A Few Sheep To Mow Her Lawn
by Mary Chang

Jennifer Phillips saw a stack of Organic Gardening magazines at a friend's house one day. What caught her eye were the sheep on the cover grazing contentedly in a wide pasture, and above them, the title of the feature article: "Have Sheep Mow your Lawn." Recently, Jen had bought a weekend home—a small farmhouse in the town of Stuyvesant, just north of Hudson. Although her two acres didn't seem like much, the land (one and a half acres of which was grass) still needed to be managed; she liked the idea of having adorable sheep do the mowing, and doing without chemicals and machines.

Jen has straight brown hair, which she often wears down and long, or sometimes parted in two graceful pigtails. Her piercing blue eyes are serious when she talks about her farm, but she always has a ready smile. She credits involvement in a community garden in midtown Manhattan, where she had a plot for almost 20 years, with helping her realize her wish to be outside working in the soil. In New York City she worked as a research scientist in the area of agronomy and climate change. Not surprisingly, she found the drive back and forth each week from her farm increasingly difficult.

After a year, she decided to move upstate permanently. She took a teaching position at Bard College's Center for Environmental Policy. She bought four sheep, which arrived the day after she moved up. The next summer she bought four chickens at auction, in part because there already was a chicken coop on her land. Some neighbors expressed interest in buying fresh eggs. The number of chickens soon grew to 25. "Now, it felt like a farm," she said.

Ken Kleinpeter, currently Director of Farm and Facilities at Glynwood Center, the community stewardship center in Cold Spring, provided her with her first sheep and suggested "rotational grazing" as a way to sustain her lawn. Open land has to be maintained; even practices such as haying can remove nutrients from the soil. Rotational grazing, also called "management intensive grazing," is about following nomadic principles. Livestock are allowed concentrated grazing time on a particular part of the pasture (generally one to two days), and then are shifted to another area of pasture and kept moving, until the grass in the first paddock is ready to be grazed again. Mobile electric fencing makes it easy to shape the paddocks. If the sheep were allowed to graze openly on limited land the pasture would risk becoming degraded because the sheep, knowing what they like to eat, will munch on a plant until it's gone.

Livestock that do not feed on pasture are usually fed corn. The image of neat rows of corn may evoke American rural life, but the reality, Jen says, is that growing corn can wear down the soil; it also takes much additional energy to grow, such as large quantities of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (derived mostly from natural gas), water, and fossil fuels to run tractors and other machines. In addition to the herbicides and pesticides used on the crop, which pollute surface and groundwater, tilling can be damaging. When fields are slightly sloped, erosion can happen. "A well-managed pasture is the best way to manage land because it can sequester carbon and results in better watering filtration," Jen says. As grain prices continue to rise, rotational grazing, a relatively new concept that relies heavily on the modern invention of polywire (mobile electric fencing), is starting to gain more notice with farmers here in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Rotational grazing not only keeps the soil of pasture fertile so that it can handle repeated grazing, but the resulting tender grass is lush, dense and is an important way to keep livestock feeding delightedly, happily. "My relationship with my animals is a huge part of why I'm doing this." Jen now has 15 sheep, eight heritage breed Devon cows, 25 hens, two roosters, three ducks, and a sheep herding dog named Jay. As her farm continues to grow, she wants her animals to be comfortable, healthy, and "have the freedom to express their natural behaviors," but "this doesn't mean I won't send a ram to the slaughterhouse."

Jen is interested in how to "build ecologically sound and robust systems that don't rely on chemicals, that are humane to animals and to other biodiversity that wants to live on a farm." Jen finds that she's not alone; she and other local farmers have been doing the hard work of exploring avenues that differ from conventional agriculture. Increasingly, they are sharing with each other their self-generated knowledge. In April, Jen attended a local conference on grazing, and was excited to learn more about how livestock can self-medicate on certain pasture plants when given the chance. She also learned how important managed pasture can be for ground-nesting birds. Species such as the Eastern meadowlark, upland sandpiper, vesper sparrow, American kestrel, horned lark, and Eastern bluebird among others need specific kinds of grassland habitats to nest. Some are nearing extinction and others are declining greatly, especially in the Northeast. According to a Cornell Cooperative Extension paper on the topic, 24 of 27 grassland birds noted in a pasture inventory done in central New York in 2005 were found to breed in livestock pastures. The presence of these birds benefit the farm as well, because they feed on flies and other insects.

Running a farm singlehandedly while balancing a teaching job is not easy. There are always the daily chores—opening up the coop and feeding the chickens, providing the livestock periodically with hay (in the winter) and water. During the spring and summer, there is shearing, lambing, and the regular work of moving the electric netting, and keeping an eye on the grass level in order to figure out when one paddock is ready to be grazed again. Jen learns a great deal by experimenting. For example, she has learned that by grazing sheep and cows together, internal parasite problems are minimized.

As her farm grew and Jen needed more land, she came to rent 50 acres of pasture that was available from a sculptor neighbor. The relationship has proved mutually beneficial—in exchange for pasture and a place to winter her animals, Jen provides the owners with one freezer lamb a year while maintaining and improving the land both environmentally and aesthetically. Now she also custom grazes cows for other neighbors in the summer.

Like any other farmer, Jen is concerned about how to keep local farms going, as well as how best to mentor and train the next generation. With the rise in interest in rotational grazing, grass-fed meat, and eating locally, the possibilities for farming on a small scale, and in an economically viable way, have opened up. Still, expensive land prices make it hard to keep farms in this area, much less start new ones. With four years of grazing under her belt and her farming goals now well-defined, Jen realizes she needs more land than her neighbor can provide if she is ever going to make a living off her livestock. So, she's looking for a new situation involving 100 to 120 acres of grazing pasture. It's a daunting prospect—how do farmers and would-be farmers meet up with local landowners who are open to having their land managed by grazing? She's been in touch with a local land conservation organization and is hoping for the best. As the number of farms in the area dwindle, it's clearly important to find creative ways to sustain existing farms, as well as nurture the next generation of farmers, whose labor on the land contributes to the beauty of the area and whose presence enriches our community with fresh local food. For what is easier on the eye then seeing some sheep grazing contentedly in a wide pasture especially in one's own backyard?

Interested in reading more? Consider: Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan and Holy Cows and Hog Heaven, by Joel Salatin; for a more scientific look at rotational grazing, consider reading Andre Voisin's seminal work, Grass Productivity.