Outside the Box

Last March, I attended a conference devoted to understanding how soil health affects plant health and nutrient density, which collectively affect animal (including human) gut microbiomes and, ultimately, animal health. It was the highlight of my entire life — in the realm of conferences, anyway.

During that event, I learned that sheep eagerly eat some, in quantity? We’ve seen it in our flocks — sometimes we’d watch them go after that alkaloid-laden plant and worry we’d have a bunch of sick sheep in the morning. But it never happened. Although we had never put the pieces of this puzzle together, it was, for us, a beautiful puzzle. And, at least hypothetically, the sheep’s microbiome was directing the assembly of this puzzle.