The Homestead Gardener: A springtime ode to clover
by Derrick Gentry –
“This morning, I noticed that the ___________were beginning to come up!”
Something new is coming up almost every day at this time of year; and what luck, what a top of the morning blessing, to feel chosen as the first to notice the newly arrived guest. The renaissance fair continues well into May. First, there were the isolated patches of color: the subtle snowdrops, the iconic crocuses. And then, the dazzling show of the daffodils as they raise up their heads and proclaim in unison that the season is ready to commence. My heart truly leaps up, however, when I see coming up through the blanched and disheveled grass, with a bright green that is unmistakably this year’s, the quieter but longer-lasting display of common clover.
Its commonness should not lessen our appreciation of the role it plays in our lives. We are truly lucky to have clover — Dutch white and medium-red, with however many leaves. Clover just “happens,” or so it seems. But if you want more of it in your pasture or in your lawn, the task really involves no more than a casual stroll outdoors on a cool morning. You can broadcast clover seeds on the surface and wait for the heavy rains to tamp it down and give it firm contact with the soil; or you can scatter it into thick turf or even into a thatched over spot, and it will still somehow find a way to germinate; or, even earlier than that, you can frost seed clover before the ground has thawed and let it work its way into place with the cycles of frost heave. On a very quiet morning in March or April, the solitary broadcaster can even hear, between the heartbeats of the squirrels, the faintest pitter-patter of the tiny seeds as they strike and scatter upon the cold ground.
Once established, clover gives so much more than it takes. It certainly demands little from us. The three-leaf clover ought to be the symbol on the flag for the cause of resilience and sustainability. Like other legumes, clover performs the crucial function of fixing nitrogen from the air and putting into the soil in plant-available form. (It’s actually a symbiotic collaboration between clover and rhizobium bacteria in the soil.) Nitrogen fixing is almost as fundamental a life process as photosynthesis. When I contemplate both processes going on around me, I feel like a truly lazy (though grateful) beneficiary of the real work that plants do. I currently take far more than I give, though I strive to do better.
Farmers around the world have long known that sowing clover in a field after harvest is an excellent way to restore nitrogen to the soil. In America, George Washington Carver was one of the first agricultural scientists who fully appreciated the role of clover in sustainable agriculture. In a classic article from the early 1900s, Carver observed that “deficiency in nitrogen can be met almost wholly by the proper rotation of crops, keeping the legumes, or pod-bearing plants, growing upon the soil as much as possible.” Carver’s advice is as relevant today as it was a century ago, living as we do in our age of synthetic nitrogen with an advanced case of soil degradation. (By the way, why is it that we so rarely see Carver up there anymore in the pantheon of names during Black History Month? I suppose our culture does not take agrarian thinkers as seriously as we once did…)
Clover is also a staple food crop for people, though of course we cannot we consume it directly. As much as we depend on plants, our digestive systems are not built to digest the range of biomass that other animals are able to process. That is where grazing animals step in and provide the missing link in the food chain. Our goats convert clover to edible protein, which we can then consume in the form of milk and cheese. (Why is it that we do not think of pasture-raised milk in the category of a “plant-based diet”? I see no reason why it should not be so considered, although it would also, I suppose, qualify as a “processed” food….)
The Pasture Garden
Can we even speak of “pasture gardens”? The tiny pasture where our milk goats graze certainly occupies more land on our little property than the food garden. If farmers can call themselves “grass farmers,” then I feel partly justified in calling my subdivided quarter-acre of mixed grasses and legumes a “pasture garden.” My only reservation is a semantic one; for many, a quarter-acre is a paddock rather than a pasture (as a hill is to a mountain, I suppose). Fair enough: I am content to call it a “mini-pasture.” As the cookie monster says, that’s good enough for me.
Milk goats are perfect for the homestead-scale operation. You can easily raise a small herd of goats or sheep on a mini-pasture of well under one acre. Not only do goats require less space and have less impact than a cow, goat’s milk is also significantly higher in nutrients than cow milk. (And all milk, perhaps not surprisingly, is among the most nutrient-rich foods in existence.) We do not rely on pasture throughout the year, of course, but it is an important supplement for a good part of the year. One other reason for having a pasture, however small, is that goats — like many animals — love being outside and grazing or foraging for their own food. Goats are by nature foragers, not grazers, but they will never walk away from a patch of land covered with clover and grasses. We want them to be happy. And except for summer days when the flies are bad, they always look happy to be out and about in that fenced in but wide open space.
What is the ideal mix for a pasture? Everyone has their own ideas, but the choice and the ratios depend on the type of grazing animals as well as a number of factors. Clovers are always welcome in the mix. On the whole, though, it must be admitted that alfalfa is the queen of the pasture legumes. It is hard to beat alfalfa’s nutrient density, which is particularly important for milk production. Unlike clover, however, alfalfa can be a bit more challenging to get established. It demands soil of a certain quality and fertility, and it much fussier regarding pH.
(It does not do well in acidic soil). Another challenge with alfalfa is that it is difficult to re-seed or over-seed in later seasons because the alfalfa is essentially “allergic” to itself (the peculiar property of autotoxicity) and the new seeds will not germinate in the company of alfalfa that is already growing there. Setting up a stand of alfalfa is therefore a one-shot deal, and the conditions need to be just right in order for it to take.
But once it does take, you have something close to a permanent pasture. Clover will begin to peter out after a few years and need to be reseeded. Alfalfa, if grazed and managed well, will last a decade and beyond. Another nice feature of alfalfa is its relative drought resistance; in dry months, alfalfa will continue to grow while other things in the pasture stall out. Your yield of milk will not suffer too much so long as you have a hardy stand of alfalfa.
It is unfortunate that recent calls for cutting or eliminating meat and dairy consumption in order to reduce environmental impact, fundamentally right-minded as they are, often fail to distinguish between the wholly unsustainable industrial feed-lot and the fundamentally different pasture-raising methods. We all tend to think more like consumers, not like producers or cultivators, and that limited mentality carries over into our grand schemes for policy making.
So long as they are managed properly and not over-grazed, a strong case could be made for the pasture as the very model of a sustainable food system. There are a number of other side benefits, what we might call “ecosystem services.” Pastures and hay fields are also models of biodiverse and ecologically vibrant habitats (though they work quite differently than other habitats, such as marsh lands or woodlands). Pastures produce large and steady quantities of biomass, whether consumed by grazing animals or harvested by vegan farmers as organic matter for composting. Pastures provide stable root systems the vast “micro-herds” of microbial life underground. Above ground, pastures are like super-functional meadows, providing sustenance not only for hoofed animals but also for insects and other creatures with wings. Pastures and hay fields need to be cut periodically and/or grazed, but the soil never or rarely needs plowing up the way fields with annual food crops need plowing. The carbon is sequestered in the soil along with the nitrogen that is fixed — for free — by the clovers and alfalfa. If there is a significant drawback to this win-all-around set up, then I am not aware of it.
The Imagination of Disaster
The sheep did a backflip and landed on its back. That is what happened when the woman tried to check under the sheep’s eyelid for symptoms of internal parasites. The sheep landed on its back; the woman landed on her ass.
That was the story related to me by my wife after she returned from a day-long workshop on goat and sheep parasites. The woman who took the fall was the owner of the farm and host of the event. My wife was actually preparing to check the resistant sheep, when the owner interceded. “This one’s not in a good mood today,” she told my wife. A moment later, she was down on the ground and the sheep had its hooves planted a few paces behind where it once was.
The event was presided over by trained scientists, explaining with the aid of high-powered microscopes how parasites worked from a scientific point of view, which did not always align with the practical interests and concerns of animal husbandry. The visiting scientists could barely disguise their child-like — bordering on Dr. Strangelove — fascination with the meningeal worm, also known as the “deer worm” (Paralaphostrongylus tenius). All parasites are cause for worry, but this one sounds like something straight out of science fiction. Among scientists, there seems to be a consensus that the evolved behavior of the deer worm is really, really cool. Here is an account of the life cycle of the deer worm posted on sheepandgoat.com, one of the many online Mayo Clinics for goat husbandry:
“The life cycle of the meningeal worm requires terrestrial snails or slugs to serve as intermediate hosts. White-tailed deer become infected with P. tenius by eating snails or slugs that contain the infective stage of the larvae. The larvae migrate through the deer’s gut and eventually move into the central nervous system where they mature into adults, produce eggs, and the life cycle begins again when they excrete the eggs in their feces. However, when P. tenius-infected snails and slugs are ingested by aberrant hosts, such as small ruminants, the larvae migrate into the brain and/or spinal cord and cause various neurological problems.”
A pasture full of parasite-hosting slugs and snails can be a dangerous place. It is frightening, moreover, to reflect upon all of the many possibilities for casual, rapid, and sudden illness and death on the homestead: various types of parasites, toxic fungal spores, listeria, and the list goes on. And then there are crises and diseases caused by nutrient deficiency. I have had to make a split-second decision to give an emergency copper-selenium injection to a newly born kid who was showing signs of the rapidly fatal white muscle disease (and if you inject too much of the deficient mineral, that can also be fatal.) Nature’s laid-back solution to these situations is to let the weak and the unlucky die their rapid deaths and simply let nature take its course. Life goes on.
Raising goats or other animals for the first time is in many respects like being a first-time parent. Failure is not an option for a new parent but a constant and terrifying hypothetical vision; we prepare for the worst, hope things are not what we think they are, and go online to google everything else. Is this normal? Is it time to go to the emergency room? We ask these questions as if we were the first to face these situations; we can’t help ourselves. With the second child, having survived the trials of the first, we become much more laid back on the job.
If you google “plants that are poisonous to goats,” you will come up with a number of lists that often overlap but sometimes conflict with one another. Every list mentions milkweed as a fast ticket to goat heaven. And then there is the danger of overindulgence: too much alfalfa in the first days of the season out on pasture, leading to bloat and possible death.
Over time, though, you begin to trust your goat’s own judgment. It is both fascinating and instructive to watch what goats choose to eat and what they reject, and at what moments. Goats have evolved an intuitive wisdom with regard to their food intake, a sense of judgment that can be observed in action but remains mysterious (like many forms of wisdom). I remember, for example, when I first noticed that our goats were not eating the leaves of our comfrey plants as eagerly as I had hoped on every occasion when they were harvested and presented to them. Why were they not interested at all on some days? Why did they stop eating after a certain point on other days? It was not until later that I discovered the likely reason for their limited taste and occasional aversion.
Comfrey is staple on the permaculture homestead and has many uses. It is remarkably dense in protein and other nutrients, and it regrows quickly and abundantly. When comfrey was first introduced in the West in the 19th-century, it was touted as a breakthrough discovery for feeding cattle and other grazing animals. These properties led to early claims that one could feed several head of cattle rotated on a tiny plot of intensively planted comfrey. It was later discovered that comfrey contains alkaloid compounds, which in certain quantities are toxic to goats and other animals and can lead to liver damage in humans as well. For a time, many people who were swept away by the comfrey fad had taken to drinking comfrey tea for its alleged medicinal properties without being aware of the health risks.
Raising milk goats is a constant reminder of the general connection between the health of the food we eat and the health of the soil in which it grows, the quality and quantity of nutrients in the food and the nutrients available in the soil whence it comes. We depend on hay throughout the year, and obviously throughout the winter, and we can usually notice the difference in milk production when our goats are fed first-cutting versus second-cutting hay. But beyond that observation it is difficult to generalize, because the quality of both cuttings depends on that particular year and on a bewildering variety of factors. We accept the fluctuations, both surplus and scarcity, with the same humble attitude we adopt toward growing food in the garden. “Animals are a part of the soil,” declared Andre Voisin, author of the classic Soil, Grass, and Cancer: The Link Between Human and Animals Health and the Mineral Balance of the Soil. Even parasite scientists agree that the best defense against parasites is a healthy animal, and that means high quality forage grown from healthy soil. We still know little about how it works, but it all comes down to soil health: As in the garden, so in the pasture.
There is a good-luck horseshoe that hangs above our barn door, and it always reminds me of the well-known anecdote about the physicist Niels Bohr. When a visitor to Bohr’s house saw a horseshoe hanging above his front door and asked how a great scientist could believe in such a superstition, Bohr is said to have replied: “Yes, but I am told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”
I am not a scientist by temperament or by training, and I confess that I do not have much confidence in scientific cleverness or curiosity for their own sake. I do take great comfort, though, in the basic ideas of ecology. As an exercise in “mindfulness,” ecological thinking contains within it some important social and political implications as well. For one thing, ecology has a solid track record of making you and me and everyone we know look stupid – which is a great leveler as well as a great ice-breaker in social situations. Ecology is the study of complex systems. Our brains are not evolved to handle it, though contemplating complexity has both a humbling and a centering effect. If knowing our own limits qualifies as knowledge, then how do we base our decisions upon such knowledge? Well, it may be as simple as this: Sometimes things go our way mostly or partly by luck, and sometimes we are knocked flat on our asses. One of the nice features of a healthy pasture, by the way, is that a soil full of organic matter and dense with growth acts like cushion and can absorb some of the impact of our fall when it happens. One thing we can count on is the likelihood of falling down again. About the best we can do under the circumstances is to enjoy this year’s harvest and hope for something as good or better next year.
That works, even if you don’t believe in it.