This pastures business is most probably based on the idea that you have meadow pasture with grass in the valleys and heather and even more indigestible plant growth on the hill-sides. Where you get lush hillsides with grassy pasture, you will send cattle anywhere they don't roll off. If you have mountainsides like Scotland's or Wales' highlands, or most of Norway, you simply cannot graze cattle up there.
> Cattle are voracious but
> inefficient grazers, sheep are less voracious, but will take the plant
> down to dirt (split lip). The combination of the two will destroy an
> ecosystem if not CAREFULLY managed.
Thanks for the info. Still, most barbarian mixed stock farmers knew how to deal with this - they sent the sheep into the badlands - marshland, heath, etc, keeping them out of grassy pasture most of the time. There is one island (I think on the Faeroys) where the sheep are kept outside of the inland by a stone wall all around the island, just leaving the shore and its lichen and sea-weeds for the sheep. These, a small but hardy race, seem to prosper.
I guess very much of this boils down to the question what Sartarite (or wherever on Glorantha) landscape and plantlife is really like. _This_ is an area where real-world comparisons would be of great value, since most of the Gloranthan beast- and plant-life doesn't seem to differ too greatly from the Real World.
One serious problem is that if you refer to modern European climate/landscape/plantlife, you'll get 20th century alterations rather than the situation faced by the Sartarites, i.e. the situation of European Bronze and Iron Age. (and Climate and plant life changed several times during these periods, if you extend the Iron Age well into the Dark Age.
End of The Glorantha Digest V5 #245
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