Mob Grazing
We hope to be able to put cattle onto the land – they graze very differently from sheep and don’t eat all the flowers. Sheep tend to cut grass flat where cattle tear off clumps with their tongues. The result tends to be more varied creating areas which provide habitat for a variety of different insects and invertebrates to thrive.
The cattle might be used for ‘mob grazing’ a technique which mimics the way natural herds such as Wildebeest graze in Africa. Each day the cattle are moved onto a fresh patch of long grass, grazing it intensively before moving on quickly – and not returning for maybe eight weeks or more.
This management then creates a lot of “green manure” in the form of trampled plants and also the livestock dunging on the land in a contained area. So the hope is that it will increase the organic material relatively quickly. We will have to await the outcome of this method though over the next few years.
Mob grazing is already used elsewhere in Gloucestershire and on some National Trust places where it is proving to be very successful in allowing cattle grazing with benefits for nature.
Sweet flowers
The land that has been permanent pasture for decades is also being managed slightly differently with the grasslands not being grazed until after the flowering season. Over many years recently the grassland has been grazed with sheep which love the sweet flowers resulting in none achieving maturity to allow them to seed and reproduce.