On Christmas week, our water pipes froze, leaving us without water. We innovated for daily tasks like washing hands and going to the bathroom, but it brought up a good question. What would happen if we lost water for a longer period of time, and how could we increase our water resiliency?
Prevention and Preparation
Prevention is a key to being water resilient. Our pipes froze because we weren’t prepared for days of single digit temps. Next time, we’ll insulate them if the weather is going to be cold. Also, keeping a single faucet running would have prevented the pipes from freezing.
Preparation makes emergencies a lot more bearable. When our water went out, we had bottled drinking water on hand from when our water was turned off for construction. If you have forewarning, prepare!
Some Solutions
When we lost water, we were blessed to have friends gather round and help out. Some got us bottled drinking water, and others gave us a Berkey water filtration systems for drinking water from our creek, which saved us from having to buy more water.
Berkey water filter and tank
We flushed the toilets by hauling in five gallon buckets of water from a large tank pumped from our creek, and washed our hands with a small filter bag and tube.
Tank with water from creek
This made it possible to survive rather normally, even with no grid water, which was awesome!
We realize that not everyone has a creek, so you have to innovate according to your circumstances, but these are just some ideas for preparedness in case of an emergency. Other ideas could be collecting runoff from your roof, or rain barrels.
This was a great, albeit inconvenient, learning experience for us. Thankfully, none of our pipes burst, and we got our water back after 5 days. But it has changed our resiliency list: drilling a well has moved up higher on our list!
If you’re just starting, you may not know exactly why you should rotational graze your animals. But there are many benefits that can be unlocked when you move your animals around consistently.
Lower Your Load
Worms live in your animals’ stomachs, and if your animals have them, they come out in the poop, back onto the grass. And if your animals eat the grass, they get the worms, who absolutely love having a safe place to breed and grow. In this way, the worms can easily spread from animal to animal. But if you move your animals daily, or at least give them fresh grass, they won’t be as likely to eat the contaminated grass and get worms. This is an especially important benefit to ruminants.
Save on Food
Sheep, cows, and goats were make to eat grass and leaves. And, they love the fresh growth of a juicy pasture. Chickens might need a little extra grain, but they can also forage for leaves and bugs, and they love kitchen scraps! So why waste money on unneeded feed when you could feed your animals mostly grass? True, it does take a little extra labor and devotion, but it’s worth it for your animals’ health, and the cost.
You Don’t Have Time To Mow
If you move your animals around, they will eat the grass down and then you don’t have to mow it. You can also plan ahead and allot a few days worth of grass not to mow, so they’ll have something to eat after you mow the rest of your yard. (Hint: you don’t have to mow that part!) Depending on how big your yard is and how many animals you have, you may still have to mow parts of your yard to keep it from getting out of hand, but it definitely cuts down on how much you have to do.
Lie Down in Green Pasture
OK, the fertilizer is poop, but it works great. Wherever the animals go gets the love, so moving them around is best. Also, eating the grass helps stir up the locked-up seed bed, introducing new plants into your pasture ecosystem. You can restore a ruined pasture this way, and make it a beautiful green again.
Hacks and How-To’s
OK, now that you know why, lets dig into how. Because there is no guarantee it will be easy. But there are ways to minimize the hassle of rotational grazing.
Fold Your Fence
We use this hack every day in summer with our sheep, and we love it. Depending on how many animals you have, how much they eat, and which fences you use, you might not be able to do this, but it works great for a smaller flock. Basically, you set up a fence that has three of four days worth of grass inside, and then collapse the corners into the middle. The next day, you can expand it out again and easily supply your animals with fresh, un-pooped-on grass.
The left side of this fence looks like a zigzag– that’s the folded fence technique. We’ll fold those triangles out later for an easy morning of chores.
Plan Ahead
On a day when you’re not as busy, set up and fold some extra fences to have available when the animals run out of their current pasture. That way, you can just move them in quick on the days when you are in a hurry. After all, moving and setting up fences is the hardest part.
Go Portable
Conventional animal housing is really hard to move. It was not made for rotational grazing. So if at all possible, upgrade to lightweight housing, or housing with wheels so you can actually move it with your animals. For chickens, we recommend the ChickShaw, which is a coop-on-wheels that fits forty chickens, and conveniently deposits the droppings on the ground. For sheep, we just built a shed out of 2×4’s, which is sort of heavy, but doable.
Practice Makes Perfect
Last but not least, try to get in a routine that makes the most of the time you have. We carry out all the food we all need at once so we don’t have to make multiple trips back to the garage. We set up fences in advance and use the folded fence method. And of course, the kids help, so that makes things a lot faster and more fun.
Are you ready? You can do it! It just takes a bit of getting used to.
