Chapter 9 of 12
Animals in the system
Grazing, scratching, pollinating: animals as partners of the land.
0 of 4 pages read. Read them all for the stamp in your travel passport.In a natural landscape, plants never grow without animals. Grazers keep grassland open, birds scratch the ground and carry seed, insects pollinate the flowers, and droppings return nutrients to the soil. Permaculture brings this partnership back into the design, with animals as part of the system rather than as a separate branch of work.
The chapter stands here because animals connect the plants of the last chapter with the cycles of the next. Hens scratching under fruit trees, bees and wild pollinators at the flowers, grazing that moves on before the plants are exhausted: each animal does work that would otherwise cost fuel or labour, and each needs care, space and shelter in return. Good design asks both questions, what an animal gives and what it needs.
Silvopasture shows the partnership at the scale of a landscape: trees, forage and grazing animals on the same ground, so that all three support one another. The pages below look at these partnerships one by one.
Pages in this chapter
Try it yourself
Who visits a flower?
- 1Choose a flowering plant on your balcony, in your garden or in a park, on a sunny, calm day.
- 2Stand or sit at a little distance and watch it for ten minutes without touching anything.
- 3Count the visitors by kind: honeybees, wild bees, hoverflies, butterflies, beetles.
- 4Repeat at another time of day, or at another plant, and compare.
- 5If you are allergic to stings, keep a safe distance or watch from a window.
At Sa Medada
At Sa Medada the silvopastoral heritage is on record: just under 2,000 of the 18,725 square metres are listed in the land register as pascolo arborato, wooded pasture, and the rest as olive grove. Beyond that, there is nothing to report yet about animals on the land.