Cattle are boosting the soil on this P.E.I. farm — and fighting climate change
CBC
Sally Bernard's black and white cows wander over a field in Freetown, P.E.I., chewing on hay and basking in the warm April sunshine.
These are beef cattle, but their main purpose isn't to make it to market — it's to improve the quality of the soil beneath their hoofs.
"They're feeding the biology in the soil, which is then helping to sequester carbon," explains Bernard, co-owner of Barnyard Organics.
"It's just doing a whole slate of things that we don't even really fully understand yet."
Bernard is learning more about how to graze cattle on her organic grain farm through research as one of this year's Nuffield Canada scholars.
As part of the agricultural scholarship program, she'll travel to different parts of the world to visit farms that practice both grazing and crop growing — and bring that knowledge back to P.E.I. to help her farm and others on the Island.
"I just wanted to meet other people that are doing it elsewhere, get their ideas, network with them, share some of those challenges and successes," Bernard said.
Grazing and cropping in the same fields is not a popular practice on P.E.I., she says, or anywhere in the Maritimes.
"Either you crop in this field, or you pasture in this field," Bernard explains. "It's very rare that they go together."
She says taking a combined farming approach comes with some challenges, such as avoiding soil compaction and needing to set up fences and water for cattle.
"Having a farm with one commodity is already a lot of management," she said. "So incorporating those other things does complicate it."
But for Bernard, and her husband, believe the benefits outweigh the demands.
Beyond improving soil biology, their cattle herd boosts the fertility of their soil by providing free manure. And that saves money they'd otherwise spend on expensive fertilizer.
"This is a really timely topic given the pressures to reduce fertilizer use, and that the cost of all of those things are going up," she said.
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