Master Po let us know he doesn't need us to come feed him any longer, and after a couple days of heating up a bottle, trudging out to the field, and having him look at me like I'm crazy, I'm content to let him get what he needs from the fields and from his mother. He's still gaining weight, albeit slowly, so I'm actually pretty happy about this development. His fiber is the highest quality I've seen thus far, I'm really looking forward to seeing that fiber made into a useful product...it's going to be heavenly.
At some point the girls figured out we hadn't locked the gate to the fallow pasture, and broke through to munch on the lush grasses. To my surprise, they actually seem to be getting along just fine with the chickens. Considering they're pretty good at managing their resources (they sample from most of the field, rather than just chomp on the nearest grasses), I'm happy to let them have both fields. Forget rotational grazing: We have a designed ecosystem!
That's just what farming is, isn't it? A designed system. I like imagining my job as farmer is to enhance natural processes, make them work for me. We take a basic relationship of pasture, grazing animal, and predators, and see the potential in it. That fiber is useful for more than dulling a predators claws...perhaps if we protected the animals from harm, and then harvested their fiber? And just like that we've entered into a complex, mutually rewarding relationship with our environment and the creatures in it.
