5 Regenerative Practices On Our Farm

The best way to eat and shop with confidence is to know your farmer. And to know the farming practices behind your food. My guess is, that’s why you’re here! In a world full of label claims and marketing schemes, it can be pretty confusing to know what to look for at the grocery store. Should you shop for certified organic products? Or should you preference local over organic? What does it mean when a product says sustainable? Or humanely raised?

A transparent food system is one in which consumers know where their food comes from and how it was raised. At our farm, you can see behind-the-scenes through our blogs, on social media, or in-person at our on-farm pickups or community events. If you’d ever like to have a look around, just let us know and we’ll make it happen!

In the spirit of knowing your farmer and food, we’d like to share these 5 regenerative practices at MoSo Farm.

Animals Live On Pasture 🐷

Year-round the cattle and pigs are out on pasture where they are happiest! On the coldest days, we make sure they have access to a shelter or windbreak. But in stark contrast to the confinement operations where much of our country’s meat is produced, our animals are never confined and hardly spend any time in a barn. This is not only a humane practice, but a regenerative one. Why? Because livestock are our most powerful tools for building soil. As we discussed in our former blog, livestock are key players in the nutrient cycle. Through grazing, ruminating, and depositing manure across the farm - they cycle nutrients between the plants, soil, and atmosphere.

Clover Adds Fertility 🍀

Instead of using synthetic fertilizers which are made from petrochemicals and often end up in our waterways, we plant clover every spring. Clover is a legume, meaning it “fixes” nitrogen or extracts nitrogen from the air and makes it available to pasture plants. This is a natural way to increase soil fertility and support deep-rooted perennial plants that keep soil in place.

Cows Spread Their Own Manure 💩

If there’s one thing that cows do well, it’s poop. Instead of using a diesel-powered manure spreader to manually move manure from a confined barn to the pastures (yes, most meat operations do this), we let the cattle spread their own manure! This is a primary benefit of rotational grazing as the manure gets spread on daily paddocks throughout the entire farm, adding important nutrients back into the soil.

Trees Provide Shade and Sequester Carbon 🌳

Our 510 planted trees are sequestering carbon as they grow while also providing shade to animals, thereby improving their health and growth. The practice of managing livestock, forages, and trees in one system is called silvopasture. According to the book Drawdown where over 100 scientists quantified the carbon sequestration potential of 94 solutions to climate change, silvopasture ranked #11!

Grasses Get to Rest 🌱

We move cattle to fresh pasture daily. This has a multitude of benefits for animal, soil and pasture health — chief among them is the ability for grasses to rest. When our cattle leave a daily paddock, we often do not return them to that area for 40-80 days. This gives grasses the opportunity to recover and send roots deep into the ground that feed soil biology and sequester carbon. When livestock are allowed to graze at large at all times (sometimes called “continual grazing”), they eat their favorite plants and go back for more every time there is new growth, ultimately stunting grasses in the long-term and creating overgrazed pastures that look like putting greens.