Care Of Land

My favorite thing about working with my sheep is their incredible ability to positively impact the land around them.   They love eating invasive species like wild parsnip, honeysuckle, garlic mustard and buckthorn. Plus, both what they eat and what they trample into the soil helps cycle nutrients and build soil health.  It is up to me to make good decisions about where they eat and when but as long as I do my job well, they are incredible forces for building habitat riches!

Along with daily decisions about how to move the sheep across the land, the flock and I also get to tackle bigger projects.

Testing Amendments for Pasture Improvement

Between 2025 and 2027, I am exploring three different options for improving pasture production thanks to a Sustainable Agriculture Demonstration Grant from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.  A heavy seeding of clover is being compared to a comercial fertilizer and a certified organic compost application. Plant growth, soil chemistry, and plant nutrition will be compared over two growing seasons. Big sections of my pasture are severly degraded from years of overgrazing followed by years of being dormant so I'm very excited to get to test three methods for improvement in a systematic way.

Improving Water Quality with a Low Cost Intervention

In 2024, I wrote a proposal for an innovative Vegetated Waterway project.  The goal was to thin the downed trees and brush within eight feet of an erosion gully that has been forming to carry water from the neighbor's field to the trout stream.  With all that extra shade gone, the sheep and I are working to restore grasses with deep root systems that will hold the soil and filter nutrients from the runoff.  A Good Idea Grant made the project possible with support from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and Walton Family Foundation.