It’s All About the Grass

Today was a monumental day for the farm. 

I made my first bale of hay. In fact, I baled my entire “first cut” for 2025 today and got it put up in the hoop house. 

Now this might not sound very exciting – farmers make hay all the time. In fact, if you live rurally, chances are that, over the last week or two, you’ve passed many full hay wagons or tractors with balers trundling from field to field while the weather is nice. Make hay while the sun shines and all that. So, while everyone was panicking about heat waves and warnings, I was making windrows and rotating them around to dry out something that people don’t really think about: Grass. 

As I pulled my ancient New Holland Super 55 rake around, I started looking at the long fluffy rows of faintly green and golden stems and saw it for what it really was – the real reason for everything I’m doing here. 

If you’ve followed us for any length of time, you’ll have seen Kate or myself talking about soil quality, organic matter, water and carbon retention. You’ll hear about keeping trees in the pasture to add to biodiversity and to give our grazing animals something to do and somewhere to hide from the elements. One thing I’ve struggled to properly articulate to people is what exactly I’m doing here. Of course; environmentalism, carbon sequestration, resilience in the face of a drought – these are all good things and are worth striving for. What it doesn’t explain is how this is actually farming and what separates it from any other farm besides buzzwords. So what exactly is the weirdo near Waupoos up to?

Basically, I’m a grass farmer. If you drew a giant thought map of everything I’m doing here, eventually every line would end up meeting at the same point – the grass. 

“Pasture” is a fancy term we use for the areas of the farm that our grazing animals forage and move from place to place. What makes the pasture a pasture instead of a cornfield or an orchard, is what grows on it – and what grows on it is grass. We talk about our paddock rotation sometimes, and this is what’s known as “rotational grazing”. Rotational grazing serves a few purposes; firstly, the animals don’t spend too long in a single location so they don’t overgraze and damage the grasses. Secondly, it keeps the animals moving so their manure gets spread all over the farm where it can be absorbed into the soil naturally, and prevents a materials handling problem for me. Why do we want the manure spread around nicely? To improve the soil and thereby improve the grass.

We run chicken tractors across the paddocks after everyone else. The broiler chickens scratch at the ground lightly and leave trail of droppings along their path that create an incredible deep rich green grass that lasts for years after they’ve moved along. The rich green grass represents all the nitrogen and other nutrients that have been absorbed into the soil which helps improve the grass. We have a pretty large compost pile which consists of winter bedding, old hay, wood chips, and yes – the occasional deceased animal. It runs red hot and makes the most incredible rich compost that we use in our vegetable and berry gardens. The other place we use it? We broadcast it around the pastures to help improve the soil which will improve the grasses.

The trees we keep around the pastures do serve environmental purposes. However, they also help cool areas of the pastures and their deep roots help pump water around when grasses alone couldn’t. Their shade helps alleviate evaporation from the soil when the grass is cut short or grazed. My son rode the hay wagon into the pasture from the house tonight and exclaimed: “wow, it’s a lot cooler back here!”. Yes buddy, it is. And do you know why? The trees, and the thick rich pasture which helps retain moisture and absorb the sun, stealing the rays of light for themselves and not just baking us. Draw another line directly to the grass.

You can see where I’m going with all this. Better soil absorbs and holds more water. Better soil absorbs and sequesters carbon. So do the trees. Trees help protect and synergize with the pasture to improve the system as a whole. And on the surface, an evolved ape with a floppy green hat moves around homemade chicken tractors and a ragtag flock of sheep with one mission – to improve the grass. Now, the next foundational piece of the puzzle is fitting into place.