What is "good" grazing?
As consumers of beef you have probably heard lots of claims, both positive and negative, about the effects grazing animals have on land. We truly believe that good grazing is not just sustainable, but an essential tool for maintaining and improving rangeland health. But what is “good” grazing? We want to share a little bit about what it means to us. As producers and land managers, grazing management is one of our greatest tools for affecting the health of our land and our animals. As such, it is crucial and something we are always striving to improve upon.
Rangelands evolved with grazing, and both overgrazing and undergrazing can be harmful.
Rangelands evolved with ungulates of many kinds, and rangeland plants evolved not only to handle the stresses of being grazed, but to thrive with it under certain conditions. We all know that overgrazing can lead to range degradation, increased bare ground, decreased diversity, and weed problems. What many don’t realize is that because of rangelands’ evolutionary relationship to grazing animals, undergrazing can lead to the same problems, especially in arid or brittle climates like ours. Exactly why is beyond the scope of this post, but the simple answer is that many ecosystems require recurring disturbance, as we know to be true with fire in forest ecosystems for example, to maintain diverse and healthy states.
As our society and culture have grown, urban populations have spread, and land has been paved and developed, our rangelands have become too segregated for the natural, often migrating ungulate populations that once helped to balance these complex ecosystems to function as they once did. Luckily, properly managed livestock, such as cattle or sheep, can also fill that role. In grazing these forages, they can also convert sunlight energy into sustainable food products like meat, milk, and wool.
Basic regenerative or holistic grazing principles
We want to manage our grazing so that it, at the very least, sustains our resources and does no harm, and, at best, regenerates the soil and the ecosystem. In order to do that, there are many variables to keep in mind, but the following basic principles are a good start: allow adequate plant recovery, manage for diversity, and manage for optimal animal impact.
First, plants should have adequate time to recover before being grazed again. When a plant is grazed, the initial energy to regrow leaves comes from energy stored in plant roots. Once there is enough leaf material regrown to start photosynthesis, those root reserves can be recharged. Overgrazing occurs when a plant is grazed for a second or third time before its root system has had a chance to regrow and recover from the first grazing event. Continued overgrazing can eventually deplete plant roots and kill the plant. Adequate rest allows plants to develop extensive, healthy root systems that feed the soil food web, help sequester carbon, increase water infiltration, and decrease erosion.
Plants under continuous grazing can exhaust plant root reserves, and cause them to die off. (Center) Rotational grazing with adequate rest allows plants to develop and maintain healthy root systems. (left and right)
Second, in most cases, you want to manage for species diversity. In order to do that, we strive for non-selective grazing pressure. Non-selective grazing usually occurs when animals are grazing together in herds, and can also be achieved through higher densities and shorter graze periods. Animals, like people, selectively choose what they eat when allowed. If not managed carefully, they can put unequal pressure on the most nutritious and desirable plant species. Over time, this can lead to an increase in less desirable and less nutritious plant communities. Other ways to manage for diverse plant communities include varying the season of use and the severity of grazing in a pasture.
Continuous grazing leading to both over and under-grazing in the same pasture. Cattle avoid the taller, more mature grass, while returning to re-graze the more palatable and nutritious regrowth.
Higher stock densities encourage non-selective grazing, putting more even pressure on plants in a pasture. Shorter duration grazes with back fences prevent cattle from re-grazing plants grazed previously.
In addition, animal impact, or their movement across a landscape, is a management tool. The hoof action of moving animals can help to break up soil crust and increase water infiltration, lay old plant material against the soil, and plant seeds deeper into the soil. Having plant litter over the soil not only helps it to break down more rapidly, it also helps shade the soil, decrease evaporation, and prevent evaporation and erosion on the soil surface. This impact has the best effect when animals are bunched more closely together and are moving as a herd. This also means mitigating animal impact where it can be a problem, such as in riparian areas or ground that is too soft.
In summary, good grazing is a function of time, recovery, and animal impact. Ideally cattle will be in pastures for short amounts of time to prevent cattle from returning to a plant and re-grazing it after it has started to recover. In order to put pressure on all plant species, the stock density must be high enough that the cattle aren’t able to graze only the most desirable plants. Higher stock densities when paired with good livestock handling helps to create adequate animal impact on the soil surface. Dead material will be laid against the soil surface where microbes can help break those nutrients down and complete the nutrient cycle.
Managing for Complexity
While the principles of good grazing are simple enough, the practice of it within a ranching business is anything but simple. We greatly value the health of our soils and our land, but in order to maintain a healthy ranching business and a healthy ecosystem, there are many other variables to take into account such as: animal performance, economic stability, water availability, variety of forage quantity and quality, riparian areas, wildlife populations, weather and other seasonal changes, leases and grazing permits and the rules they come with, as well quality of life.
Nature is complex and always changing. Our grazing management, therefore, must also be able to adapt. As my dad, David Mannix, put it, “When I think of good grazing practices, I think of a mindset that considers all of the complexity above and is adaptable such that it can continue indefinitely.” As a family, we are always adapting to new challenges and striving to adapt our grazing to make it as near to the regenerative side of the continuum as possible
Also, because our land varies greatly from highly productive irrigated meadows on the valley floor, to drier native rangelands in the foothills, into highly timbered mountain country for summer grazing, our grazing strategies look very different depending on the pasture and time of year.
Grazing on our irrigated meadows
During the growing season in the irrigated meadows, this looks like higher stock densities with much shorter graze periods. These may range from 1 day to 3 or 4 days in each paddock. We use electric fence to help break up our pastures into smaller paddocks, which allows us greater control of stock density and time. Those pastures are then allowed adequate time (30 days or more) to recover their root systems before they are either re-grazed or hayed. Several crucial riparian areas run through many of these meadows. These include Nevada Creek, and Wasson Creek among many others. In order to protect these riparian areas from these high stock densities, we fence off the majority of the riparian areas and either water through off stream tanks or and allow small water access points. This ensures that the banks and the vegetation remain intact and keeps the water cool enough for native trout species.
In the late fall, this grazing rotation slows considerably, and the cattle may be in these pasture for 10 days or longer. Because plants are not actively re-growing, they can’t be re-grazed, and the longer duration is not hard on them. This gives us some more time to focus on other projects on the ranch.
Grazing in the foothills
In the intermediate native rangelands of the foothills, our graze periods are currently a bit longer. Instead of a few days, they might be a couple of weeks. This is partially due to forage availability, partially due to the terrain and the added difficulty of breaking up these large pastures, and partially due to the lack of water availability for larger herds of animals. When 1-3 day graze periods are not possible, rangeland health can be managed with longer recovery periods and varying seasons of use. The pasture in the picture is currently grazed only once every other year, with an entire growing season without grazing for plants to rest and develop healthy root systems. Another common rotation is to graze a pasture once in the spring, graze it in the fall the following year, and finally resting it fully in the third year, so that plants are only grazed in the growing season once every three years.
That’s not to say these pastures couldn’t benefit from higher stock density and shorter duration grazes. Improving our grazing on these native rangelands is currently a high priority goal of ours, and over the next several years we will be adding additional water and fencing infrastructure in order to more intensively manage these pastures.
Grazing in more remote, often high mountain summer pastures
As we move into the high mountain pastures after the first of July, our grazing changes again. During this season, the cattle are furthest from the ranch. Much of this summer grazing is on leased ground, some of which has restrictions for numbers of cattle and time they are allowed to be there. It is highly timbered, steep country, and the forage availability varies greatly. Each allotment can be thousands of acres. The water sources are often many small springs that are not equipped to water large herds of cattle. Because of these variables, the cattle remain in these same mountain pastures for much longer than they do during other parts of the year. In order to try to prevent harm to these pastures we use a few different strategies. First, generally cattle are only in these areas after the growing season. Therefore, the plants will not be overgrazed before their root systems are fully established. Second, we try to change how the cattle access those pastures each year. They tend to graze the end of the property that they enter more heavily, so they are brought to the mountains from a different side each year. Third, cattle distribution can be influenced by the placement of mineral tubs to draw cattle away from heavily grazed areas and towards unused areas. In addition, we also send people horseback to try to move cattle off of heavily pressured areas during their time there. Finally, many of these pastures are also on their own rest/rotation cycles like we mentioned earlier.
Summary
On our ranch, good grazing is a continually moving target that we are always striving for. Perhaps the most important requirement of a competent grazer is to be observant and always learning. We hope to continue to more deeply understand and apply the grazing principles with a mindset that considers the complexities of the landscape and our cattle, people, and communities. We must do this if we hope to see our ranch and our land remain resilient for years to come.
If you have any additional questions about how we try to balance the complexities of grazing on our ranch, be sure to reach out!
-Erica
Erica Mannix, daughter of David and Peggy Mannix, returned to the ranch in 2019 after several years in the teaching profession. She currently works for the ranch, as well as working part time for Quivira’s New Agrarian Apprenticeship program.