About the farm
A small pasture operation on glaciated till and loess soils, about halfway between Denton and Crete. This page is the longer version: what the ground is, how it is laid out, and what we are trying to do with it.
The ground itself
Western Lancaster County sits where the Dissected Till Plains meet the loess uplands, near the western limit of the Pleistocene glacier. The parent material here is glacial till, which is why cobbles and small rocks turn up throughout the soil profile — and why a post hole in the wrong spot stops short.
Slopes run from 7% to 30% across most of the pasture, with roughly 25 m (~83 ft) of total relief. Terrain generally rises from the northwest corner toward the mid and south pasture. Two gullies cut through the property, about 15 feet deep at their deepest, holding mature cottonwoods with cedar working in along the sides. They function as drainage corridors, not grazing ground.
Soils
Four soil units cover essentially all of the pasture. They explain most of the variation in how the grass grows — and where it does not.
| Soil | Slopes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Burchard clay loam | 11–17% | ~42–45% |
| Shelby clay loam | 7–12% | ~34–36% |
| Steinauer loam | 11–30% | ~21% |
| Kennebec silt loam, occasionally flooded | drainageway | <1% |
The Burchard and Shelby clay loams are the best soil on the property, and they are also the most contested — buckbrush colonies spread across them and suppress the grass underneath. Steinauer loam on the hilltops is the opposite problem: clay over coarser till, fast draining, thin. Brome grows there but does not thrive. The small Kennebec pocket in the drainageway is the most productive soil unit we have, and it is tiny.
Clay-heavy till soils hold water well but are prone to compaction and slow drainage, especially on slopes. That combination shapes nearly every decision here.
How the pasture is laid out
The ground is not uniform, and we manage it as several distinct zones rather than one field.
- Lower, north, and west ground
- The best forage on the property. Strong native warm-season diversity — big bluestem, little bluestem, indiangrass, switchgrass — and healthy sod. The approach is to protect it, keep it in rotation, and overseed gaps rather than rework it.
- Mid-slopes (Burchard and Shelby clay loams)
- The highest improvement potential, and the hardest fight. Buckbrush is the main constraint: it spreads by rhizomes and forms dense colonies with thick root mats that crowd out grass. Mowing sets it back temporarily. The long game is sustained grazing pressure over multiple seasons — possibly sheep — plus reclamation seeding.
- Hilltops (Steinauer loam over till)
- Thin brome, low productivity, drought-stressed, with shallow topsoil and fast drainage. Expectations here are modest. The realistic goal is breaking up the monoculture and adding drought-adapted species rather than attempting wholesale native conversion.
- NE pasture
- The most balanced mix on the property — brome and warm-season grasses together on clay that is stiff and chunky and needs structure. The flat top of this section is the poorest soil we have: saturated for days after rain, then hard and dry. Alfalfa volunteers and does notably well there. The area is slowly being converted to silvopasture.
- Gullies and drainageways
- Cottonwood-dominated, not grazed. Cedar encroachment is an ongoing job. Counter- intuitively, the north end of the main gully holds the thickest brome on the property, because runoff keeps it wetter than the surrounding slopes.
- East of the gravel drive
- A narrow drainage swale, disturbed and regraded when the house went in around 2021 and seeded to a warm-season mix at the time. Big bluestem and switchgrass have established, but the stand is still patchy with bare soil after roughly five years — the construction took most of the topsoil with it.
Where the grass stands today
- Lower, moister ground: strong native warm-season community, with some brome mixed in.
- Steep slopes and hilltops: mostly smooth brome, with scattered little bluestem and other warm-season natives.
- Mid-slopes: the best soils, held back mainly by buckbrush.
- Drainageways: woody, cottonwood and cedar, out of the grazing rotation.
Getting here was not a straight line. The property was smooth brome almost entirely at purchase in 2016, with scattered indiangrass on the west hill and cedar already working in at the gully edges. It had not been hayed or grazed for roughly ten years before that — wet-cycle years, and the first cutting after purchase ran about 25 large six-foot round bales.
Then came years of haying with no fertilizer inputs, followed by an extended drought across the early 2020s with well-below-normal precipitation. The brome thinned. Annual weeds moved into the openings, especially on the west-facing slope, which degraded to weeds by 2023–2024 and is still recovering. Parts of that ground were seeded and showed little at first. What helped was moisture: 2025 brought real rain again, and 2026 has shown noticeably more vigorous spring growth — likely the combination of better moisture and a few years of organic matter accumulating on the surface.
Water and infrastructure
- Freeze-free pasture waterline, installed summer 2025. The first trench cut disturbed one side of the line; that side was broadcast-seeded with a warm-season mix the same month, with a cool-season follow-up in August. The trench ground is now being tracked season by season — the cool-season seeding has thrived, and orchardgrass is coming in patchily.
- House and driveway, around 2021. The northeast corner of the pasture and the driveway swale were disturbed at that time. The swale east of the drive still drains south, passing under the driveway through a culvert and down the main gully.
- Perimeter fence. High-tensile 5-wire electric, 40″ tall. Interior paddocks are set up for the pig rotation.
Animals, and why we keep them
Pigs are on rotational paddocks, moved every 7–10 days, with each vacated paddock repaired and reseeded — a warm-season soil-builder cover crop mix plus trefoil on the disturbed ground. Chickens run in tractors and have for years. Sheep are under consideration for buckbrush on the mid-slopes but are not stocked; hair sheep would be the starter choice, and they would require woven wire or 5-strand fencing rather than the existing 5-wire cattle high-tensile. Sheep will not control cedar, which still needs mowing or fire.
We are honest about the scale: this is a modest number of animals on ten and a half usable acres. The point is not continuous maximum production. The point is capability — fencing, water, grazing knowledge, and working land — built and maintained so that the farm could scale up meaningfully if it ever needed to. It is a hedge, and it is a long-term project.
What we are trying to learn
- Pig disturbance versus mowing. Early-season pig paddocks greened the big bluestem hard in 2026, along with fertility hot spots on the paddock edges — a much faster warm-season response than chicken tractors produce. Whether that is a real effect or just a lucky window of season and rain is an open question, and we are treating it that way.
- Chicken fertility lag. Where the tractor has been, brome responds first and warm-season grasses wait. We want to know how long the lag actually is.
- Indiangrass cultivars. NE54 against Scout, tracked side by side.
- Trench and switchgrass overseeding. A 2026 side-by-side on the switchgrass ground — the second attempt on the north half, the original planting on the south half, watched all season for germination, stand density, and trefoil performance.
- Shade and forage. The silvopasture trial is testing whether widely spaced trees can moderate the moisture extremes of our heavy clay without costing too much forage.
Long-term goals
- Increase overall pasture productivity through targeted soil improvement and species diversification.
- Reduce buckbrush pressure on the mid-slopes and reclaim that ground to grass.
- Expand native warm-season grass and forb diversity wherever soil and moisture allow.
- Maintain and improve the rotational grazing infrastructure.
- Evaluate sheep integration as a long-term biological tool for woody plant suppression, contingent on a workable predator and parasite plan.
Underneath all of it is a simpler idea: build the skill and the infrastructure to produce food from this ground reliably, at family scale, and keep that capability alive.