Sheep farmers. Do you hire out sheep to eat crops?

[chomalungma]

There's a field near me that suddenly seems to have been taken over with sheep.

They are doing a great job. The crops that were there - not sure what they are eating but the field has gone down a lot and now they seem to be in the next field.

So a question - do farmers just hire out sheep? I've never seen sheep anywhere near this field.

Just curious.

Yes they do, grazing stubble or brassica or whatever fields with animals, uses “waste” to feed the animals, and the animals in turn put nutrients back into the land so it’s more fertile for the next crop.

Could be the farmers own field or sometimes crop and animal farmers work together to “borrow” the sheep.

This is why plant based Vs animal based diets don’t work

It's fascinating. They have done such a good job of it.

When they first started, you could hardly seem them in the field.
Now it's almost gone.

I'm not a sheep farmer and I haven't got any experience of hiring them. They tend to be borrowed ime. Farmer gets free grazing, you get your land trimmed. The only downfall is that grazing land for horses and larger livestock, along with arable land doesn't always have sheep proof boundaries, so it's not that common anymore in many areas. Changes in farming and land management mean places are less likely to have drystone wall, dense hedges etc to keep them enclosed.
We use them for weed control on horse grazing, and even with most of it enclosed by established hedgerows I sometimes suspect I spend almost as long sheep proofing the remainder as I would weeding by hand.