Nature models diverse farming
There is a weed called shepherd’s purse and it thrives in paddocks that grow crops. Farmers will cultivate paddocks and prepare a nice seedbed. They then plant the seed of their desired crop. The crop grows and the farmer then harvests the crop.
The paddock is then cultivated again ready for the next crop. This cropping system provides the ideal conditions for shepherd’s purse.
Many farmers use sprays to control shepherd’s purse. This is a cost and many people are becoming wary of the amount of sprays used in our food. Organic farmers will use non-spray methods such as cultivating in between the crops. This is timeconsuming and costly.
Either way, cropping farmers both organic or conventional battle to control weeds such as shepherd’s purse.
Dairy farmers do not have a shepherd’s purse problem because it does not grow well in pastures that are grazed and trampled by stock.
Instead, dairy farmers can have a problem with a weed called broadleaf dock. Dock loves the conditions found on pasturebased dairy farms, especially wet lowland paddocks.
Like cropping farmers, dairy farmers control dock with sprays. I am not sure how organic dairy farmers control dock. But the last organic farmer I spoke to simply reclassified dock as ‘‘part of their diverse pasture sward’’.
I would normally be very impressed with this reclassification method except for the fact cows do not eat dock because it is bitter. Or at least they will not eat it unless they are really hungry.
Cropping farmers do not have a problem with dock because dock does not like to be cultivated and it does not survive in cropping conditions without livestock.
So what many cropping farmers do is after they have grown two or three crops in a paddock, they plant the paddock into pasture and run stock on the paddock for a year or two.
The grazing animals kill off shepherd’s purse without the need for sprays.
Dairy farmers are also able to eliminate dock by planting the affected paddock into crops for a year. The other thing they can do is to have some sheep on the farm because sheep eat dock.
Thirty years ago, it was quite common for farms to be mixed farms. Farms would have some combination of dairy, cropping, sheep or beef. There are many cases on farms like the shepherd’s purse and dock example, where different stock types or crop rotations working together have beneficial relationships.
But as the decades have moved on, farms have become more specialised. Dairy farms started to concentrate on just dairy. The only crops dairy farmers would grow would be those needed to feed their stock in dry summers or cold winters.
But in the past decade, many dairy farmers stopped doing even that any more, preferring instead to send the cows away for winter grazing. Essentially, outsourcing the crops.
The rationale is the dairy farm is more profitable if it just grows grass for milk production.
No doubt the spreadsheets prove that specialisation is the more profitable option for many businesses, not just farms.
But the end result is monoculture farming systems.
These systems have been enabled by modern fertilisers and sprays. They produce cheap food too, so they are hard to argue against.
However, I am sure the overall farming system – including the environment – is better off with these more diverse farming systems.
Not a week goes by when I do not read or hear someone promoting the end to livestock and how a plant-based utopia awaits us.
My household has dairy intolerant members so we are consumers of plant-based milk and we are big fans of Tip Top’s vegan Trumpet icecream too.
Many great things will happen with plant-based products but a plant-based future without livestock is just a cropping monoculture. That just means more sprays and lots more fertiliser.
The debate we should be having is more around how we grow our crops and livestock not whether crops are better than livestock.
Nature is not a monoculture and I think the more our farming systems mimic nature, the more sustainable they will be.