Fauna

What’s a farm without animals?

Nothing but a piece of ground! It’s the animals that make the farm what it is.

There are the animals that we think of as farm animals–the sheep grazing in the pasture, the ducks napping underneath the truck, the chickens pecking through the grass, the dogs chasing cars along the fence-line.

And there’s the wildlife: the blue heron flying between our pond and a neighbor’s pond, the hummingbirds flitting around the mimosa tree blossoms, the foxes playing in the road, the black snakes eating the eggs in the duck house.

And there are insects, both the beautiful kind like iridescent blue butterflies and hovering dragonflies, and the pollinators like the honey bees and native bees, and the pests like Japanese beetles and deer flies.

But there are also fauna that we don’t see because they live in the soil, the bacteria and fungi, micro-arthropods and nematodes, and earthworms, and their web of life makes it possible for us to grow the plants that provide the food that we eat.

We’re working on farming all of them.

We keep sheep, managing them in an intensive rotational grazing system. Over time this will build the soil and the soil’s ecology, helping heal some of the damage done from past land management practices.

Chickens and ducks patrol a good chunk of the “home” part of the farm, and not only produce great eggs for us to eat, but also keep tick and chigger populations down.

We also try to provide habitat for wildlife. We don’t use any poisons, and instead of burning brush, we pile it up and it becomes home to all sorts of things.

And any kind of farmer should be doing all they can to make conditions so that the soil biology can thrive, because when soil biology thrives, plants thrive.