winter grazing -- diversity

It's interesting in December to watch the cows graze. In summer, the diversities of forage -- in mid-field, at the woods' edge, in the forest understory -- are really evident, as hundreds of species, at various stages of growth, maturity, lignity, vie for a place in the solar bath pouring over them. This time of year -- cool season, short days, indirect sunlight -- plants are dormant, no longer reaching for the sun. Now it's lignin -- woody fiber -- that holds them up. They slump against one another, blanket one another, or stick up straight and rigid through the earth-shrouding mat. Shades of brown, tan, and yellow prevail.

And yet we can still see, if we look, how the cows -- pasture-wise with much experience -- assort their meals from the widest possible array of plants. Fescue, dormant and yellow-green, is pulled up in soggy mouthfuls. Clumps of orchard grass, where they appear, are clipped off rather short -- too short, if it happened often, but now, while they are dormant, they can endure this kind of impact, so long as they don't see grazing again until complete recovery, some time in May. Turf grasses are mown short, along with the dead tendrils of many small forbs.

Especially noticeable are the dark-brown, fibrous stems of hemp dogbane, rattling with small, colorless leaves when the cows are turned in, but gnawed down to short twigs, flaxen fibers fluttering from the chewed ends, in twenty-four hours.

No telling what benefit the cows accrue from this unpromising source, but their vibrant health attests that they know what they are doing