Grazers and browsers.

   In previous posts I think I have described the eating habits of goats, they eat mostly leaves , bark, briers and weeds and will nibble on grass when there is not much of this other food around. This is considered a Browsers diet. Goats and deer are browsers. The highly nutritious sprouts and bark and twigs require less time eating than the grass that grazers prefer.

     Horses, sheep, and cattle are grazers. The eat grass and hay and in great quantities. They can be kept with browsers and the two will not compete for the same food sources.

We just added an alpaca to our homestead - Hippie.  He is a grazer and, despite the pastures being full of goats to capacity, Hippie and trailblazer , the donkey can live in the same pasture with very minimal impact on the feed bill.

The successful integration of grazers and browsers in the homesteader's pasture rotation can improve the production and the viability of the homestead. The grazer to browser ratio willnot be the same , as you fields and woodlands are cleaned up and you pastures expand the number of browsers your lands can support will deminish while the number of grazers increase.

      There is even varibility between grazers to be capitalized on, for instance, a farm that has for years produced nothing but cattle soon becomes clotted with grasses and weeds that cattle will not eat and has to be plowed and replanted. By rotating in a flock of sheep or a drove of donkeys the fields can be stripped of several weeds that the cattle find unappealing and the work and expense of tilling and reseeding and the related topsoil loss from erosion can be averted. Donkeys just happen to like broom-sage and will eat it in abundance on pastures where cattle have allowed it to take over.

Multifloral roses and Kudzu are evasive species that can be controlled by large concentrations of browsers - they can help bring a grown-up field back into condition. They also make trails that the grazers can follow to get to different areas of vastly overgrown fields to where they can start expanding the cleared areas.