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How a Cincinnati cattle farm is helping bees, beef

Two men stand in a cow pasture. Cows are behind them.
Isabel Nissley
/
WVXU
Andy Dickerson and Nick Hartley stand in a cow pasture at Bahr Farm.

Beef cows graze in a pasture at a small farm nestled between Finneytown and College Hill. The 32-acre Bahr Farm has been around since 1916.

A few years ago, the Bahr family donated the property to the Cardinal Land Conservancy so it could remain a working farm.

Now, Conservancy Director Andy Dickerson says they're trying a new agriculture strategy: pollinator-friendly pastures.

“Our cattle are grazing among pollinator-friendly pastures, so they're going to weave through and eat clover and grass that we have in there, and a lot of the wildflowers are going to be fine,” Dickerson said. “Then we'll pull them off, and they'll be on another pasture. When they come back, they'll eat some of the new growth, but then they'll also munch some of the leaves on the flowers, the wildflowers.”

This sustainable farming method provides habitat and food for bees and birds. Cattle grazing land doesn't usually do that, since its only purpose is to feed cows.

In fact, cattle farming contributes to habitat loss caused by climate change. Raising cows for beef produces large amounts of climate-warming gasses, according to a 2017 report by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

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To combat that, Dickerson has been experimenting with adding pollinator-friendly plants to pastures at Bahr Farms. This summer, he’s seeing them bloom.

“There's pale coneflower over there, purple coneflower, ironweed — the cows don't eat, but we leave it because butterflies love it,” Dickerson said.

Establishing pollinator-friendly pastures also involved rotationally grazing the cattle, too. Bahr Farm used to have a single pasture. Now it’s divided by fencing. By moving the cows from field to field, none are overgrazed, letting the land recover and leaving plenty of pollen and nectar in plants for bees.

Benefits for bees and beef

Facilities manager Nick Hartley opens up a gate to a pasture. The herd of cattle comes bounding in.

He says he's started seeing different species of butterflies on the pollinator-friendly pastures.

“Nature figures it out pretty quickly,” Hartley said. “We had flowers, certainly right away. Clover came up and was flowering, and you had bees all over it.”

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Hartley says the pollinators aren’t the only ones benefiting. The cows are also gaining weight on these new pastures. The native plants and legumes provide more nutrients and protein than traditional grazing grass.

“Two of our cows are 1,500 pounds, and they just look great,” Hartley said. “A couple years ago, they were a little bit leaner when we were trying to get these pastures established. It's just nice to see them nice and filled out.”

What the research says

Bahr Farm isn't the only place using pollinator-friendly pastures.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been funding a research project exploring “bee-friendly beef” since 2020. Ecologist Ben Tracy is one of the scientists on the project.

“We learned that when you allocate a certain proportion of pasture land to these native grasses and wildflowers, you can produce some positive benefits,” Tracy said. “We know that you can increase weight gain in cattle, and we know from our pollinator surveys you can get a lot more pollinators in these areas.”

Tracy says he thinks these pastures could significantly benefit pollinator populations if enough farmers implement the strategy. The next step is researching how much of each pasture needs to contain native plants and wildflowers to produce results.

“Can we find maybe a sort of optimal proportion of pasture land to devote to that additional biodiversity?” Tracy said. “Because, again, that sort of trade off between producing an agricultural product like beef and a conservation product, if you will.”

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Back at Bahr Farm, Hartley treats that trade off more like a collaboration.

"You see your cattle grazing and you'll see a goldfinch land on a purple coneflower or you'll see a bee on a clover and it reinforces that these two systems can really work together,” Hartley said. “They're not mutually exclusive.”

Isabel joined WVXU in 2024 to cover the environment.