Scott Obar

See Hes wrote:Hi Scott,

I followed your food forest project and see that you are 2 years ahead.
My wife and myself are due this winter to get our beloved trees out of the backyard into real soil.

Most trees grew for 2-3 years in pots and reached between 1.5 till 3 meters hence the choice what livestock fits in is very limited.

Due to my job here I have almost every day a few hrs. "research time" and as more I found out, as smaller the choice for livestock became.

For pests and bugs (and snakes) are Guinea Fowls on the plan.

Chicken (Rotational) fill the gap for weeds and "other pests" even they are scratching the soil surface.
I hope to get with with Pinto Peanuts a strong ground cover which takes the chicken scratches.
Beside Chicken love the leaves..

Geese for grazing, but you still have to maintain the grass by moving as geese are picky eaters and won't touch older grasses.
I just posted today a new thread how Geese might get along with pinto peanuts (Arachis pintoi) as forage.
I would be happy if somebody made already experiences with Geese on pinto forage.
There is absolute nothing to find in the web about it..

My solution for 7 acres is more easy as on your size of Land with 24 acres.
Lots of Leuceana trees as pioneers plus Pinto peanuts as ground cover will be the (main) nitrogen fixers.
Mixed with Moringa they will be the group of sacrificial plants for the animals.

My trees will be protected with ring fences around and hopefully continue growing like they did in their pots.

Was a hard job for my wife and our maid to maintain the roots and re pot as necessary as they grew, so I not want to lose them with the wrong livestock.

A friend in Thailand lost his entire forest in just a few days using goats.
The first days they were browsing on everything in abundance but as the delicatessen were gone they chew down almost all of his fruit trees in a full moon weekend..

I like Guineas because they're the least damaging of vegetation out of all our birds. Still haven't seen them hunt any snakes.

I have lots of experience with pintoi peanut (perennial peanut). We planted it by seed (not very common to find seed) with every tree we planted, so we have thousands of patches all over the place. I will keep an eye out to see if the geese are interested in it. I don't notice hardly anyone eating the leaves, but yesterday I watched a chicken eat off all the little yellow flowers from one large patch.

Depending on how wet your climate is, you might reconsider guineas. They really struggle here with our rainy season. I think they are native to more of a drier savanna climate in Africa.

Also, send some soil samples to labs before deciding to plant Leucaena. We had taken soil samples, but even still, I did not consider the pH tolerance of Leucaena before planting a bunch of seeds. That was pretty much a 99% failure on our property since they do not like low soil pH.

Andrew Mayflower wrote:Those sheep might work well.  You can't trust them to leave saplings alone, so some means of protecting them will be necessary until the trees grow tall enough to not be vulnerable to the browsing.  

Sheep (generally) like to go under fencing, goats like to go over fencing.  With adequate fencing height (4' is usually plenty, some breeds might be OK with 3'), and any places they might try to go under blocked off sheep aren't terribly hard to contain.  They do need to be trained to electric fencing though.  Don't trust them to respect it automatically.  Set them up in a hard fenced area with the electric fencing inside the hard fence.  They'll learn quickly.

Are turkeys eaten in your area?  They can mow surprisingly effectively, and don't scratch to anything like the extent chickens do.  Electric netting will contain them, if you clip wings.  Heritage turkeys can easily fly 30' up into trees unless clipped.  Broad breasted will only fly until they get past a certain size, but at that juvenile stage they can still get over fencing unless clipped.  

Yeah turkeys are eaten here. Pretty much only for Christmas though. It's one bird I've considered adding. How would they get along with geese and others? I've heard turkeys are very good at catching grass hoppers. Do they have a homing instinct? We have all our birds (Chickens, guineas, muscovies and geese) trained to come back to the tractors at night for dinner and to go to bed. I don't care about flying. Some of our female muscovies do laps around our hills. I'd rather they be able to fly because we have opposums here, and rarely some other wild animals.

Thanks for the tip about sheep tending to go under fencing.

To train sheep to the electric fencing using a hard fence along the outside of the electric fencing, how long would you have to leave them in that training corral? Reason I ask is because I'd be worried about the parasites accumulating in a small corral in a short period of time.

I'm thinking about putting hair sheep in a densely planted silvopasture setting. I want to do rotational grazing to help eliminate parasite problems. I don't want to be setting up, taking down and moving electric polywire or electronets everyday or even every few days. Ideally I'd like to plan out 10 or so equally-sized paddocks on a couple hectares of our landscape and setup all the paddocks at once with polywire or polytape and run everything with one charger. I know there are those little plastic handles with hooks that you can use as gates, so I just want to open the gates and herd the sheep into the next paddock.

This would save a lot of time, because we wouldn't have to reel in polywire, move fence posts, and set up a new paddock everytime we want to rotate the sheep.

Lastly, Do you need to go with the big name chargers and materials? In Peru we have Picana (brand from Argentina), a local Peruvian company that I had never heard of, and one official distributor of Gallagher (famous brand from New Zealand). I've heard Gallagher is the "best" but it's also the most expensive. In my other thread someone stated that lightning kills their chargers about once every 2-3 years, so not sure it's worth spending more money on this sort of technology.

Gray Henon wrote:Lightning kills my charger every 2-3 years on average.  Absent frequent thunderstorms,  they should last a long time. At this point, money wise, I’d probably be ahead with a standard 4” square woven wire, and just use a smaller charger to charge a knee high wire to keep animals off of it and possibly a too wire for jumpers.

Every 2-3 years?! Is there something about these installations that attracts lightning? Are they striking directly or is the damage from side flashes. I've heard this is possible, but never heard from someone who this happened to. I'd be really scared to live in your house if you get that much lightning where you live.

I've been seeing a lot of hype about the St. Croix breed. Their parasite resistance is touted as is their hoof health. I don't think the breed is available in Peru. We do have the Pelibuey and Barbados Black Belly. I don't see why these two breeds would be any less resistant than the St. Croix, since they were all descended from West African sheep (Pelibuey is believed to be descended from the West African Dwarf breed) and bred for centuries in essentially the same climate in the Caribbean. Have their been any studies comparing these caribbean breeds?

Just thought I'd add, we have Muscovies, and know exactly what you're talking about. They are a lot more stubborn than the chickens about going in their tractors at night. All our birds are free range during the day, but we keep them in mobile tractors at night for protection. I hate putting them away at night. It can be very aggravating. We let nesting birds stay out (as long as their nests are in a reasonable spot). We won't tolerate nesting near a creek (wild animal highway). The females that build nests in random places across the landscape are definitely at risk of predation. Our main predator is the Opposum. They call the animal intuto and rabo pela here. Luckily we've found that covering the nesting bird at night with a simple plastic milk crate is sufficient to keep them safe. At least we've never had any incidents. We have lost plenty of muscovies that we never covered.

The birds are on a different hill than where our house is, so the dogs seldom patrol the area, especially if we haven't done any weed maintenance on the property for months. Our dogs have very strong instincts, and they will kill an opposum on sight. They are good at hunting rodents too, and can often sniff out the nests of field mice. We gave a lot of affection to our dogs as puppies so they are best friends and follow us everywhere.  This means they hang out by the house and not near our birds. Ideally you'd house the older puppies near the ducks and never give them affection. Oh yeah, we don't have any of those trendy "livestock guardian" dogs either. We just got the local mutt puppies from the village. You don't need any of those fancy breeds, just make sure you correct the puppies sternly everytime you see them getting a little too rough with the birds. Our dogs somehow seem to know that the birds are of value to us. We used to give them the occasional dead bird, but realized that's a bad idea. Now they will never eat any dead animals. Also train them to respect the eggs. We feed old eggs, but never let the dogs see the shells.

We've lost plenty of birds in the year since we started doing this out here. If you can encourage the ducks to stay near each other every night, you can probably solve all the predator problems with one properly raised dog. Try the milk crate idea for the nesting birds too.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:I'm not sure about that. Electric fencers are simple and robust. I was given a cattle fencer (line powered, 120VAC) that is easily 40 years old and it's still operational. When the old ones finally die, there's nothing inside that can realistically be repaired.

However, in remote locations, the fencer would be powered by a solar panel and battery. The battery has a lifespan, so it's the usual failure point. It's a simple replacement job, though, if you can get a replacement battery. Anyone with simple tools could do it.

Edit: Remote areas can be a surprising mix of high tech and low tech. A flip cell phone and a donkey cart are not incongruent in the third world.

Cell phones is comparing apples to oranges. Cell phones are everywhere. We are talking about an obscure technology (in this context), that is unlikely to have much widespread use amongst the local population. Where I live, everyone is using wooden fence posts and barbed wire to divide their properties into paddocks for cows. I personally would prefer dealing with this instead of electric fencing, but you have to be pretty sure about your fence locations before going that route. Once you hit a certain scale, I understand there are supposedly cost savings with the temporary electric fencing. Not sure how many hectares one needs before the cost savings is realized. 12v gel batteries are cheap enough. Small solar panels are now considered old technology and nowadays should be built to last 20+ years. Do you think it would be worthwhile to examine the build quality of the charger unit and reinforce the housing with silicone caulking if necessary? We do live in the rainforest here.

I dabbled with some electric fencing components down here, and the issue I see is that you're dependent on centralized port cities to deal with distributors of these products. The distributors have to pay customs and import taxes and pass along those costs to the consumer + charge a premium. Also, their catalogues were very incomplete. For example, we were supposed to roll up our polywire with a stick, because the distributor doesn't sell any reels. The posts they used were just little sections of rebar that they modified at the local welder to be able to step into the ground. The isolators were these little "cola de chancho" products that seemed to be a flexible metal coated with some non-conductive resin. They were kind of problematic because often one of the isolators would twist just enough so that the polywire was touching the rebar fence post, which obviously rendered the entire setup useless. I'm not sure if I should just get a new battery and re-use the materials we already have. The charger does seem a little weak. Especially because we are thinking about running hair sheep. Definitely won't be doing the operation without a reel though.

Do you mind sharing the brand of your charger that served you for 40 years? Does the company still exist?

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Scott,
Based on your restrictions, I think what Ann quoted in her post would be your best bet. Some low growing plant that spreads like crazy. Otherwise scaling up what you are doing. Any grass eating livestock that I can think of (cows, sheep, goats, pigs, etc) would also eat the young trees to some extent. I think geese are probably safe (chickens could be scratching too much), but if its not enough you have to scale up or go anther route.

Another option would be to reduce the density of the plantings so that you can use different equipment or animals in a different way. Most commercial orchards leave room for tractors. Even the permaculture ones tend to be spread out enough for crops, equipment, animals, and whatnot in between. Any more densely planted permaculture orchards that I have seen are quite overgrown. Not necessarily bad, just different than what you are describing that you want.

Our property is too steep and inaccessible for a tractor. It wasn't our first choice property, but we made do with what was available. The plantings will thin themselves over time when we start to sacrifice some of the pioneer trees. Currently leaning towards running Pelibuey sheep with electric fencing, and setting up temporary tree protectors for the smaller trees for the paddock the animals are in. Sheep will require less expensive plant protectors than cows. The videos I've seen with Greg Judy, it looks like the sheep seldom eat the woody branches and twigs on any of the weeds he shows. They seem to prefer to strip the leaves and not debark anything. We should be OK if that's the case. I think it's important to stay on top of their nutrition with minerals, but those free choice minerals might not be available in Peru. Also, I'm sure it has a lot to do with rotational frequency. If we get lazy, they'll probably start targeting trees. Not sure how acrobatic they can be compared to goats.

Most would suggest that technology is not good for remote third world locations, because technology inevitably breaks, and then finding someone to service some unusual gadget is difficult.