Episode Four - Beyond Livestock: Animals in Regenerative Agriculture
Episode Description:
Regenerative agriculture is more than a human-centered enterprise: it means working with nature and alongside other creatures, to accomplish larger ecological purposes. Our relationships with animals have always been multifaceted, and in this episode we explore ways those relationships are creating more sustainable and mutually beneficial partnerships.
Chicken Tractor at the Raven Rocks Quaker farm in Beallsville
Photo Credit: Renee Wilde
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO: You’re listening to Grounded Hope. I’m Renee Wilde.
Regenerative agriculture is more than a human-centered enterprise: it means working with nature and alongside other creatures, to accomplish larger ecological purposes. Our relationships with animals have always been multifaceted, and in this episode we explore ways those relationships are creating more sustainable and mutually beneficial partnerships.
From the highways to the hedgerows we bring you grounded hope.
____________________________________________________________________
ACT ONE: THE CHICKEN AND THE EGG
RENEE WILDE: Spring is the busy season for the mail-order hatcheries who send millions of baby chickens through the US Postal Service to eager farmers and backyard enthusiasts around the country.
DANIELLE O’HARA: We’re right in the thick of it - March, April, May.
WILDE: Danielle O’Hara is the great granddaughter of “Chick'' O'Hara. Chick started Mt. Healthy Hatcheries out of his basement in the 1920’s, raising chicks for his family and neighbors. Danielle is the fourth generation to help raise chicks, ducks, turkey’s and game fowls for the family hatchery.
O’HARA: So, these are the shipping boxes for the orders going out this weekend because once those chickens hatch it is like go time, you have to get them out the door.
WILDE: A newborn chick will absorb the yolk from the shell as it’s hatched, supplying enough nutrients for the first few days of its life.
O’HARA: They say up to 76 hours, but we try to get them to their destination by 48 (hours), for sure.
WILDE: Inside one of the low profile hatchery buildings are hundreds of bakers racks lined with multi-colored eggs. The eggs are grouped in hues of brown, beige, white, green and blue, each rack representing a different breed. Over a quarter of a million eggs will be hatched here over next week, but you won’t see any laying hens.
O’HARA: So, we actually have breeder farms, where we go and pick up our eggs three times a week. We bring ‘em back here and incubate them. (It) takes 21 days to incubate.
WILDE: According to the Ohio Poultry Association, Ohio is one of the biggest egg laying states, with 31 million laying hens. This hatchery works with ten Amish farms around the Holmes County area in Ohio, and one English farm in Indiana. These 11 farms breed the eggs for over fifty five varieties of poultry sold through the Mt. Healthy mail order business.
O’HARA: So you have your staples, like your Barred Rocks, your Rhode Island Reds, Comets, Cornish, that kind of stuff that you know is going to sell. We’ve seen a big increase in rare, fun, kind of backyard varieties. So, recently we added Creamed Legbar, Barnevelders, and some different types of Marans. We made a couple hybrids people seem to like.
They want good production, but they want something that’s going to look nice in the yard. So that’s where the retail market is shifting.
WILDE: During the pandemic demand for chickens has risen dramatically as both backyard pets and as a local source for meat and eggs.
O’HARA: I don’t know whether it was the fear within the scarcity of food, or the concern with the food system failing, or just being home and having nothing else to do, but our sales almost doubled compared to 2019. It was a huge upswing.
WILDE: So what trends is the hatchery seeing for 2021?
O’HARA: Actually Rob, who's our Operating Owner, I guess you would call him, he brought in the first blue breed and they just sold like crazy, people love that grey color. But, our Blue Rocks, our Rhode Island Blue which is a hybrid that we made, Blue Laced Red Wyandotte, Blue Copper Marans, Blue Giants, Splash Giants which Splash is like a variation of blue, We sell those quicker than I can keep up with, for sure.
Personally, I like Orpingtons. They look like little butterballs.
WILDE: The pandemic has sparked a social and environmental awareness of the modern food industry in consumers, and the demand for sustainably grown food has risen. Farmers are seeking more ways to meet that demand by turning to natural feed, and by using farming practices that cycle nutrients through the feed, manure and soil - to create a healthy environment and healthy people.
TULLIA: I actually have my own chickens and one of them has a hurt leg a little bit, and if I call her to come here, she actually will.
DON HARTLEY: Do you want to show her your chickens?
TULLIA: Sure
WILDE: What kind of chickens do you have?
TULLIA: The same as these. It’s from the same flock. We raise them from little chicks.
WILDE: Tullia and her Dad, Don Hartley, are showing me the chickens they raise on their farm at Raven Rocks in southeastern Ohio. In 1970, Don and some of his fellow graduates from the Olney Friends School in nearby Barnesville, scraped together a thousand dollars to purchase this beautiful 840 acre property named after a local landmark.
The property has a rich history, with the first known inhabitants going as far back as 760 AD. Archaeologist Olaf Prufer published a Kent State Research Paper on this called Raven Rocks: A Specialized Woodland Rockshelter Occupation in Belmont County.
Don and his family are one of seven out of the eleven members of the Raven Rocks group who live on what has now become over twelve hundred acres. When the group first bought the property it was a Christmas tree farm, but now it provides certified organic beef, chicken, eggs, and other products that the group sells at the Worthington Farmers Market in Columbus.
HARTLEY: Basically it’s beef cattle and we had a few chickens for a while, but now the number has increased a lot because there is so much demand for the eggs at the farmers market that we have a hard time filling it. And, also, we like Joel Salatin's idea of having the chickens follow the cattle. Because it’s a symbiotic relationship, the chickens kick apart the cow pies and get a lot of the fly larva and stuff, which reduces the fly problem for the cattle.
WILDE: Don and his family raise ISA Brown chickens which are known for their prolific egg laying.
HARTLEY: We have two egg mobiles, ones an old manure spreader that was converted into an egg mobile, where we can shut the chickens in at night and then let them out in the daytime so they don’t get bothered by the racoons and foxes, however, hard to protect them in the daytime from the Red-tailed Hawks. And then we have a bigger eggmobile that’s like a 10 by 14 building that we put on wheels and can move around too, and we can put about a hundred (chickens) in it.
WILDE: The egg mobiles are movable outdoor chicken coops that can be moved from pasture to pasture, and often will feature an easy egg collection system on the outside of the coop. Eggs laid by chickens who are out on pasture have a deep orange yolk.
HARTLEY: And the color comes from all the grass they eat. Most people don’t realize how much grass chickens will eat, but they’ll clean off a field, and that affects the color and the nutrition. The Omega 3’s are much higher in the ones from grass raised chickens, as the ones that aren’t out on pasture.
We’ve seen the pastures rejuvenate tremendously from moving the cows frequently and having the chickens in with the cows, and of course all the manure spread out on the fields. Ted used to make hay.
WILDE: That would be Ted Cope, another Raven Rocks member who lives on site and raises cattle.
HARTLEY: Ted used to make hay, and put the cows in for the winter to keep them off the fields, so to preserve the fields. Now we’ve decided that isn’t the best way. The best way is not to have so many animals that they tramp your fields down, keep them in dry areas and in the winter time, but put ‘em out and have enough pasture that they can graze in the field.
When it’s heavy snow, Ted will feed a few bales of hay, he makes a little hay, , But it saves tremendously on the amount of diesel fuel and farm equipment and stuff needed when the cows spread their own manure, and collect their own hay, and you don’t end up doing that with fossil fuels. So it makes a big difference.
WILDE: Don and the other Quaker members of Raven Rock are “a community of people dedicated to preserving and enhancing the natural and social environment where they live and sharing their knowledge and concern with the broader society.”
HARTLEY: I don’t know why people at the farmers market think our eggs are better than anyone else's. We’ve had customers tell us that over and over again, and I think it’s partly because I like the chickens, I talk to them when I’m out there, and I just think it all goes together.
You know, anything we can do to keep in touch with the land and our roots and realize that we aren’t separate from that, and we aren’t going to make it if we think we can get all our food out of a factory.
ACT TWO: HORSE POWERED REGENERATIVE FARMING
WILDE: Riceland Meadows is a 74 acre organic farm in Ashtabula owned by Ralph Rice. Ralph raises and butchers his own organic certified, grass-fed lamb and beef, along with chickens and hogs, to feed his family. He manages a large woodlot that provides timber for the farm buildings and sap for maple syrup. And by using a seven year crop rotation and horse powered equipment, Raph has created a farm that basically feeds itself.
RICE: Now spelt for us is the king of crops, because spelt is all the feed that my horses eat. In other words, I’m kinda growing my own diesel fuel if you will. But, also spelt is a tall crop, so we get a lot of straw, and straw provides a carbon source for most of our composting.
WILDE: Ralph farms with Suffolk Horses, the only draft horse developed exclusively for farm work. The breed came very close to global extinction in the 1950’s and is currently listed in critical status, with an estimated 600 Suffolk Horses in the U.S.
RICE: This mare is due in April to have a baby. These are Suffolk Horses, Suffolk Punch they’re actually called. They're from a place in England and they say they’re as rare as the Giant Pandas. I have three brood mares, my son has a pair of full sisters, and none of them are related to our prospective stallion here.
WILDE: When Ralph made the switch from the taller Percheron horses to this more compact breed, he didn’t lose any horsepower. Although 8 inches smaller, these chestnut colored horses have a very wide, muscular body.
RICE: The ‘Punch’ comes from being a punchy, short-coupled horse. They are built for the furrow, bred for the furrow, but they’re a lot more than just a furrow horse. They’re good on the cart. I love them in the sugar woods. Everything we’ve done with them has been perfect. They mow all the hay and they’re doing it on half the food my Percherons ate, and you can see from the condition they’re in, it’s not because they're skinny (laughs).
WILDE: Ralph hitches up his pair of broodmares for a leisurely wagon ride around his property on this first day of spring.
RICE: But they have a real nice gait, unlike Percherons and Belgians the push is for a fancy hitch horses and a lot of action out front, these horses are actually bred to have a small cannon bone, so there’s less action but their very good in the furrow or for farm work, yet they’ll still step out and move when the time comes.
WILDE: Ralph layed out this entire farm on a piece of graph paper back in the 1990’s when he first bought this property, and that good planning shows. The front of the farm along the roadway is divided into small paddocks as part of the 7-year rotation of hay, pasture, frost-seeded clover, corn, sorghum sudangrass, and spelt. Crop rotations like this are a key part of regenerative agriculture. They build healthy soils and reduce the need for pesticides and fertilizers.
RICE: Whoa.
WILDE: Are those your woods?
RICE: This is the beginning. See where the fence is, and our first maple sap bags are hanging there, then we go that way.
WILDE: Clear bags hang from maple trees, collecting the last of the sap which Ralph processes in a little sugar shack that he made on the property. He uses horsepower to manage the woodlots and the syrup collection.
RICE: Alright girls, get up. We manage our woodlot on a three prong approach. The first is for maple syrup production. The second is for wildlife. And the third is for timber. Now when I say timber, most of my buildings are from timber that I harvested here in the woods.
A good pair of horses, a team of horses, can easily handle the work of a small farm. It’s just limited by the teamsters knowledge and what equipment he has. But, here in our area of Ohio, with Amish settlements in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, there’s very little excuse for [not] finding what you want. You can find it.
WILDE: Most of the 60,000 Amish who live in Ohio have continued the practice of horse powered farming into the 21st Century. They believe that by continuing to farm with horses, rather than convert to tractors, it keeps the scale of farming to a manageable size and allows more time for families.
RICE: Horses are good for us because, sometime we go out and start mowing hay, or whatever, at lunch time we all get to stop for lunch, including the horses. It takes them an hour to eat so you get an hour, they get an hour lunch, all they want to drink, and back at it again for three or four hours.
WILDE: In Stephen Leslie’s 2013 book The New Horse-Powered Farmer, the former art student and monk turned small scale farmer demonstrates how revisiting traditional skills in the modern era can serve as solutions to small-scale, resilient farming within a changing climate.
RICE: But this kind of work will ground you, and it’s pleasant to me. When they’re walking I’m hearing the bells ring. And when I stop them - Whoa - to rest or whatever. You hear the birds singing, the cows. It’s very relaxing, it’s very - like I said, It’s mental therapy. You’re forced to work at their pace, and that’s good for all of us, to be back in touch with nature.
WILDE: Ralph writes about farming for Rural Heritage Magazine, and gives demonstrations with his horses on RFD-TV.
ACT THREE: RESTORING NATIVE PRAIRIE ECOSYSTEMS
KEVIN KASNYIK: Before European settlement, prairies were an important part of this region right here.
WILDE: Kevin Kasnyck is the Manager of Park Operations for the Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks. We’re at the 7,000 acre Battelle Darby Creek Park, west of Columbus.
KASNYIK: We’re in what’s called the Darby Plains Prairie. Historically it was a four hundred square mile tall grass prairie, one of the few that extended this far east of the Mississippi. It extended from the State Line to Columbus.
WILDE: Tallgrass Prairies once covered 170 million acres of North America and was the continents largest continuous ecosystem. Tallgrass prairies evolved on landscapes that can be difficult to survive on, and supported a wide range of biodiversity in both plants and animals.
KASNYIK: Then, what happened, of course, was the invention of the plow and agriculture, and the shaping of the landscape just changed. It didn’t take long for people to figure out the soil under the prairie are extremely fertile.
WILDE: Over 95% of the original tallgrass prairie is now in farmland. The Darby Plains Prairie is pretty much decimated, but there were enough people both inside the park system and outside of it that wanted to preserve and build that prairie back up.
KASNYIK: We started to do kind of grass roots efforts to gather seed from the Darby Plains region, and the only seed that was really left was in pioneer cemeteries that hadn’t been plowed or disturbed, so that the seed would continue and we could harvest it from there. Along railroads. Those were the kinds of places that there were only a little bit left, and over time we started to pick that seed.
WILDE: Kevin and other park staff collected enough native seed to revert former agricultural areas in the park back to a tallgrass habitat.
KASNYIK: We harvest the prairie grasses - big bluestem, little bluestem, cordgrass, indian grass - now we have over 2,000 acres of prairie here.
WILDE: In a fenced area along one of the roads leading to the park, a small herd of North American Bison are grazing in one of the tallgrass prairie restorations.
KASNYIK: These are bison, these are definitely not buffalo, these are bison, and historically they were here and they were probably an important part of the Darby Plains ecosystem in the prairie.
WILDE: Bison are a keystone Species that helped create the habitat on the Great Plains. They aerate the soil with their hooves as the forage, which helps disperse native seeds and stimulate plant growth to maintain a healthy and balanced ecosystem.
KASNYIK: You know, they benefit not just the prairies and the plants but they do a lot for insects, and the diversity of birds and amphibians. I mentioned their trails, they wallow, they roll, they dig, they rub and their disturbance creates and benefits a lot more than just the prairie.
WILDE: The practice of using bison to fertilize and aerate the soil was used by the Indigenous plains tribes. They would move bison herds to specific areas to regenerate the land, and use controlled patch burns to regrow fresh grass. To many Native Americans, the Bison was seen not only as an animal, but as an ancestor and brother to them. Bison were an important source of food, shelter, utensils, and clothing, but most importantly spiritual strength for the Native population.
The last bison in Ohio was killed in Lawrence County in 1803, but luckily, three decades early, North American Natives had begun establishing their own captive bison breeding programs. These early preservation efforts were so successful that a significant percentage of bison today carry the bloodlines of these original Native-sponsored herds. Members of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which represents 69 tribes, have one of the collectively largest herds in the U.S., with 20,000 bison.
Today there are only 3 truly free ranging bison herds in the U.S. - the largest in Yellow Stone National Park. Kevin and the metro park staff worked with the Ohio conservation organization The Wilds to introduce bison to the park's restored prairie.
KASNYIK: We started with 6 bison. I believe it was early in February when we drove them back to where the nature center now sits, and drove out in that pasture, and turned them loose. It was spectacular. So we have 8 cows and one bull, that’s the bull in the back up there. In the near future we hope to have some calves. We’re expecting some calves. I’m not sure how many.
WILDE: Baby bison are born from late March through May. They are called Red Dogs. They are born orange-red and darken to brown when their horns and shoulder hump start forming.
In 2020 The Department of the Interior (DOI) launched the Bison Conservation Initiative to engineer the return of wild, healthy bison herds in conjunction with states, tribes, nations and other non governmental organizations - with the goal to help shape diverse ecological communities.
KASNYIK: People come out and get very excited about seeing the bison. Hopefully it causes people to think more about conservation. And when they start to learn the relationship between the bison and the prairies, in this area right here where they live, I hope they get a respect for it, and want to learn more about it, and get a little bit excited about it.
WILDE: We end this episode with a quote from Oglala (ow-guh-laa-luh) Sioux Chief Luther Standing Bear from the book Buffalo Nation by Valerius Geist.
From Wakan Tanka (wah-kahn tahn-kah), the Great Spirit, there came a great unifying life force that flowed through all things - the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals - and was the same force that had breathed life into the first man. Thus all things were kindred, and were brought together by the same mystery. Kinship with the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principal. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota’s safe among them. And so close did some of the Lakota come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue. The animals had rights- the right of man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom and the right to man’s indebtedness - and in recognition of these rights the Lakota never enslaved an animal, and spared all life that was not needed for food or clothing.
***************************************************************************************
Our theme music is by Kevin MacLeod.
Our webmaster is Rachel Isaacson, an Americorps VISTA at Agraria
Our scholars are Beth Bridgman, an associate professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, and Rick Livingston, an Associate Director of the Humanities Institute at The Ohio State University, in Columbus.
Check out the educational resources tab at our website GroundedHope.org to find book suggestions that complement our themes, and ways to engage these themes in classroom discussions.
This podcast is made possible by the people at Community Solution’s Agraria Center for Regenerative practices, and by a grant from the Ohio Humanities.
I’m Renee Wilde, and you’ve been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset