I have been growing and using bamboo on my farm since 1998 and have integrated it into my farm operations. In the winter, after the livestock have eaten down the stockpiled hay in the pastures, I thin out the older canes and feed their leaves to the livestock. The resultant defoliated canes are used for making fences, trellises, and find a multitude of other uses on the farm wherever a custom length pole is needed. In the spring, the groves provide bamboo shoots for myself and the livestock, with the livestock controlling the spread on the running bamboos by eating all of the shoots coming up outside of the fenced bamboo groves. The livestock is only excluded from the groves during the one month long shooting season. They have access to the grove’s shade for the rest of the year. During the summer, the livestock appreciates the cool shade in the bamboo grove’s interior. Bamboo is very effective at transpiration, so the entire grove acts like a giant swamp cooler providing temperatures inside the grove up to 7 degrees F below ambient shade temperature. Given the choice between bamboo shade and tree shade, the livestock will almost always choose the bamboo shade. The lightweight bamboo canes also have the advantage of not posing the injury threat of falling branches and trees that you get in the tree forest during a windstorm.
Birds also find the bamboo grove to be an attractive habitat since the thick evergreen foliage reduces their heat loss on cold nights, the slick canes are difficult for predators to climb, and the jiggling of the lightweight branches gives them plenty of warning of the predators’s approach. I have many hundreds of birds, mostly grackles, blackbirds, and starlings, show up every evening to roost for the night in my bamboo groves and then leave in the morning, leaving the groves to the cardinals, sparrows, and other birds that frequent the groves during the day. The birds leave behind a quantity of guano that fertilizes the grove and the surrounding pasture, so that once the grove reaches a large enough size to attract enough birds, then the grove becomes self-fertilizing. Chickens are also highly attracted to bamboo, not surprising since their red jungle fowl ancestors are native to SE Asia where the local name for the jungle fowl is “bamboo fowl”.
Running bamboos are the best plant for stopping and reversing erosion since their reticulated rhizome network is very effective at holding the soil in place and the thick tangle of canes acts as a sieve to collect debris from the floodwaters so it builds soil after every flood, plus the large amount of biomass that it generates both above and below ground builds up the topsoil.
