Blog Post

Green Oasis

Sheila Cooke • 10 August 2018

Low rainfall has browned pastures across Europe this summer. Read how this farm dampened a dry spell.

Photograph of the headline from a German newspaper,

"Do you remember that I had a picture about our pastures being green, when everything around is brown? You can see it in the picture [below]. All are suffering because it is not raining since weeks", wrote Viviane Theby, of Scheuerhof Farm, in Wittlich, Germany.

She went on to say, "The last 6 weeks we only had 3,5 ml of rain and temperatures from 28 to 31°C. Today was an article in the newspaper that all pastures are brown already and farmers don't have grass to feed outside."

Photo with green grass on the hill top, and brown rye grass in the foreground.

"The ryegrass in the front is ours too. We do not have enough animals to graze everything. So next week the cows will go in there to make animal impact before it will be a field again."

Two cows standing in a field of brown grass. You can see the same forest in the background as featured in the previous image.

Viviane and her husband Karl began practising rotational grazing in the summer of 2017, as an experiment on the hillside [shown in the photo above]. By the end of the summer, they could see that rotational grazing made an improvement over set stock grazing, but they knew there must be something more, so they contacted 3LM. In November 2017, we went to Germany to give them complete training in Holistic Management.

The green grass in the photo above is of the same field. Viviane writes, "I sent you one how it looks today [a close up shot] while everything around is brown."