yes thank you for this consideration. i have about 1 acre of pure pasture to work with, another 1.5 acres of mixed use pasture that will ultimately have fruit trees and a small garden and a couple tiny homes but i plan on having mobile fencing to help maintain the area. then i have access to about 40-50 acres of mixed forest land, some of it with a LOT of brushy understory. also in the PNW things regenerate very quickly. i think that there is probably a specific number of sheep that i could have here without there being any problem with regeneration. i don't know what that number is but by starting small and paying attention i'm sure i could learn. i'm going to start with just 2-3 sheep:)
with that said i do wonder if the sheep would have trouble getting their optimal nutrition from mostly brushy forest understory.
Benedict Bosco wrote:I raise Icelandics, and they do browse, but they prefer whatever is greenest and most palatable, which is usually grass and leaves, and won’t eat much for stems (they just strip the leaves, and eventually the bark). My concern with trying to focus on browse for a long term feedstock would be regeneration. How quickly do the plants/trees/shrubs recover after a grazing event? Grass by nature recovers fast and is therefore an ideal feed; I suspect you would need a very extensive area to browse for it to be sustainable.
