Pigs
Rotational paddocks, moved every 7–10 days. Each vacated paddock is repaired and reseeded with a cover crop mix plus trefoil. We are watching how warm-season grasses respond to pig fertility — so far, better and faster than expected.
Twenty acres of hilly Nebraska ground, managed slowly.
We are a small, family-scale pasture operation between Denton and Crete, in western Lancaster County. The work here is mostly watching, mowing, seeding, and moving animals — and letting the grass tell us whether any of it is working.
Where we are
The farm sits in a transition zone between the Dissected Till Plains to the east and the loess uplands to the west — near the western edge of the old Pleistocene glacier advance. Glacial till means cobbles and small rocks embedded throughout the soil, some of them at the surface. It is hilly ground: slopes run 7–30% across most of the pasture, with about 25 m (~83 ft) of elevation relief from the low northwest corner up to the south-central high ground.
Row crop ground lies to the north; a neighbor’s cattle pasture runs to the south. It is a working neighborhood, not a secluded one, and that is fine by us.
The land in numbers
- Deeded acreage
- ~20 ac
- Fenced pasture
- 11.25 ac
- Usable pasture
- ~10.5 ac after trees and deep gullies
- Acquired
- 2016
Fencing is high-tensile 5-wire electric, 40″ tall. Two gullies with mature cottonwoods drain the property; eastern redcedar keeps trying to colonize the sides.
What we do here
In a sentence: we are moving this ground away from smooth-brome dominance and back toward native warm-season grasses — big bluestem, indiangrass, little bluestem, and sideoats grama.
- Low-input methods. No hay removed from the property since 2023. We mow and leave the cut material on the ground to build organic matter, hold moisture, and feed soil biology.
- Targeted seeding, not whole-field renovation. Small areas, selected varieties, then observation over multiple seasons.
- Livestock as a disturbance tool. Pigs in rotation, chickens in tractors — both used with an eye on what they leave behind.
- A silvopasture trial. About one acre of widely spaced trees, testing the balance between shade and forage production.
- Soil health as the actual goal. Organic matter, moisture retention, and repairing compaction after pig paddocks.
Animals, 2026
Chickens
Tractor-based. The long-standing observation here is that chicken fertility tracks slowly: brome greens up first, warm-season grasses wait until late season or the next year. That lag is part of what we are studying.
Sheep — under consideration
Not yet stocked. Hair sheep are the likely starter choice if we go that way, as a long-term tool against buckbrush on the mid-slopes. It would take different fencing first, and sheep will not touch cedar.
We keep animals at modest scale on purpose. The aim is capability — fencing, water, grazing knowledge, working land — not maximum production.
Recent work
- Sep 2026 Chickens moved onto pasture in the tractor.
- Sep 2026 Pig pad mud-hole repair and reseeding; cool-season trench ground thriving; clover coming in on the pig bare spots.
- May 2026 Trench and switchgrass-spot overseeding — indiangrass and big bluestem with trefoil, plus a direct north-versus-south comparison on the switchgrass ground.
- 2025 Freeze-free pasture waterline installed — the first real infrastructure addition for animal water.
- 2023 Final hay cutting. Management shifted to mow-and-mulch.
- 2021 House and driveway built; the disturbed swale east of the drive was seeded to a warm-season mix.
- 2016 Property purchased. Cedar removed from the pasture immediately; the ground had not been hayed or grazed for roughly a decade before that.
What we are learning
Most of what happens here is a small experiment with no control plot and one season of data. We try to say so plainly rather than dress it up.
- In a 2024 mid-summer mowing test, big bluestem regrew far better under dry conditions than either brome or indiangrass — which is part of why we lean on it.
- Pig disturbance appears to hit the warm-season grasses’ demand window better than chicken tractors do. It may simply be the season and the rain.
- Alfalfa volunteers and persists on the NE pasture’s heaviest clay, where most other forages underperform.
- Orchardgrass established thickly in the shade along the red building’s north wall, and sparsely in the open — the same seed mix, two very different outcomes.
Where ground is still recovering — the west hill’s weedy face, the pig pads, the trench lines — we would rather show you the bare spots than claim they are fixed.