hau Leah,
Nice piece of property! First off I'd decide if you plan to have an In-law house or if you are going to all be under one roof.
Silvopasture is cool, but you want to keep the older trees, I'd get some rolls of surveyor tape in different colors so you can mark trees as you walk the land.
We are doing ours by first taking out dead trees, junk
wood type trees, then obstructed trees (usually small trunks with high branches only).
Once these are down and out of the way I go around with my red tape roll and mark undesireable trees left from the initial thinning.
I take down red oaks, We have a mixed hardwood forest of Hickory, White oak and Red oak along with a smattering of birch, slippery elm and Hawthorne.
small bushes (which I could leave for fodder if we had goats) get removed as do wild black berries. This gives me "dappled" shade over much of the Silvopasture spaces, with plenty of open soil for planting fodder.
I use a wide variety mix for pasture, grasses, brassicas,
root vegetables such as tall fescue, timothy Bermuda, seven top turnip, purple top turnip, rape, squashes, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, oats, barley, alfalfa, side oats, etc.
This keeps our hogs happy (American Guinea Hogs) and keeps us from having to spend a lot of money on
feed. We are setting up to be able to only use a paddock every three months, we probably won't get there but if we can do two months between grazings, I'll be very happy.
With your mix of animals, you
should be able to graze all of them in one paddock instead of segregating them all the time.
When I thin the forest, I put as much thought into the future look as possible. I also allow for a wallow in each pasture since the hogs are going to make one.
I keep all white oaks and slippery elms. I thin the Hickories since the forest is mostly Hickory. The birch and hawthorns get to stay for the critters they house.
By systematically thinning the woods, I can leave the forest mostly looking like a forest and still have plenty of fodder for the hogs.
when we add the new
chickens, guinea hens, ducks and geese we won't need to build any extra paddocks since everyone will be able to forage together.
We allow 1/2 acre per paddock and graze for one week before we move them. Once the new paddocks are ready I'll be able to move them every two or three days.
We are setting our spaces up in a 1/2 wagon wheel style with the hog house and farrowing hut at the center, this makes moving them around very easy, all I have to do is open the gate to the selected pasture and they come and go as they want.
one of the advantages to this set up is they don't go rooting out a wallow in their paddocks, they just come back to "Hog Central" to do their wallowing, drinking, sleeping.
As we add more paddocks, I will set up a temporary travel avenue to keep them going where I want them to graze. Fruit trees will go on the outside of the permanent perimeter
fence so they can have the drops but not harm the trunks.
Also, since we do have some "yard" we give them most of the clippings when we mow (a weekly chore) the hogs love the fresh cut grasses.
You can utilize those areas that have more than 14% slope by turning them into food forest, squashes don't mind afternoon shade here, as well as things like brassicas, cucurbits, some tomatoes, tomatillos, etc. We have high humidity, high heat for summers and rarely get below 0 f.
As far as numbers go, I would think 10-12 ewes would require around one acre per every three days to allow the pasture to recover after they have been moved on.
We have three breeding hogs (plus babies) and we have to move them weekly to not have to reseed once they are moved. (I do always add seed to the previous pasture but that is more for diversity of fodder building than recovery of the pasture as it stands).
