As the debate rages on whether we
should be eating meat or not, I publish my latest article within the animals chapter to present another key facet to holistic animal management; Cut and Carry. Its a traditional technique that has been adapted by Permaculturists to ensure healthier animals and pastures. Read about it here and the nuances of it all. meanwhile enjoy the wonderful new header
art from my dear friend and fellow
permie, Joana Amorim.
https://treeyopermacultureedu.com/animal-systems/cut-and-carry/
Excerpt:
Written by Doug Crouch
Within
Permaculture, domesticated livestock and humans can combine to form an interdependent symbiosis in which there is thriving conditions for the animals and ecosystem regeneration occurring simultaneously. Contrarily, the more humans remove themselves from holistic animal management, the more pollution is created, resources squandered, and degradation occurs. Animal management entails we meet their basic needs by giving them
shelter,
water, food of varying forms, care, protection from extremes and predators, and limits. These limits come in the form of the
fence lines that we erect permanently or temporarily with electric fencing. Also the shepherd has a range with his own flock, not bound as much by
fence yet other varying constraints. Moreover,
feed is found within these limits or it is brought to the animals for a variety of reasons. The main idea behind cut and carry is you cut forage for the animal beyond their boundaries and carry it to them when needed. In essence this is how
hay and straw works, even grain inputs, but what we refer to as cut and carry is more leaf fodder than anything else. At the bottom of the article a few variations are explained further as well.
Why Cut and Carry
Constraints of all sorts exist when one is performing holistic animal husbandry. It takes work; hard work, punctual work, and pulsative work. It also takes keen observation and decision making that is timely, which is reflective of the principles using animals as a biological resource and
energy cycling. Consequently, we perform this cut and carry task when forage inside a limit gets too low and you are unable to move the animals to a new area or want them to finish the last bits off while keeping them highly nourished. Pasture observation is key along with the animals behavior changes, which allows you to make critical decisions. Beyond forage becoming low, other factors might influence your decision making for cut and carry such as when pastures are too wet and you prefer the animal to stay in their house sites or a sacrifice area (an area that gets really beat up). Also sometimes to give the animals variety or a highly nutritious input we do cut and carry. Furthermore, some animals like
rabbits rely mostly on this system for their caloric input beyond grains and kitchen wastes.
When raising goats at Treasure Lake, Kentucky, USA in 2018, I found myself cutting and carrying for all the reasons above. I also would select certain vegetation that I was wanting to cut down anyway for numerous reasons so being able to carry it to my goats was great. I didn’t want to simply chop and drop where the vegetation was growing and I could not set up a limit where that vegetation was growing.
Tree and Shrub Cut and Carry
If animals are pinned in an area and extra forage is needed, simply find palatable vegetation and harvest this fodder for the animals. From the above example of the goats, I was using the
black locust, osage orange, box elder, staghorn sumac, and elm mainly from the
native realm. The non native bush honeysuckle, which proliferates in our disturbed soils there in Northern Kentucky, was also another I spent a lot of time cutting and carrying. Some of the actual plants were not even out of the electric fenced in area but rather the vegetation was too high for the goats to reach. So I would pollard the tree (cut at chest to head height) and let that drop and the goats would quickly devour the foliage. However, some was from outside the boundaries and did represent quite hard work with the weight of the vegetation and the distance I sometimes would walk. However I didn’t have to move the electric fence as often and again was able to remove unwanted vegetation from certain areas, like the dam wall, which is destructive for the dam whilst having a purpose of feeding the goats. In the end it did make a mess of branches that overtime I intend to cut up for
firewood, mulch, etc. So remember if you cut and carry cuttings from
trees and shrubs there will be woody material leftover that you will need to process one day.
Similarily in New Zealand at a farm I worked on in 2007-08, we would chop and drop tagasaste tree branches to our sheep. Tagasaste, also called tree lucerne, was a great supplement for the sheep in this mediterranean climate. This tree fodder crop from the legume family allowed the sheep to have highly nutritious forage in the two low points of forage in that climate. One period is when the soils are cold and wet in the winter and the other when the soils have dried and grow no grass in the summer. This allowed for higher stocking rates, faster growing sheep, and healthier pastures and sheep. The tagasaste were planted in Savannah style along with other tree crops.
Cutting of branches of nitrogen fixers is a common way in which this strategy is manifested and contains an infinite amount of variations. For example, there is also a common practice in the Dominican Republic to cut the fence lines of the gliricidia (madre
de cacao) and feed that to the animals. The fence lines were these trees driven in the ground as thick woody cuttings. They would then sprout and when more sunlight was desired for their “winter” tropical period, the leaf fodder was chopped and dropped for the animals to eat only.
Thus we can procure these resources woody resources from wild or edge zones, plant them in that way or Savannah style, or create coppice woodlots. All of those work and as always, many elements support the important function.
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