The Scoop on Poop: First Steps into Permaculture

As a mom to four, I am not unfamiliar with the poop. Whether it's the blow-out infant diapers, chasing around a potty-training toddler, or mucking out animal pens, I know that the smudges on my overalls could be dirt or it could be something else. It is almost never chocolate.

Attempting to live this homestead life, the presence of poop, and the question of what to do with said poop, becomes a regular topic of discussion. The animal headcount on our farm today is one cow, four pigs, a variety of thirty-some-odd birds, two dogs, and five cats. The bigger the animal, the more they eat, and the more they... produce. And in trying to be mindful homesteaders, we have been using this constant production line to our benefit by taking our first steps into this beautiful thing called permaculture.

What is permaculture? I would define it as a way of living that helps preserve the natural cycles of a particular environment. It means, "Permanent Agriculture," to imply that there isn't just one growing season, or one productive season, but that all times of the year are connected and a part of a life cycle. It's also important that this is part of living in a "closed system" that isn't introducing new species/chemicals/products for growing, but rather using what is readily available in that environment. It's a green way of living, but more so. There's vastly more involved, but our little farm is only at the beginning of this journey, so I'll just share what we have started to incorporate at our homestead.

Ideally, every part of the farm works together. Take my husband's pig pen/rotational grazing/paddock system into consideration. We have a pen in the center of pasture, with (once it's all set-up and the pigs stop stampeding through the electrical wire) paddocks radiating out from this central hub. Pigs graze in one pasture for a time, rooting through the ground with their fantastic snouts. They dig up the rocks under the surface and find grubs and roots and other delicious goodies. They poop and trample in their manure, and we sprinkle in whole corn kernels, some foraging cover crop seeds like clover, peas, buckwheat and beans. They stomp it into the mud before being moved to the next paddock where they begin the process again. Then we send in the chickens.

Chickens scratch through and eat the flies and bugs out of the manure (and off the bigger animals), and contribute by pooping also. They help spread manure around the paddock and then we move them out as well. By the time the pigs come around to that same paddock again, it has had a chance to rest and grow the seeds that the pigs themselves buried, which they can now eat, along with the native vegetation that had been agitated from its dormant state by pigs rooting. (Seriously, one season we had a hill with sparse grass. Then the pigs did their thing and turned it into a dirt patch. The next spring, that patch of dirt was like a jungle. Different vegetation that would normally have been choked out by the faster growing grass was springing up so vigorously and so tall compared to other areas where the pigs hadn't touched!) So cool, yes? I think so.

Our pigs till up the land for gardening. You can set them loose into an area overrun with brambles and brush, and they will clear it down and soften up the earth and eat lichen and moss and clear out low hanging bushes to make dense forest patches into beautiful wooded glens.

A similar process happens when you add in a cow. Cow manure is so nutrient dense because of their unique way of digesting food. Did you know that pigs like to eat fresh cow pies? Ew, was my first reaction, but then I read about the intact amino acids that's in cow droppings, and how it's basically like a super nutrient snack for the pigs, so no wonder when we let the pigs out to forage, they go straight to where Cookie was and eat up whatever they can get.

Grazing animals are given mineralized salt to help supplement their diets when they're out on pasture. You can lay out tubs of different minerals: zinc, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur etc. and your lovely cow will select the minerals that are lacking in the grass where she is grazing. Then, those minerals get put directly into her pasture through the manure, ensuring that new growth will be richer and more vigorous than before! In addition to this, we have been using Cookie's own hay to seed her pasture area. She likes a particular grass hay, and so instead of putting it in a manger for her to eat out of, we've been spreading it in different areas around her pasturing pen. She tosses it around anyway to cherry pick the pieces she likes first, but by spreading it around, she is seeding the ground with the grass that she likes so that in a few weeks, the new grass growth will be her favorite, cutting down on hay that we have to buy outside.

Mucking out the pig pen and collecting cow pies is something that I have actually come to enjoy because I see this black gold go from field to compost to garden. I can already see a change in the soil in our gardens because of this nutritious addition. I took it very personally when we did a soil test in our garden to discover that it was so depleted and we failed all the tests. Failed! It was a personal affront to me, as a nerdy Asian, to have failed. But the addition of compost of all animal variety manures, plus their bedding and our kitchen scraps, raked leaves, grass clippings, etc. is going to ensure that we never fail another test again.

The ground where our pigs have been allowed to forage is loamy and turned over, ready for seeds. We used to be over run with bugs that would eat away at our plants at all times of the year, but with our free-ranging chickens and guineas, we have had far fewer pests.

We've only just started figuring out how to take advantage of the different skills and behavior our animals have, but it's exciting to see what kind of progress we've made in the past few years. I heard Joel Salatin say that farmers aren't ignorant country bumpkins, but intellectual agrarians, striving to take full advantage of what is available to them for the success of their farming endeavors. I like to consider myself a homesteading scientist. We are running experiments every day, taking in data, improving methodology and hopefully making some good advancements in this homesteading laboratory.