Through the dust and the screams, a ray of light shone off the tractor.
It was a battle the likes of which Bluegrass, Virginia hadn’t seen in years.
The humans had finally managed to get an advantage in the war against the thorns. Dreaded in the thorn kingdom was a machine known as,
THE BRUSH HOG!
This wasn’t a regular hog; they were bad enough for thorns, but this was different. A normal hog leaves some of the thorns standing and even leaves a little fertilizer in its wake. This horrific war machine took down everything in its path without a second thought.
The rancher was making his way toward one of the thorns’ biggest strongholds with this formidable war machine. The villages on the outskirts were razed left and right. Would the citizens of Thorntropolis have any hope of surviving?
The rancher started backing the brush hog into the thickest section of downtown when an unexpected ally appeared.
BONK!
The whirring of the blades stopped immediately. The hero was a large hidden rock in the heart of Thorntropolis. Many considered this boulder a nuisance but today he earned his place.
From that day on the thorns vowed to build their cities as close to rocks as they could to defend themselves from the rancher’s fearsome doomsday machine…
…
Ok, so…I broke a shear pin on the brush hog while trying to get rid of some thorns. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it won’t be the last. If you don’t know a shear pin is a piece that is designed to break first to protect other parts of the machine so don’t worry I’m already back up and running.
This is just step one in our process of getting rid of thorns without using any herbicides.
Herbicides are pretty much a 1 step process, and they work, but as I talked about last time there are many known and unknown downsides.
What we do is a 4 step process that takes more work but creates much better pastures and much cleaner animals.
1. We let pigs start the process. The pigs dig into the thorn beds and fertilize the ground preparing the soil for grass to grow. They also turn up lots of rocks so we can remove them easier.
2. We come in with the brush hog or a weed whacker with the blade where the thorn kingdom has reinforced its cities with too many rocks.
3. Then we unroll hay for the cows in the winter where the thorns used to be. This is where the real progress starts to be made. The hay covers the ground, protects the soil, and it also has tons of grass seed in it.
4. Once grasses start to take over the area it will be included in our normal cattle rotation. Some thorns will still be growing but they will be less and less over time and the grass will eventually out-compete them.
We will repeat some steps a few times, but this is the basic idea and it’s worked for us pretty well so far. The new ways are often faster, but at what cost?
This is how we keep herbicides away from our pastures and our animals and your meat. It also maintains the pastures’ diversity since herbicides kill many more plants than just the nuisance ones. Our pastures create some pretty awesome meat, and I wouldn’t want to risk killing good plants that are part of that taste.