Presenter: Shawn and Beth Dougherty
Description: Meet farmers from Ohio who are using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy and hear how they are using a minimum of off-farm inputs as a key to whole-farm sustainability.
The Doughertys have been farming together since the 1980’s, for the last twenty years in eastern Ohio, where they manage 90 acres, much of it designated by the state as ‘not suitable for agriculture’. Using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy, they raise dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm-fed hogs, and a variety of poultry, producing most of the food, feed and fertility for humans and animals, on the farm. Concerned that farming is so often dependent upon multiple off-farm resources, from feed, fuel and fertilizer to water and electricity, their ongoing project is to identify and test the means by which farming was done for centuries with a minimum of off-farm inputs. Their research has led them to identify grass conversion, especially the daily conversion of grass into milk by dairy ruminants, as a key to whole-farm sustainability, combined with the integrated nutrient feed-backs that are possible with a community of diverse animal and plant species, domestic and native. They are the authors of The Independent Farmstead, Chelsea Green Press 2016.
Recorded: Nov. 18, 2024
Video: Grazing Micro Dairies