Converting scrub to pasture

Ohio was forest at the time of the Revolutionary War, and so was Florida. Any farmland there was carved out with a plow and spade. The hand of man disappears from the picture and they go right back to being forest.

The land grows naturally what is suitable to be grown there. If it's suitable for scrub, it will be scrub. If it's suitable for grass, it will be grass. If it's suitable for forest, it will be forest.

As I said, I agree that absent the hand of man, which can be in the form of overstocked fenced pastures, there is a natural state for each area. But what you say about suitable doesn't follow. Land can be quite suitable for grass even if it isn't the species that will eventually dominate an area. Otherwise, all those beautiful Kentucky horse farms would be forests.

You can use solar powered electric fences to fence in your goats, move the fence around after they have eaten it down to where you want. You have to train them and house them, get them water, but it would be one way to use goats with out fencing in the whole area.

I thought I was going have goats fix my disaster, but went with the brush hog because I could just hire a guy and be done with it, no animals to take care of. Now that I have it slightly under control (a year later, brush hogged twice) I am looking for some goats once it warms up.

...........For 8k you should have been able to build a perimeter fence(barbed wire-5 wire fence around the entire outer perimeter . My guess is your perimeter is around 2,600 feet !
..........If you plan properly , you can put the bwire on the Outside of the posts ! Then , at some later date you can stretch field fence on the INSIDE of the existing posts . The field fence only needs to be 3 feet tall to keep the goats IN and the dogs OUT ! , fordy

I too would clear the fence line and run goats. Selling the goats after you where done with them would pay for themselves and maybe some of the fencing

I don't like mowing and we have steep, stumpy, stony soils - rolling a tractor sideways down the mountain is very un-fun.

The trick with livestock is to mob graze them. Put them in on small areas that they eat down completely, then plant (mob seed), then move them onward. Storm seeding and frost seeding also work with this. (http://www.sugarmtnfarm.com/?s=frost%20seeding)

Once it is basically converted you switch to managed rotational grazing and the soils, forages and animals will all improve over the years. This is what we do. We use pastured pigs (400), sometimes sheep, chickens (300-500), ducks and geese. In addition to eating our pastures they pay the bills - we farm. Goats are good too - that's what my brother does. I have a cousin that does Highland cattle. Always wanted some - thus my userID.

Get up a good perimeter fence and then you can start doing small areas inside it.

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

If that is light sand in a dry climate, removing the brush doesn't make it pasture worthy, could just be open to wind erosion.
We can all give advice on what to do in our little chunk of the world, but that advice is worthless if your conditions are different.

Exactly! That's why I suggest using goats for a couple of years. Any green leaf/briar/vine, etc., that pops up will be quickly snipped off and eatened. I done a patch several years ago with goats and I hope to do another one this summer. Then this place will look like it did 50 years ago when my grandpa was still alive and living on it.

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r.h. in oklahoma

Raised a country boy, and will die a country boy.

By looking at the picture provided I am confident that cutting back the brush will in fact create a pasture worthy area.

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~ Mike @ Solsikke farms ~

Goats would be the most manageable way to deal with it, I would think. They can turn plant matter into meat and milk faster than most any other livestock. Fencing is a problem with them, but I run mine back up into pens come evening so they aren't out working on an escape plan overnight (and so critters don't come eat them).

But I look at that picture and I wonder why even bother.

There's so much habitat there that I would think it would provide more calories for my family WILD than it ever would being put under the hand of man.

Allan Savory in his TED talk (which is the only thing I know about him) disagrees with you, as does Geoff Lawton. Both believe, in some form or fashion, that animals on the sand in a dry climate is what it takes to reverse desertification. I don't have the personal knowledge or experience to argue either side of that issue, but their vids are fascinating.

Well, think it through.

You have sand, which is short of organic matter in the soil. Limited fertility.

What plants grow there are scant and scarce. Cows or goats eat those plants and deposit material (feces) back on the top of the ground. The material through various natural processes gets churned back into the soil, creating a new layer of topsoil.

HOWEVER, it takes a very long time for this to happen.

In the photo, there are trees and bushes there. They will be depositing leaves and twigs and such onto the surface of the soil as well, which will then create leaf litter which ultimately builds soil.

I guess it's just a question of which is going to happen faster. Neither of which is a speedy process.

Short-sighted farming is what has raped so many soils in our country in the first place. I know of what I speak, since I live on top of denuded cotton fields that have been sitting fallow since 1947 and STILL have only limited fertility available.

If you need a patch of land to "pay its own way" then you're almost always going to do that at the cost of soil fertility. To me, success is defined by having soil that my grandchildren can still grow things in.

I am not familiar with Allen Savory. But I am familiar with both droughty sand and high water table sand. If enough humus is added, tons and tons, water retention can be improved and leaching reduced.
A friend has property on a slope as shown in the OP. It is wooded. The trees are either 80 years old and dying or 20 feet tall, broomstick diameter and dying. The big trees are dying because they are old. The young trees struggle each year and eventually die due to drought. Some years they are fine, other years many die. There is a good carpet of natural leaves, but the nutrients quickly leach well past the reach of forest vegetation. Gradual removal of the mature trees has not increased survival of smaller trees. There is no brush or grasses.

In another area, sandy soil for 6 feet, then clay for many feet. The water table is just inches below the surface. I have seen spruce trees 70 years old that are barely larger than a baseball bat. The high water table limits many varieties of plants, while the sand allows the nutrients to leach away.

My Aunt has tried for 40 years to grow grass and flowers in northern Arizona, to no avail. She waters three times a day and has added tons of top soil. Stop watering for a week and everything dies.

Even when there is a water table that plants can reach in the spring, if the water table slips away the rest of the year, plants cannot survive.

Sandy slopes are always subject to water erosion.

I thought it was over grazing that caused desertification?

For those asking for more data on my soil/climate, here is a soil map. I like in North Georgia...just south of the mountains.

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That's an absolutely beautiful piece of property. Is the part you're trying to convert to pasture the little marked corner in the upper right?

If so, I have to ask "why"?

As a person who lives in a very arid and open region, with only about 7 small trees on our entire 10 acres, I think that place looks like paradise to me.

The problem area is actually everything to the right of the driveway. When this picture was taken, it looks like it was fairly inhabitable but they just let it go for a couple of years and now the briars and small pine trees have sprouted. I just need it to be able to sustain farm animals and grass is always what I thought was best to do that with. I dont want to get rid of the trees, but the briars and such make it somewhat inhospitable.

Well, I don't think Georgia is known for its great grazing lands, but I think if you fenced it off and turned animals into it (rotational grazing) then it would slowly and sustainably move to what you want it to.

Animals generally improve property if not left in one spot too long. They'll beat down paths for you and eat up everything which can be eaten up.

On the bright side, those briars are going to be an enormous boon to the rabbit population. You might take more meat calories in hasenpfeffer off that land than you'd ever get out of goats.

Hasenpfeffer - had to look that one up. Sounds good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasenpfeffer

It's pretty dang good. Any game meat always benefits from being marinated in wine and vinegar, but the blander white meats are especially savory after such a treatment.

Makes me think if Laverne & Shirley

"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated,"

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~ Mike @ Solsikke farms ~