Woody strips in grassland - good for nature and the farmer
After a first farm walk in July 2024, our biodiversity ambassador Alexander Steindl opened his farm doors to interested visitors again on 17 August. Alexander took over his parents' former conventional dairy farm and has been transforming the business bit by bit ever since. The organic farm is now home to a colourful array of grazing animals, including old livestock breeds such as Murbodner cattle, Turopolje pigs, Krainer Steinschafe (sheep) and Pinzgauer Strahl goats.
When grazing, he uses the principle of mob grazing: the animals move to a new piece of pasture every 2 to 3 days, and his pasture-fattened poultry - which Alexander keeps in mobile, tent-like sheds - even change pasture every day. During the short grazing periods, some of the green fodder is trampled down and this is intentional: The trampled down grass forms a mulch layer, moisture is better retained on the surface and healthy soil is built up.
Through agroforestry systems, i.e. by planting trees and shrubs on his agricultural land, Alexander creates additional structural diversity on the grassland. And these structures are particularly important for ecosystems, as they create new food and living space and thus ensure an even more diverse community of species for birds, insects and other wild animals.
The rows of trees are well thought out. In the strips themselves, Alexander works with different growth heights to further increase the structural diversity. For example, chestnut trees alternate with Indian bananas and elderberries, with mayberries underneath. It is not only nature that benefits from the carefully designed wooded strips, but also Alexander as a farmer: the agroforestry systems provide shade, which his grazing animals gratefully accept, improve the microclimate, provide wind shade and ensure that the water available from precipitation is absorbed, distributed and stored on the land in the best possible way, as the wooded strips are laid out in a keyline design.
Modern surveying technology is used to determine so-called keylines on the individual areas, which - similar to contour lines - are usually horizontal to the fall line of a slope. As he favours fruit trees and shrubs for the plants, he can also make use of the harvest.
In spring 2022 alone, Alexander planted 400 to 500 shrubs and 200 trees on his farm. However, he soon realised that planting trees costs a lot of money and that he often couldn't find what he was looking for at tree nurseries, especially due to a lack of quality and variety. ‘And so my greatest passion was born out of necessity,’ Alexander explains as the participants of the farm walk arrive at Alexander's private tree nursery, where he uses grafting and propagation by cutting to grow the planting material for his agroforestry systems himself. ‘When you buy trees, look at the roots,’ Alexander tells the visitors. ‘If a 3-metre-high tree has two stumps for roots, it can't work. The root-to-crown ratio has to be right.’
‘Trust a lot and make mistakes, that's the best way to learn,’ is Alexander's motto. And his success proves him right: with his special type of grazing and agroforestry systems, Alexander has embarked on a path that is unusual for many, but which allows him to farm well and at the same time promotes nature. He is passionately dedicated to regenerative agriculture. Because for our biodiversity ambassador Alexander Steindl, one thing is clear: ‘Sustainability alone is not enough, we need to regenerate nature.’