The Animals
MANY months had passed since the day we had planned to have animals on the land, but finally everything was in place.
The fence was complete. And thorn bushes had been placed at the base around the entire perimeter - both inside and out.
Our portable electric fence had been purchased and imported - a whole story in itself!
This portable fence allows us to keep the animals where they need to be.
The berked (water cistern) was dug, built and had partially filled with water - filling up completely in August.
The nighttime corrals for the cows and for the goats and sheep were finished.
And besides the physical preparations, we had been developing our grazing plan and praying for the land.
so, using satellite images of our farm, we divided our land into 101 plots, or paddocks as we call them - each paddock averaging slightly more than 0.9 hectares (2 ¼ acres). With 1 paddock occupied by our berked and one by our camp and livestock corrals, 99 paddocks were left for grazing.
After clearing out any brush that was in the way, we used our portable electric fence to set up our 1st grazing paddock in a corner of the property. We hired a young man from the area as a shepherd and we were ready to start purchasing livestock.
Due to poor rains at the time many of our neighbors had small, weak animals they were looking to sell at a low price. Driving around from home to home - at times piling goats in the back of our SUV - we were able to buy more than 100 goats and sheep and 8 cows from our neighbors in July 2022.
This was a win for our neighbors because they got paid instead of watching their animals die from drought. And it was a win for us because we got animals at a great price - albeit weak animals. We calculated that some of them wouldn’t make it - and a handful of them didn’t, but most of them have fattened right on up!
As the animals moved through the first paddocks, we planned out our grazing for the rest of the year. Starting in one corner of the property and moving to the other, we used what we had learned in our Holistic Rangeland Management course to estimate how many days we could spend on each paddock. And in this way we plotted our course through the land.
Six months later we have completed our first run through the 99 paddocks… but more on that later. For now, we were glad to finally have animals munching happily on our land.
