Mass Audubon Tests Management Intensive Grazing
Livestock Helps Improve Habitat at Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary
Aug 5, 2009
The sight of pigs, goats, sheep and poultry in temporary pens at a wildlife sanctuary is a bit surprising at first. But the reasons for their presence at Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary are sound. They are helping to restore grassland habitat and remove invasive alien plants.
What is Management Intensive Grazing?
Management Intensive Grazing is a livestock feeding style where animals are rotated through fields in succession based on the speed at which the foraged plants recover. This form of grazing is becoming an important part of sustainable agricultural practice.
Livestock farmers need less time, money and equipment to harvest and store feed. Management Intensive Grazing also improves the quality of fields as animals are moved before the roots of favored forage are damaged, allowing the plants to recover and preventing invasive plants from taking hold.
Why Use Livestock to Manage Wildlife Habitat?
Much of Cape Cod was originally wooded but those woodlands also included open areas where grassland plants could flourish. By the 1800s most of the wood had been harvested and the Cape had no forests. Today many woodlands on Cape Cod are early successional forest, which does not support grassland species.
In fact, throughout Massachusetts, grassland habitat is disappearing and management of conservation areas for grassland species is critical to preventing their local extinction.
Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary’s grasslands will provide nesting habitat for declining bird species such as the American woodcock (Scolopax minor) and Eastern meadowlark (Sturnella magna). Birds of prey including Northern Harrier (Circus cyaneus) and American kestrel (Falco sparverius), which hunt over open grassland, will also benefit.
Ocean Song Farm Livestock at Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary
With land at a premium on Cape Cod, farmers must look for creative ways to produce healthy free-range livestock. Ocean Song Farm, a Community Sustainable Agriculture operation, has found an ally in Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary.
The sanctuary property is not treated with pesticides or fertilizers and there is a tremendous variety of vegetation for the farm’s pigs, sheep, dairy goats and poultry to eat. The animals are grazed in rotation. Sanctuary Director, Ian Ives describes it as three levels of Managed Intensive Grazing with the coarse work done by the pigs, the moderate work by the sheep and goats and the fine work left to the poultry.
This is the first year that the project is being closely monitored and Ives is hopeful that he will be able to show the results to other sanctuaries and wildlife conservation areas as a good win-win management program which combines environmental stewardship, farm profitability and enhances local farming communities.
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