It is a lifestyle that is disappearing, Cory.Unfortunately.
And with it go the great vultures who used to live off of the occasional goat or sheep that would die and get left behind. The lammergeier is almost gone from Europe and the Black and griffon vultures are only just hanging on ( Sorry, I'm a birder)
I think the only animals that will continue to be "free grazed" are the famous Pato Negro pigs, that feed on acorn and deliver the famous air dried hams of Spain.
Simply because the price of those keep going up, so it'll still be lucrative to do it the old way.
One can only hope that Manchego cheese will become priced likewise, so they'll still be free grazing sheep and goats in the future.
In Schweiz the situation is different. The Swiss as a nation are rich from banking and industry and have simply decided that they want to keep their bucolic paradise. So they subsidize heavily, to make that form of agriculture possible. You must have seen their farms in the villages, with their little plots of land, and wondered how that works out, economically.
The answer is massive subsidizing.
I have a cheesemaker friend down there, who goes on the Alp every year with 22 cows and a few goats.
He has 3 cabins, one above the other. So grazing starts at the bottom, and goes upwards as the snow melts.
No electricity, so milking is done from hand and he only has a great wood fired copper pot for making cheese.
I spent part of a summer up there, once.
The raclette cheese, he makes, is to die for.
My wife used to spend summers as a sheep herd in the alps when I first met her.
Traipsing all over the mountains with a bunch of sheep.
She says that in autumn when she came down, being around other people was eal hard, after being alone all the time.
