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After Morven became �鶹�ƽ�� Sustainability Lab, “We realized … the best thing we could do to promote soil health and try to bring back the agricultural ecosystem after a few centuries of cropping and hay was to put cattle on and graze them in ways that have been shown to help regenerate soil and improve productivity,” said Manuel Lerdau, a UVA professor of environmental sciences and research director of the Morven Sustainability Lab. “This is what’s called ‘regenerative agriculture’ or ‘regenerative grazing.’”

Planting crops pulls nutrients from the soil, including nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which then need to be replaced with fertilizer. Corn, for instance, removes a lot of nitrogen, and soybeans remove a lot of potassium that must be replaced annually.

In the 20th century, chemical fertilizers became cheaper than animal manure – but they don’t restore the land’s biodiversity. A more effective approach is to allow cattle to graze at high density in small areas, which cycles nutrients back into the soil naturally.

Cattle are expected to graze at Morven for 12 years, the estimated amount of time it will take to improve soil health.

Lerdau and Elizabeth Meyer, professor of landscape architecture and Morven’s faculty director, saw the crop fields, loblolly pine and hardwood forests, and the property’s historic structures as opportunities to investigate and understand sustainability.

Justin Mallory, left, and Irvin White bring personal experience working with cattle. (Photo by Taylor Goff)

In 2023, the UVA Foundation hired Justin Mallory to be Morven’s asset manager. Mallory lives on a family farm in Albemarle County and has been managing cattle for more than 10 years.  Two years later, the foundation approached Irvin White, a local regenerative farmer, businessman and UVA graduate, to become Morven’s grazer.

With the team in place, Meyer and Lerdau pitched the cattle idea to the University as a way to care for the land and provide students and professors with research opportunities. 

“Changing the farm into a site for research that invites in students, faculty and community members is one of the big changes happening at Morven,” Lerdau said. 

During the summer, a recent graduate from �鶹�ƽ�� Department of Environmental Sciences will lead a team of undergraduates to begin measuring soil, plant diversity and abundance. Teams will repeat the measurements every few years to track progress. 

Also this summer, a team from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center that is interested in remote sensing of agriculture will conduct a field campaign over Morven’s agricultural area and forest to measure the land and ecosystems from above, using drones and aircraft that capture plant species, plant coverage and plant size estimates.

The cattle ’settled in quickly after their brief trip from Louisa to Morven Farm. (Photo by Taylor Goff)

“As the cattle eat grass and produce (waste) and increase the organic matter in the soil, it will also increase the biology of the soil by bringing earthworms and other things at a microscopic level, like microbial fungi and insects like dung beetles, which creates food sources for birds,” he said. “It’s a cool ecosystem that starts to develop.”

White began working with Morven last year and has been prepping for the cattle’s arrival. “We’ve been there fencing through the winter and early part of the spring and planted the grass seed last fall,” he said.

The cattle arrived Wednesday morning from White’s farm in Louisa. They didn’t take long to settle in. 

“They all got off the trailer, jogged for about a hundred feet, put their heads down and started grazing,” he said.