search of their favorites, like a child choosing strawberries over broccoli. By dividing the pasture into small sections or paddocks, the animals have to eat their "broccoli" as well as their "strawberries" before being moved to the next paddock dining table. And by the time they graze through a succession of paddocks and get back to the first one, the tastier plants as well as the less tasty will have had a chance to grow back again. In other words, by rotating the paddocks frequently, plant diversity is maintained. Diversity means not only more species of life in the pasture, but a more balanced diet for the grazing animals. Exactly when to move the animals so as to maintain diversity while encouraging the most efficient regrowth is a very fine art that resists precise instruction. I tend to move the animals sooner rather than later and then finish the "grazing" of the rougher, less tasty plants with the mower. I try to favor my blue-eyed grass by reserving the paddock where it appears for mid-summer pasturage, after the wildflower has gone to seed.
Among the other management questions to be addressed, these are the most important: Can I reseed the pasture without tearing it up and exposing it to erosion? Yes. Graze the sod to be renovated rather severely in the fall so that the ground is almost bare. Then during early spring when the ground is freezing at night and thawing during the day, broadcast seed at a third more than the normal rate over the slightly frozen crust. The freezing and thawing will work the seeds into the soil enough for germination when warm weather comes. You can also run a disk lightly over the thin sod later in spring when the ground is drier, to make grooves into which your broadcasted seed will fall and be covered when it rains. Sometimes burning dead grass in spring and then broadcasting seed on the bared, blackened surface results in a successful stand. But the best way to renovate a pasture is not to reseed it at all. Instead, manure it heavily, lime it, and then keep mowing whatever grows. In a couple of years, the native grasses and legumes that are already there, though depressed by over-grazing or lack of fertility, will volunteer-especially bluegrass and white clover.
Which weeds are harmful and must be extirpated from the pasture? I've mentioned white thorn. Burdock is another. Animals won't graze it hard enough to control it and the burrs ruin wool and mohair. Every area has a number of plants the livestock won't eat, like ironweed and hull thistle, and these should be mowed or hoed before they go to seed. White snakeroot is totally poisonous, and milk from a cow that has eaten white snakeroot can be poisonous. Fortunately this weed is found in woods and wooded fencerows, and then only rarely, and has not been a problem since pioneer days when animals grazed frequently in woodland.
Which plants do the animals like the most and therefore eat first? The clovers. White clover most of all. Young bluegrass is another favorite. That is why I try to maintain white clover and bluegrass as my main pasture plants (see below).
Also on this level of management, you need to know ecological de tails like where the meadowlarks and bobolinks are nesting, and plan to graze that portion during the nesting season in late spring instead of making hay off of it. The mower might destroy the nestlings and perhaps even the mother birds.
You will also want to resist the urge to cut every bull thistle that thrusts its spiky head above the grass. Yes, they can reduce the grazing value of the pasture if allowed to spread. But a couple will draw ground sparrows or song sparrows to nest under their prickly, protective arms. When you find a nest under a thistle, don't cut the thistle down; just clip off the seedheads. Like all annuals, bull thistles die in their second year anyway, after blooming.
On the other hand, spare no musk thistle, a very difficult weed to control, and one which fortunately has not yet made its way from the South to our farm.
Sourdock is another pesky weed in pastures. The animals will eat at it, but as it gets older, the plant becomes unpalatable. Sourdock sports a large seedhead, very pretty in dried flower arrangements, and will take over a pasture if not held in check. I pull them out by the roots, or if they won't pull, cut the taproot as for burdock, two inches below the ground level. A spade or shovel makes an easier tool for this job than a hoe. Likewise, mullein needs to be excised from the field in this way. Wild carrot is another bad pasture weed, but sheep eat it and keep it at tolerable levels.
Canadian thistle is our worst pasture weed because it spreads by both airborne seed and roots. It does not have a single taproot like bull thistles, sourdock, burdock, and mullein, which once cut below the soil, will not grow back again. But a strong sod, several mowings a year, and sheep nibblings keep Canadian thistle at bay. In recent years a disease that turns the tops of the thistles white, and a gray insect, the name of which I don't know either, have also reduced the vigor of these thistles.
Kentucky fescue can be a problem in pasture management. Although it makes a fair winter pasture, it grows so rampantly in summer that it tends to kill out other grasses. On a diet of only fescue, livestock may suffer from a disease called fescue foot. Some research indicates that pregnant mares on heavy fescue pasture may abort or not breed at all. After years of listening to the agricultural universities advise fescue, many farmers are killing it with herbicides or plowing it up and reseeding better grasses. Don't plant the stuff, but if you have already done so, don't panic. I keep a small section for winter pasture, and after ten years, I am noticing that it thins out if not fertilized, and white clover and bluegrass make inroads into the stand. Nature abhors not only vacuums but monocultures.
A consciousness of the relationships between pasture plants and animals comes into play another way. Sheep, cows, donkeys, and horses do not all graze the same way or prefer the same plants. We learned that our horse, in early spring, would eat the new growth of heavy, coarse swamp grass that was invading the pasture next to the creek. The other animals shunned swamp grass at all times. Donkeys, I am told, will eat musk thistles. Goats will eat almost anything, but not tin cans, and are perhaps the only animal that can control white thorn at least when the pest is only a seedling.
Sheep and cows together will make more efficient use of the pasture than either species alone, contrary to what western movie cowboys used to say. An old tradition in stock farming holds that a pasture that can carry a cow per acre will also carry a sheep and her lamb(s) because the sheep will eat herbiage the cow won't, and vice versa. I believe that the small cottage farmer like myself would do fine combining cows and sheep, which is a more practical form of intensifying grazing than trying to increase the number of one or th
e other species. Since my emphasis is on sheep, I stock a full complement of sheep which in this area is considered to be about five sheep per acre, and then I add one cow for every four acres. If time proves my little pastures will carry a bit more livestock per acre, I will back off on the sheep to four per acre and add another beef animal. Or maybe a donkey.
The donkey would serve mainly to guard the sheep from coyotes and dogs, which brings up another uncanny pasture relationship: the one between wild animals and tame. When the riding horse we used to have gave birth to a colt, mother mare decided that stray dogs were not entitled to democratic rights in our pasture and she viciously chased them away. She must have kept the coyotes away, too, because we had no problems as long as she reigned over the meadow. Evidently she taught her snide regard for the dog kingdom to Betsy, our cow, because after Betsy started having calves, she would also run dogs out of the pasture, and I presume coyotes. After a while, the sheep, who are as smart as any of us when necessary, would, at the first hint of a strange canine in the field, gather around the mare or the cow, even standing right under them for protection.