Monday, March 18, 2024
HomeNotes From KathyEat Everything

Eat Everything

The way I looked at the world changed when I got my first goat. Everything looked like goat food. I hauled home tree limbs, bags of ornamental pears and crab apples that had fallen on the ground, and after Christmas, some of those trees headed to the dump ended up stockpiled in my backyard.

But that was just the beginning.

After I learned how easy it was to teach a cow to eat weeds, the way I looked at pastures changed too. In fact, the weedier the pasture, the better it looked to me because I knew that weeds were often more resilient AND more nutritious than the grass that most folks prefer. While one of my rancher buddies was pleased when he saw more grass in his pasture as the cows ate more and more weeds, I was a little sad. I’d watched his cows skip over the grass and head straight for the weeds because they liked them so much more.

This unusual way of thinking about forage is why I’ve spent the whole month of March sharing information about weeds and the economic and environmental benefits of weed-eating livestock. I’m hoping that I’ll sway a few of you out there to see things my way. After all, if your livestock eat weeds you have 43% more forage. What’s not to love about that?

Thanks for reading!

Kathy

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Kathy Voth
Kathy Vothhttps://onpasture.com
I am the founder, editor and publisher of On Pasture, now retired. My career spanned 40 years of finding creative solutions to problems, and sharing ideas with people that encouraged them to work together and try new things. From figuring out how to teach livestock to eat weeds, to teaching range management to high schoolers, outdoor ed graduation camping trips with fifty 6th graders at a time, building firebreaks with a 130-goat herd, developing the signs and interpretation for the Storm King Fourteen Memorial trail, receiving the Conservation Service Award for my work building the 150-mile mountain bike trail from Grand Junction, Colorado to Moab, Utah...well, the list is long so I'll stop with, I've had a great time and I'm very grateful.

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