Principles of Animals In Permaculture
There are a few ways that permaculturists integrate animals into food systems that are different than usual practices in modern agriculture, but mimic how many ancient cultures or indigenous people used and still use animals
Animals are a huge subject in itself. There is much to know about each animal - its specific needs, diseases, life cycle, predators, etc. In this course, we focus on what you need to know to design a holistic system for and with animals, and we share some examples of using permaculture principles to integrate them beneficially. If you decide to incorporate animals into your system, you will need to do additional research on the specific needs and care of your animals.
One of the best ways we’ve learned about them is to work with or just talk to people who have done it for years. Often, they have tips and tricks that would take days or years to research.
Why have animals in the system at all? A huge reason is for their manure. Animal manure concentrates nutrients in a way that makes them easy to access. Animal waste is an important component of all ecological systems. Without it, systems can degrade over time. Animals also break up soil, plant seeds, and perform other important ecosystem functions. Recognizing what these are is key to creating a regenerative system.
You don’t have to have domestic animals in your system to be successful. But if you do, you can increase their value by fully understanding not only their use to you, but to the ecology that you’re in.
Domestic animal manure is especially valuable in kitchen gardens. Annual veggies use a lot of nutrients, and remove them from the system into your body (or your customers’ if you sell them). For now, we have an abundant organic waste stream (food waste, animal manures, etc) in most places in the world that we can capture for our kitchen gardens, but it’s also good to think about how you can capture manure on site.
Understand the needs and resources of your animal.
Doing this well will greatly improve the efficiency of your design.
Example:
What does a chicken need? What is in the nature of a chicken that they naturally want to do?
Food (a variety)
Water
Shelter
Exercise (scratching)
A place to lay eggs
Other chickens, a flock
Protection from predators
Shade, when it’s hot
What does a chicken provide?
Eggs
Meat
Feathers
Companionship
Entertainment
Eats pests
Chases rats
There is more, but that gives you an idea.
When designing the space for chickens, think about how you can design food nearby. For instance, a mulberry tree, rows of kenaf, a log full of bugs, and other goodies that they can access are nice.
For your own needs, how can you design their egg boxes so you can access them most easily?
This is a standard egg box that is easy to reach by opening their “roof”. Ideally, you can collect the eggs from outside the coop by lifting up the “roof”.
Understanding the basic needs of each animal and providing it passively within the design as much as possible reduces your work because you’re working with the nature of the animal and of the system and what it can provide.
By the way, “Needs and Resources” is a powerful exercise that can be used in many settings to improve the design.
Integrate, don’t segregate.
This can take some thoughtful design because some animals, like goats or chickens or horses, can be quite destructive to food systems and ecosystems in general. In some cases, it’s important to keep your animal separate from the kitchen garden, for instance. Many people who have had animals have long practiced keeping a firm separation of systems there. It can be much less messy.
But a little creative thought can open up some ways in which they can be integrated safely.
For instance, we use our chickens to create garden beds. Once they are created, chickens can be pretty destructive by scratching them apart, destroying the fungal and microbial networks we built up. But they’re great at killing off weeds in an area and then dropping their manure and building fertile soil. Think of the time you would take doing that! Why not let them express their natural selves and scratch the weeds bare, while fertilizing your beds with the best fertilizer around?
We have been building garden beds with our chickens. They stayed in their pen for a couple of weeks, scratching up the weeds. We then started shoveling wood chips into the bed to provide some “brown” material to go with their hot manure. They got to scratch for the bugs in the chips very happily while building fertile garden soil for us all the while over several months. We let them free range for the summer - lots of bugs - and will move them back into the pen for a final go round this winter with more chips.
The only work you have is occasionally adding some “brown” material like leaves or wood chips, which will then, with the manure, create a rich beautiful soil.
Design your system so that animals meet as many needs in the system as possible. We built a fence where we wanted a garden bed and kept chickens there during the day.
We’ll be using sheep in our orchards to keep the grass mowed.
Protect animals from predators.
This is a must for most domestic animals, especially if you intend to breed any of them. Babies are very vulnerable to a range of predators. One simple way to do this is to have guard animals and/or protective shelter, at night especially. Some sites need a lot more of this than others. Use your design tools to come up with a good plan on this.
Some good guard animals are donkeys (including miniature donkeys), llamas (can be moody), geese (can be moody), guinea hens (very good alarm system, but they’re not bright and tend to kill themselves off via accidents), dogs (many breeds must be trained to not be predators themselves, especially of smaller animals).
We designed our chicken coop to be covered with wire cloth on all open sides including top and bottom. We buried the wire cloth six inches under ground, and put a corrugated metal roof to keep rain out. Note that chicken wire is not strong enough to make a good coop - some predators, like raccoons, can go through it. Six sides is predator proof. Predators that can dig under a coop that has no protection on the bottom include weasels, foxes, and raccoons. Those that can come in from the top include those plus owls, hawks, and eagles.
Here’s a simple latch on an external egg box. Raccoons and sometimes other animals can open most of the simple latches, this one is trickier.
Our girls are so safe at night, we have forgotten to shut the door a couple of times, but the local predators have long since started going elsewhere for food, so nothing bothered them. Most who have been around chickens or have friends with chickens have heard at least one horror story of a raccoon getting into a coop and killing most of the chickens. They do that. This is why we go to such lengths.
Stay within ecological limits.
Overgrazing the system is a great way to degrade it quickly. It’s a great way to ensure your system gets worse, instead of better and to give yourself a lot more work. It’s one of the major causes of desertification, springs drying up, and other damages. If you’re clearing a forested area in order to plant grass to graze, think about whether you really need to do that.
Florida Cracker cows and sheep have been especially adapted to being able to forage in wooded areas, for instance. There are many ways you can incorporate animals into healthy ecologies without degrading the ecology. The best way, of course, would be to add animals in a way that regenerates the land. This is being done all over the world with holistic grazing (see video, below on this) and other integrated, ecologically friendly animal systems.
Right animal, right place.
There are two aspects to this.
1). Understand the destructive aspects of your animal. How can it degrade the system if left to roam freely? If you want a grazing animal that won’t eat the young trees in your food forest, don’t get goats. Try cows or sheep. Even some of them will find young woody material attractive. You have two choices. Get animals who won’t eat trees, or fence either your trees or your animals.
Electric or other temporary fences are highly recommended as you can move the animals exactly where you need or want them, and keep the pasture healthy. Another example is chickens. They love to scratch. They will disturb your beautiful composted raised beds in your garden if you let them. We fence off the gardens to keep them out.
These goats pass the nut of the fruit they’re eating through their poop and it’s gathered by people and sold for $300/lb (argan oil). Sounds like a win-win solution, right? The goats don’t eat the leaves, just the fruit. But they injure the tree and reduce its health and lifespan by the damage to the branches from their hooves. Unintended consequences. The lesson is - pay attention to the changes being made by your animals.
2). What species really thrives in your region naturally? Don’t try to raise Scottish sheep in Florida please! Or tropical sheep in Scotland. You are likely to end up with some dead sheep. Heirloom breeds that have been in your region for decades are often the best choices. They often don’t produce as much as newer breeds, but the care they need is far less than many animals bred for maximum production and they are able to survive better in the natural ecosystems of your region. Two heritage breeds in Florida that are not that well known but have a lot of potential are the Cracker sheep and Cracker cow. Cowboys used to turn them loose in the woods and then herd them in once or twice a year. They have adapted to heat, hurricanes, and being able to survive on our native landscapes, from prairies to oak scrub.
Florida Cracker cow and calf.
Eve and Stella, a mixed blue and Ameraucana from our flock, enjoying our food forest. We love Ameraucanas for their blue eggs and many years of laying. The mixed is probably Wyandotte and something else. We also have Rhode Island Reds, good free rangers, but they don’t lay as long or often as Ameraucanas. There are many breeds that do well in a wide range of climates; each has their own pros and cons. “Mutt” breeds also tend to do very well.
Feed animals from your site when possible.
Designing your site to be able to support animals is an important component. This can be tricky with high production animals like chickens. Chickens need a lot of protein and calcium to be able to lay eggs every day. This is not a natural thing that animals do - most birds lay eggs 1-5 times per year. Thus, we bake the shells from our chicken eggs, crush them, and sprinkle them on their food, to ensure they get enough calcium. A shortage of it can cause malformed eggs which can become a life threatening problems for chickens.
Many people free range their chickens but usually one ends up increasing the number because they lay less often without a well balanced organic feed. You can grow high protein, high value fodder for animals to help them to be more productive. The best choices are plants that need little or no inputs (like fertilizer or watering) in your ecosystem. On our sand dune, this is challenging. High protein plants that can thrive in volume on a sand dune are rare, and many are invasive in our system. So we compromise, using some native plants, like high protein Fakahatchee grass or Spanish Needle (bidens alba - our chickens love it) and some relatively low input drought tolerant non-natives, like moringa, kenaf, vetiver and Napier grass, mulberry, pigeon pea and sweet potato. All of these make great mulch that feeds the soil as well.
There is a balance here - good nutrition helps prevent disease. It can take some work to find that balance with food you grow yourself.
If you want cows or horses, be sure to understand what your site can support. The average cow with a calf needs 1.5-2 acres of land to support it. Some heritage breeds need less. Some ecosystems are more brittle and delicate and can’t support as many cows. Horses can be very hard on ecosystems because of the shape of their hooves and grazing patterns. We wouldn’t graze a horse on our sand dune, for instance. If we wanted horses, we’d keep them in a contained area and bring food to them.
Smallholders can use animals.
It’s possible to support animals in your system even in a suburban yard. Chickens and rabbits can be supported by what you grow. Miniature goats, such as Dwarf Nigerian may need some external food especially if you are milking them, but on the other hand, they are very human friendly and can be taken on walks to forage. You even may be able to hire them out to “mow” your neighbor’s weeds. The manure from these animals is very valuable and will continue to keep your kitchen garden fertile and abundant.
Nigerian Dwarf goats https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.wvF6LK2XzPcjujG_dO2YdQHaFj&pid=Api
Broadscale use of animals
Grazing animals have been a part of the prairie and savanna ecosystem for eons. Yet, only recently did modern humans come to understand the key roles they played in those systems.
Allan Savory was a game warden in Africa, on a site where large animals (elephants, wildebeest, etc) were removed to let it recover. It was a surprise to discover that the system degraded more when animals were removed. Careful observation showed that they contributed important things that kept the ecosystem healthy and balanced. In the plains of the US, running buffalo tore up the soil, allowing seeds to find shelter and rain to soak in. They left manure to fertilize the prairies, and created wallows that became watering holes for many other animals, who also contributed to keep the system healthy.
Roaming herds did one thing that cattle often don’t do - they kept moving. They would eat the tops of the grass, not all of it. And this stimulated the grass to grow rather than injuring its capacity to survive (the definition of overgrazing). Savory wondered what would happen if domestic grazers were moved through a system like wild animals.
For a while, the project we partnered with at Pine Ridge Lakota reservation, OLCERI, took care of a few hundred wild horses on 8000 acres of ranchland. We noticed that they liked to hang out on top of the hills, probably to be able to see anything coming.
The grass was overgrazed on all the hill tops. This creates a cascading erosion problem and potentially could dry up springs because it removes the ability of the land to catch water and let it sink in.
Solution? Fence the hill tops off (electric fence is a fast and less expensive way to do this though there is a risk of electricity failing). Then plant perennial grasses or trees on them. This accomplishes two things. The trees reduce the view, provide shelter for potential predators, and provide less food, thus making it less attractive for the horses to stay on the hilltops, and also create rain capture. The challenge is the high winds that sweep the prairies.
It is easier to get trees going on the north slope of the hills and gradiently move upward. Trees that block the downslope view still make hilltops less attractive to wild horses.
Summary
Animals can bring abundance and joy into the system. Design for them, and make caring for them that much easier and more pleasant.