cattle

 It is twenty below zero as I write this and I can see from where I sit the cattle at their hay rings in the south pasture.  A dozen or so lie on the leftovers from a prior feeding.  They are chewing their cuds and several columns of steam rise from their breath and body heat.  We feed cattle in the pastures on a slow rotation through perhaps three paddocks in the course of a winter and we do this deliberately in an attempt to mimic nature, which always operates in a circle.  Our agriculture pretty much denies this reality, insisting instead on a straight line picture: inputs in equals growth equals slaughter/harvest equals money and waste.  And then we buy more inputs to start over.  

With grassfed cattle production it is more apparent that the proper model is rather: birth/seed then growth then harvest/death then decay, then regeneration and then back to birth and seed sprouting.  The glitch in our cattle feeding scheme is that the winter hay mostly does not come from the pasture, but from hay fields that are part of the organic cropping rotation.  

This cycle is a bit harder to see with pig production or annual cropping.  But it is still the overall pattern and we forget it perhaps at our peril.  It also provides place of honor to perennial plants over annual ones.