Joel Salatin goes by many names and titles. One is The Lunatic Farmer. He tries new things, keeps what works, and rejects what doesn’t. If you’re engaged with the regenerative agriculture movement in the USA, you recognize he’s an inspiration to millions (and a profitable farmer to boot).
One of his ideas for pasture management is using temporary shade in open fields. It can draw cattle into low growth patches of grass. These Cattle loaf in the shade and then take care of their business in that shade. They ain’t shy. That fertilizes (‘manures’ as the old timers say) the soil and builds water retaining organic matter. Give it some time and boom, explosive grass growth.
Salatin has a very good book on projects for the regenerative farm: Polyface Designs. Where most farm build books are heavy on pictures but lite on specifics, this book skews heavily to dimensions and step by step CAD rendered build processes.
To make a shade mobile, you start with a hay wagon. One popped up on Craigslist for an absurdly low price, on account of some damage to the hay holding frame. Well we don’t want to hold hay on the hay wagon, so it was perfect for us.
Remove the broken hay holding frame. Extend the back axle to maximum length. Build some uprights. Bolt them in. Brace them together. Straighten out the broken frames. Weld them to hold the straightened repair. Bolt them to the uprights. Add crossbeams. Paint all the wood. Add shade cloth, which is landscape fabric right now. Screw boards in from the top to sandwich the cloth to the crossbeams, maximizing the clamp surface area to minimize wind tearing the fabric.
Then pull around with the quad atv and turn the cows loose to loaf in its shade.
It’s late enough in the year that they don’t care much for it now. But I am looking forward to next summer and the revitalizing power of the shade mobile.
Or if it doesn’t work, then convert it to something else. It’s all an experiment.
