Johanna has a question here:
"I know there are surely big differences between
penning up animals in the way Geoff is talking about
in 10.62 'Grasslands and Range Management',
and penning animals in the way factory farms do it,
and only so much can be covered in one short video.
But I think I need those differences explained a bit more.
Specifically why would you want to pen up animals at all?
Even at a smaller scale these factory farming methods
are still inappropriate aren't they?"
Well there's a difference between a pen and a factory.
I'm in a pen right here.
This is a dairy pen and I pen up animals in here.
I put calves in the dairy overnight
so they don't milk their mothers,
so I can milk their mothers in the morning.
The yard on the outside I pen the mothers in at night
so they're near the baby calves when the calves are young.
I don't bother when they're older.
And I collect the manure.
It makes it convenient to collect the manure,
and it's quite OK to pen 'em up overnight.
They're quite happy.
I can bring in forage crop.
I can't allow the animals to go
into the food forest so much,
especially when it's young.
But I can bring the forage to the animals.
So I do that and they love coming in here.
They queue up to come in here.
I have multiple pens around my
lane way
where I pen the animals overnight
and I bring in forage.
But that allows me to collect the manure in one place,
and that manure then goes to compost,
goes to worm farms and goes on the gardens
and food forests and starts to be
the engine of fertility that runs the organic farm.
So there are multiple reasons that you pen up animals
in a pen that they love.
And it's not a factory pen.
It's a designed pen.
It can be a survival pen,
where there's not enough food out there
out on the range.
But you've got forage growing,
you've got survival forage growing
and you bring the animals in,
you provide 'em with water,
you provide 'em with mineral blocks,
you allow 'em to rest so they're not using a lot of energy
and you bring them multiple forages
to keep 'em nice and healthy.
It might just be your breed stock
if you're having an extreme drought.
You're collecting the manure.
You're making compost out of the manure.
You're growing more forage to keep the animals alive,
while you get over a serious drought.
There can be systems where an area is over-grazed,
incredibly over-grazed,
and traditionally it's just built up and built up
and the whole landscape's degrading
and it's falling apart.
It's going backwards,
it has no ecosystem services left,
and you need to remove all the animals off the landscape
and bring it back into a treed landscape
with forage and range land between forest belts.
But in the meantime you've got to take the animals off
while the forest matures.
So you take the animals off,
you feed forage to the animals,
you easily gather their manure,
with that you make organic fertilizer
in the forms of compost and compost teas and biofertilizers
and with that you speed up the reforest of the landscape
and in the end you can take the animals
back out into the range land
on long slow cycles
that actually improve ecosystem functions,
improve the forest edges by design.
By design.
Always by design.
So the pens are designed,
and some landscapes,
some animals won't easily design into a landscape
without damaging shallow soils like the wet tropics.
But they can live in a pen
very easily
and still go out onto some areas,
they can go out and get a bit of freedom of course
and get outside,
but you feed them inside a pen
and all the nutrient from the animals runs off
by design into forage crop that then feeds the animals.
So you've got a trickle down directing nutrient
from the animals towards a very very diverse forage crop,
which gives you a very very diverse pick and feed pen
that gives you that production
and also the animals can have another area or two
they can walk out through and they're not always in a pen.
It's not factory farming at all.
It is direction of forage to animals and manure to crops
and manure to environmental rehabilitation through design,
and it works wonderfully well.
That's the difference.