Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. There is a lot to think about!
For getting more food-producing perennials going in the forest, wildlife and goats can be an issue, but I am thinking that for a big tree like an oak or chestnut it would be worth putting up pallet tree guards. Or I could just spread a bunch of acorns around and see what happens.
Goats I haven’t really added into the equation. We had a really good system with them for years, where they would just free range (unfenced) and come back every morning to be milked, but this winter they stopped coming every day, went away for too long, and dried up, so it’s hard to rely on them after experiencing this, unless we do a lot of fencing.
Total free range is good when it works because they are understocked and just nibbling stuff here and there. In the past we kept some goats in fences, and the forage took a very long time to regenerate, so I am not sure if fencing off large areas of forest is going to be worthwhile.
So far I’ve been thinking along the John Seymour lines that I mentioned earlier, but with swales with fodder and food trees dividing up paddocks in the pasture/cropland rotation.
We have around an 1/2 acre near the house planted to vegetables and fruit, and around another 1/4 acre that’s semi-cleared and needs to be fenced and planted, perhaps fruit and nut trees on seedling rootstock with a plan to graze geese, sheep, and pigs underneath eventually. We produce nearly all our vegetables (hopefully 100% of them this season), and our fruit trees and berries are getting better year by year.
I need to get better at gardening without inputs. Once we can catch more animal manure this will get easier.
This leaves around 9 acres for the rest of the plan.
At 4 sheep to the acre, this is 36 sheep, or around 16 ewes with lambs. If we got on average 750ml per day per ewe, we would get around 2700 litres of milk in an 8 month lactation which might yield around 500kg cheese and 160kg butter.
We’d also get around 19 lambs to eat every year, which if raised to around 14 months old could provide around 266 meals, plus some fat for cooking with, which is roughly how much red meat we eat at the moment.
So if the sheep idea works out roughly as planned, we’ll be getting enough red meat, butter, and cheese to provide for what we currently eat, plus some extra cheese that we could eat instead of other foods.
I am wondering if 2 ewes (plus their lambs) to the acre with no inputs is too much to expect? We would need to produce our own hay from this land, as well as grazing. Tagasaste and other tree hay plants could help towards this. The sheep enjoy eating some of the wild trees we have here too, so there is also the option to harvest branches of these, or try pollarding some of them for more intensive harvesting.
We would also want to keep pigs, to help till up bits of land for grains and fodder roots, to make use of excess buttermilk and other ‘waste’, and just because we like bacon.
For grain, at our current usage, we’d want to grow around an acre a year of it. If we stopped feeding it to dairy animals, then we’d only need 3/4 of that, and we could reduce it a bit more if we ate less bread or the chickens ate less grain. If we wanted to feed the chickens some legumes, we’d want maybe 1/4 acre of those, and if we wanted to grow some roots for fodder, we’d want maybe 1/2 an acre for that. So for these crops we could plough up 1/2 acre a year with pigs or potatoes, and then grow a rotation of potatoes (or combine potatoes and roots), roots, wheat, barley/oats/rye/legumes, then pasture again, so at any time in the 9 acre plan, we’d have 1 1/2 to 2 acres in crops and 7 to 7 1/2 acres in pasture.
Or I am wondering if the pasture would be healthier if it remained perennial, and we had an extra 1 1/2 to 2 acres for crops set aside permanently?
What are your thoughts?
