The cows love it and so does the Bay: Farmers spread awareness of eco-friendly practices

by Christine Condon, Maryland Matters
October 25, 2025

As farmers say at the Hedgeapple cattle farm in Frederick County, their cows live a good life, with one bad day.

All day, the cows graze on the Buckeystown farm’s grassy hills: Two herds with 45 pairs of heifers and steers, plus their calves. And even as autumn settles in and cold temperatures arrive, the cows still have months of grazing in front of them. Their pastures will stay grassy — by design.

The farm uses a practice called rotational grazing — moving the herds from pasture to pasture, then allowing grazed areas to re-grow over a period of 30 days or more.

The practice allows the farm to continue cattle grazing through January, said farm manager Chris Zook, saving them about $200 a day that would be needed to buy bales of hay to feed their hundreds of Black Angus and red/Akaushi Wagyu cattle.

“Take care of your grasses, and they will take care of you,” Zook says.

The practice was highlighted during a tour of the farm Thursday, one of several farm visits in the region led by the nonprofits Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Mobilize Frederick. The tour, focused on regenerative agriculture, attracted a combination of farmers, elected officials and environmentalists.

That’s because in addition to the economic benefits cited by Zook, the practice has a host of ecological perks, too.

By allowing the grass to regrow, quadrant by quadrant, the farm anchors its soil in place, reducing the amount of runoff during rainstorms from its fields into the nearby Monocacy River, which flows into the Potomac, which empties into the Chesapeake Bay.

So the farm is just one of many cogs in the overall effort to reduce the flow of harmful pollutants — including the nitrogen and phosphorus from manure — into the nation’s largest estuary.

Reducing agricultural pollution was one of the more stubborn pieces of the multistate plan to improve the bay by 2025, which fell short. The agreement is currently undergoing a reconstruction process that some have maligned as unambitious. Discussions are ongoing, and the leaders of the bay states are expected to sign off on a finalized agreement in December.

Policymakers have found success in other areas, including updating sewage treatment plants and planting thousands of filtering oysters. But as the population of people and animals in the bay’s watershed expands, slowing pollution from city streets and farm fields has proven to be a challenge

Though they may sound simple, regenerative practices like rotational grazing can actually require considerable extra labor — and capital. For example, Hedgeapple Farms had to ensure that it could transport water to all of the pastures used for grazing, either using water lines or portable tanks.

Hedgeapple largely funded the changes itself, but there are some funds that farmers can tap into, including from state and federal government sources, like the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service.

Farmers also have a host of other worries, including drought conditions and rising costs for fuel, equipment and animal feed. Many have side jobs that make additional work too cumbersome, Zook said.

But a big challenge is also spreading the word, said assistant farm manager Seth Young.

“A lot of people, they’re told about it. But they never actually show the results,” Young said.

Some farmers also struggle to adopt new practices because of an adherence to tradition. They farm just as their grandparents or great-grandparents did, said Mark Townsend, a farmer who also serves as treasurer for the Maryland-Delaware Forage Council. Maybe that means they follow an old adage: “plant in the dust, and your bins will bust,” which urged farmers to plant seeds during dry, dusty conditions.

But conservationists urge farmers to plant “cover crops” during the off season. In Maryland, the Department of Agriculture provides compensatory payments to farmers to plant barley, rye and clover after they harvest their crops, to hold their fields in place during the off-season. It can be an intimidating change, Townsend said.

“To drive your planter through 8-foot tall rye? It’s like, ‘Oh my God.’ It’s horrifying,” Townsend said. “You’re like: ‘This is so against everything that I’ve ever known. And so, there’s a huge mental barrier, rightfully so.”

The farm’s commitment to sustainability runs deeper than just the rotational grazing. The farm also used grants from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to plant more than 2,400 trees around the pastures, which will also help to reduce runoff into the Monocacy.

Initially, Zook said he feared that the perimeter of trees would cut the amount of space in each pasture, but ultimately they did not. Now, he’s more focused on the benefits, including the opportunities for cattle to seek shade during hot summer days. The farm’s practices are also a benefit to other living creatures, such as honeybees, said John Gardner, a local resident who cares for six hives on the property.

Hedgeapple is a quality home for the bees, who frequently venture from their hive boxes to forage, because its fields have more plant diversity than other farms.

“I tell people, when I see huge, golden, vast acres of corn, from the bee’s standpoint, I’m looking at a desert,” Gardner said.

Corn is wind-pollinated, and doesn’t need to attract pollinators. And pesticides and herbicides used on corn fields also endanger bees’ efforts to collect pollen, Gardner said.

The gangly tall grasses on the fields at Hedgeapple also are an ideal habitat for grassland birds, which rely on pasture habitats but are threatened by urban sprawl and changing farming practices, said Gabriel Foley of the Maryland Bird Conservation Partnership.

The Partnership uses nesting boxes to attract both American kestrels and barn owls to these habitats, where they can feed on insects and small mammals, Foley said.

Perhaps the most popular tool to show off the value of regenerative practices like cover crops and reduced grazing is a rain simulator: essentially, a shower head pointed at a variety of soil samples to show the effects of plantings on runoff.

Glass jars hang from each sample area, so viewers can see just how muddy the rainwater runoff becomes. Thursday’s selections included tilled soil, soil that hadn’t been tilled, allowing a small amount of vegetation to grow, and soil with cover crop planted.

But the winner was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the patch of dirt and long grasses dug up from a corner of Hedgeapple Farm that morning. The water in that jar was nearly clear.

When the simulator runs, rain spews from the spigot, sending about an inch of rain onto the small plots in a matter of minutes. It’s an outlandish — but not impossible– rate. Yet, it still shows the importance of snaring soils with a diverse array of plant life, Townsend said.

“If you weren’t necessarily prepared to take in all that water at that one time, you’re kind of left sitting — irony intended — high and dry, right?” Townsend said. “You’re not getting the water that you actually need into that soil, because you don’t have the mechanisms by which to absorb it.”

Amanda Grev, a forage and pasture specialist at the University of Maryland Extension, said that the practices aren’t just meant to save the bay, but to save farmers money, including on fertilizer, that would otherwise wash away during intense storms.

“The goal of these practices is, in the long run, to save you money, right? We’re not trying to spend thousands and thousands of dollars purely for the sake of being regenerative,” Grev said. “We may have a little bit of expense initially, but how much are we saving in terms of soil and nutrients?”

Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.

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