The Beetles Showed Up First

One evening on the north-west paddock, late in the herd's first week on grass, we found a dung pat only a few hours old with its crown already stippled with small holes. Dung beetles, in and working before the pat had cooled. It was the first time we'd documented them on this ground, and it was one of the more encouraging things we saw all week — because a beetle at a fresh pat is one of the clearest signals a working farmer can read in the field that a pasture is alive and doing its job.

What the beetles are actually doing

A dung pat left on its own is a slow problem: it sits on the surface, fouls the grass around it, shelters fly and worm larvae, and takes months to break down. Dung beetles turn that around. They tunnel into the pat and pull it down into the soil, aerating the ground and moving the nutrients from the surface — where they wash off or gas away — into the root zone where grass can use them. In the doing, they also break up the habitat the parasite larvae and pest flies were counting on. That much is well established across the grazing-science literature; it holds in field after field. How much any given pat gets buried, though, varies enormously with the beetle species and the climate, so we don't put a number on it — the direction is solid, the magnitude is local.

Why we treat a beetle count as a health reading

This is why dung beetles earned a place in our biodiversity method. They are the part of the soil's workforce a person can actually see: crouch at a fresh pat and you can sort what's there into three functional groups — dwellers that live in the pat, tunnelers that bury it, rollers that carry it off. The method, and the limits we know it has, are written up in the Almanac. The reading is coarse on purpose — an indicator, not a census — and it swings with weather and time of day. But when beetles turn up at a pat within hours, it tells you two useful things at once: the local population is intact, and there is nothing in the manure poisoning them.

Why the dewormers stay off the grass

That second point is the one we manage hardest, because it is the lever we actually control. The avermectin family of dewormers — ivermectin and its relatives — passes through a treated animal and out into its dung, where the residue kills the beetles that would otherwise work it. The field evidence here is good, and it comes from cold-continental pastures much like ours: across the Prairies and the northern Plains, dewormer choice is one of the strongest signals of whether the dung community stays healthy. It is not that “regenerative” ground automatically carries more beetles — the honest lever is the chemistry, not the label. So we hold a standing goal of keeping avermectin-class dewormers off the pasture. An animal that genuinely needs treating is drawn off, dosed apart, and off-ramped from the herd rather than dosed and turned back out, so the residue never reaches the ground we are counting beetles on. Worth adding: the beetles doing this work in Quebec are mostly not natives — most of the species on Canadian cattle pastures are cold-tolerant European immigrants, better suited to our winters than the locals.

What we're not claiming

Two honest limits. First, on the read itself: we called this off a photograph of the holes, not beetles in hand, so the exact species is a guess — most likely one of the small burrowing kinds, and we saw no sign of the ball-rollers. The dated entry sits in the Almanac's field notes, hedged the same way it was written that evening.

Call it a promising read, not a survey.

— Field note, 2026-05-27

Second, on the bigger story: you will sometimes see dung beetles credited with cutting a herd's carbon footprint. We won't make that claim. The field studies that have looked disagree with one another on whether beetles change a pat's greenhouse gases at all, and even the optimistic figures shrink to almost nothing at the scale of a whole animal. We count beetles because they read the health of the pasture — not as a carbon offset.

The record so far is one photo, one evening, one pass through one paddock. That is honestly all it is. We will be looking again on the next rotation, and the one after, and if the beetles thin out — after a wet stretch, or a bad call on treatment — that goes in the record too. First read: they showed up first, and that is a good sign to start from.