The Cost Of Grass

The history of our small pasture is brief: In the early 20th century a farmer cleared the timber, strung the perimeter with barbed wire, and set out a small herd of cattle. Variously beef and dairy cows lived here until the nineteen-sixties when the animals were removed, and the land was left alone to revert back to forest. We acquired the property in 1996, and in 2005 converted about a third of this woods-turned-pasture-turned-woods back into pasture.

The old way of making pasture—almost certainly employed here nearly 100 years ago—was to simply cut the timber close to the ground and turn the cattle out. The cattle ate most of the weeds, killed off the brush, and fertilized the ground. Gradually, without significant human input, conditions became favorable for grass, and a passable pasture was born. Of course in its first years it would not have been a picture-perfect pasture, and likely did not produce much.

Our method, in keeping with the production-driven ethos of our time, was far quicker. We knocked down trees and pushed out stumps with a track-loader, mowed with a brush hog, mechanically raked off stones and debris, limed the ground, and seeded. Bingo! Good pasture in six months.

That flurry of work seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I wonder if there were costs beyond that of machinery and labor.

Bringing the question to mind was a recent research study linking low and erratic sleep patterns to higher incidences of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Apparently the evidence is building that if we mess with our sleep cycles, we’re asking for trouble.

Some observers of the phenomenon blame the invention of electric lights and other machine-age advances, which freed us to overrule the natural diurnal cycle. That sounds reasonable. As every witness to the human condition knows, freedom inclines to license, and so it went with the machine age. We indulged our desires to have more, make more, and control more, and the result is our current hyperactive, striving, 24/7 society. Our pasture is representative of the mess.

The slow pasture-making process of 100 years ago was of necessity of course. They had no other option. But just as our modern methods have costs we may not suspect, the old way likely had unsuspected benefits. At least one was the cultivation of patience. Apparently other benefits included low rates of many troubling diseases (and, of course, good nights’ sleep).