Shelter and water are the limiting factors for how many grazing paddocks we can have here. The animals’ welfare depends on having access to shade and fresh water wherever they are for a grazing day.
Heat
In the rainy weather, we tend to leave the animals in their night pens, with their shelters. But in the hot weather, the animals need shade. And we are having more hot weather and longer dry seasons than ever before, so shelter and water are ever-more-vital for our operation.
The sheeps‘ Ouessant and Icelandic ancestors lived in cool, moist places and the long, dry, hot weather causes them physical and emotional stress. The guardian dogs‘ ancestors lived with their flocks in the mountains of France and Spain but they also need shade in the heat. The goats? From Africa. Heat is not a problem but even they sometimes need shade.
Water Delivery
We’ve experimented with different water delivery methods. In 2021 we have settled on 1″ Black PVC Pipe, zip-tied to a boundary fence, to carry pumped water up the hill to the back pasture. We have teed off several delivery stations, strategically located with regard to where we plan to create paddocks through cross-fencing the back pasture. Soon we hope to create a distribution pump system and have more water stations available.
Looking for Cool Shade
Shelter in the shade of mature oak trees is the best shade, cool and open to any passing breeze. But ongoing animal presence under oaks compresses the soil and actually can kill the tree if repeated over time. So, we need to have human-built shelters, at least until all the baby oaks we’ve planted come of age to provide shelter! (Maybe not in our lifetimes, LOL.)
We purchased some used pig huts from Craigslist, at a decent price, and they are great in the rain, but sizzling in the hot, dry times. Still, the animals will use them for shade.
Peter has designed a new, lighter-weight, potentially portable, but probably fixed, thermally-improved lean-to roof. You can see the prototype in the picture above. The outer roof layer, made of metal, gets hot, like the pig huts do. But there is a sandwich of air between that and the inner roof layer, created by a rigid plastic tube that keeps the two roof layers apart.
The air layer that is the sandwich filling insulates the inner roof layer from the heat of the blazing sun, and this system keeps the shaded area cooler than the area inside a metal pig hut.