In the early days, people wishing to practice Holistic Management using livestock were usually advised to build an arrangement of fences, commonly but not always in the pattern of a wagon wheel, around a central water point. Although this is an efficient way to handle livestock in many situations, the wagon wheel became such a strong symbol that it obscured the idea behind it. Like people who draw symbols on the doorpost to keep away lightning, many ranchers and researchers built wagon-wheel grazing cells in the belief that they had magic power to grow grass.
A legacy of the wagon-wheel dogma is the term “cell,” which Allan Savory first applied when planning an early project on a vast property that required dozens of fences radiating from numerous water points. On paper, the layout of the perimeter fences separating the water points looked like the top view of a honeycomb with its myriad cells. In that case, each water point and its herd were included in a separate grazing plan recorded on an individual planning chart. The term “cell” referred to the land area encompassed in each individual plan.
Planning for livestock grazing, not fencing layout, continues to define a cell. In Holistic Management, a cell is any piece of land on which livestock moves are planned as a unit and recorded on a single grazing chart. You might have two or three cells on a ranch or one cell encompassing an entire farm. The management of a cell requires consideration of all the factors that influence progress toward the entire holisticgoal. If you change herd numbers or combinations of herds seasonally, so too the area constituting a cell for planning purposes may change. You might, for instance, amalgamate two herds in two cells into one large herd running in one much larger cell.
Art is sometimes defined as the representation of truth and beauty within artificial limits—a frame, the pages of a book, the range of an instrument. It is a daunting illustration of “progress” that not long ago whole continents were “cells,” in which all interactions—between herds, soils, and plants—occurred without artificial limit, but today we measure cells in mere acres or hectares.
Planning for smaller land units demands considerable art, because such plans cannot be perfect, especially in the early stages of land development. Initially, because you are making decisions holistically and thus need to balance social, economic, and environmental factors, you may have to settle for overgrazing some plants and for higher-than-you-would-like levels of partial rest. You could, of course, avoid both problems by increasing paddock numbers, but it wouldn’t be economically sound to increase fencing before livestock numbers. You may, in fact, find it impossible to apply all the tools to maximum effect until you can develop a sufficient amount of the infrastructure, such as fencing and water points, specified in your land plan. And the order and timing of that development will be determined by your financial planning, through which you will coordinate the buildup of both livestock and infrastructure to ensure that you remain profitable each step of the way. These constraints can prove discouraging enough to put some people off planning altogether. But holistic thinking and management mean embracing reality, not waiting for a perfect context. Only the experience of making the best plan for the season ahead can show you how to undertake long-range land planning to push back the limits and give yourself a more generous frame for your art in years to come.
Part 4, “Land Planning,” addresses that broader challenge. Today, however, success lies in doing the best you can with what you have.
Carrying out the financial plans outlined in part 1 calls for a control of detail beyond anything generally seen in conventional budgeting. The main difference, however, is in the kind of detail you control. Although livestock may be critical to moving toward your holisticgoal because of profits derived from its meat, milk, or fiber, raising livestock is a by-product of more primary purposes—creating a landscape and harvesting sunlight. This section deals with that challenge at the field level.
Since the Holistic Management textbook explains the principles behind grazing planning in depth, read it carefully, starting with chapter 46 (“Holistic Grazing Planning”). The bulk of this section provides a review of the major operational points and examples of how to apply them.
The framework for Holistic Management puts all land management tools into six basic categories. Of these six, rest, grazing, and animal impact (chapters 20 through 22 in the text) are the primary subjects of grazing planning. Four management guidelines govern most management decisions concerning these tools: population management (stocking rate), time, stock density, and herd effect (chapters 44, 38, and 39, respectively, in the text). Only the first three guidelines can be quantified. (Herd effect is largely a matter of herd size and animal behavior.) Division of a cell into grazing areas (commonly called paddocks) is essential too. (Though these areas need not be fenced, we’ll use the word “paddocks” for simplicity’s sake.)
The common excuses ranchers and farmers give for not planning their grazing, or at least not planning it in any detail, are in fact the reasons they must plan their grazing. If you knew exactly what weather to expect and had a perfect knowledge of the many other variables involved, then you might not need to plan—as long as you could keep all of that in your head all of the time.
You plan your grazing so you can do the following:
• move closer to achieving all three parts of your holisticgoal;
• achieve the profit you’ve planned this year;
• enhance animal performance and/or increase animal numbers;
• minimize overgrazing of plants;
• reduce or eliminate overrested plants and soil surfaces;
• speed the essential biological decay (as opposed to chemical and physical breakdown) of dead and dying plant material and the cycling of mineral nutrients into the soil to promote the next season’s growth;
• coordinate a variety of activities—for example, breeding, weaning, cropping, hunting, creating firebreaks, personal schedules and vacations, marketing; and
• reduce labor and improve efficiency.
Your planning will center on these questions:
• What landscape are you trying to create? (How did you describe and map it in your holisticgoal?)
• How much total forage will the cell, or cells, have to supply in the current planning period?
• How much forage will an average acre or hectare of land have to supply?
• How long will standing forage (including reserves for late springs, drought, fires, wildlife, and so on) last in a nutritious state at the end of the growing season?
• How long will animals spend in each paddock, and when will they return (the vital recovery period grazed plants require)?
• Where and when will you need to concentrate animals most to maintain healthy grassland, reduce weeds and woody vegetation, and prevent soil erosion?
Standard American practice measures forage use in “animal unit months” (AUMs). Months work well for computing grazing fees, but they prove clumsy for calculating whether a herd should move in two days or three. An “animal unit day”—animal-day (AD), for short—works much better to compute grazing taken in a single grazing period or over a season.
An animal-day is the amount an animal eats in a day and is thus first of all a measure of forage quantity, not animals or days. The concept of animal-days helps you do the following:
• estimate how much forage stock or wildlife will require from a given area of land;
• plan for dormant season and emergency reserves (assuming animals are outside year-round);
• assess the impact of grazing on areas of different quality (or pressure on animals to graze low-nutrition or poisonous plants);
• determine a realistic stocking rate quickly and more accurately than other known techniques; and
• cope with mixed species and classes of stock when converted to standard animal units.
In all your figuring, the animal-day will have the same character as bales, pounds, tons, cubic feet, or whatever unit you use for bulk measurement. Unlike a ton or a cubic yard, an animal-day of growing forage has no status at the Bureau of Standards. Fortunately, animals have a gut feeling for the exact amount. How they harvest it is an interesting subject in itself. Animals can adapt their rhythm of eating, drinking, chewing cud, and sleeping to a wide range of conditions, although frequent changes of routine generally cause performance to drop. Night grazing, for example, is not uncommon in hot climates, especially where forage quality is low and physiological needs high.
Nevertheless, an animal-day, roughly speaking, is enough forage to fill an animal’s stomach, as shown in figure 2.1. Your sense of what that means will grow quickly as you compute how many animal-days your herd has taken and observe the land before and after. Later, you will learn how to refine your estimates to take into account forage trampled to the ground, the presence of wild grazers, and other factors. For now, just think in terms of what one animal consumes in one day in bulk terms. In the box entitled “Factoring in Physiological State and Wildlife Needs” later in this section, we’ll discuss how to cater for the physiological state of your animals at the time of grazing (i.e., whether they are dry, pregnant and lactating, or needing to gain weight rapidly).
You’ll need to determine your animal-days of forage both while planning and later when implementing your plan so you can better judge whether you have the forage your animals require. A cow eats more than a calf, and cattle eat more than sheep, goats, or donkeys, so if you’re running more than one class of animal or cattle, sheep, and goats together, you’ll have to make some adjustments to provide one animal-day figure that enables you to assess the forage availability for all your animals. To do that, you can translate animal numbers into standard units that reflect the kind of animal and its size. Then add all the figures to give you one animal-day figure. The box entitled “Conversion into Standard Animal Units” shows how to translate the head count into “standard animal units” (SAU) that weigh the demands of each class of stock in relationship to the appetite of a standard cow.
Animal-days = Animals × Days
A cattle-day is the food a dry cow eats in one day.
A sheep-day is the food a grown sheep eats in one day. About 5 sheep-days = 1 cattle-day
1 cow × 100 days = 100 animal-days of forage
10 cows × 10 days = 100 animal-days of forage
4 cows × 15 days = 60 animal-days of forage
Figure 2.1. An animal-day is the amount an animal eats in a day and thus is a measure of forage quantity, not animals or days.
Conversion into Standard Animal Units
If you’re running a breeding herd, or a mixed-species herd, you will need to convert to standard animal units to better assess the volume of forage required to feed the herd. To do this, merely select one class of animal as your standard and then rate all the other species or classes to that standard animal.
The simplest way to do this is to use the following formula:
a cow = 1 animal unit
a cow and her calf = 1.5 animal units
a weaned calf = 0.75 animal units
a bull = 2 animal units
You can also rate a herd based on weights and percentages: A 1,000-pound (450-kilogram) cow is commonly used as the standard animal in the United States, but if your cows average closer to 800 pounds (324 kilograms), use that as your standard if it makes things easier. If a 1,000-pound cow is your standard animal, then,
a 500-pound calf = 0.5, or 50% of an animal unit,
a 750-pound steer = 0.75, or 75% of an animal unit, and
a 2,000-pound bull = 2, or 200% of an animal unit.
Use either approach when factoring in different species. The formula commonly used for small stock relative to cattle is as follows:
5 adult sheep, goats, or pigs = 1 animal unit
10 lambs, kids, or piglets = 1 animal unit
Here’s how you would calculate animal days of grazing for a mixed herd of cows, bulls, calves, ewes, and lambs using the above formula:
100 cows = 100 animal units
4 bulls = 8 (4 × 2) animal units
85 calves = 43 (85 × 0.50) animal units
200 ewes = 40 (200 ÷ 5) animal units
300 lambs = 30 (300 ÷ 10) animal units
Total = 221 animal units
If this herd spent five days in a paddock, it would consume 221 animal units × 5 days = 1,105 animal-days of forage.
What these standard units don’t do is factor in the physiological needs of the animals. A prize bull or lactating cow will have different forage requirements than a young steer. But don’t assume it’s just the bulk of forage that matters. A lactating cow won’t usually eat much more than a dry cow, at least not enough to have a significant impact on planning. Her nutritional requirements are much greater, of course, but she will eat only until she is full. A dry cow will do the same. She’ll just gain weight instead of producing milk.
In earlier days we attempted to account for physiological condition using sophisticated tables that factored in desired weight gain, physiological state, and so on. But many people have found that the tables offered no real advantage over simple field checks that involve a special line of questioning, described in the box referred to in the note below. Most managers will be working in ever changing conditions, so precise calculations to account for physiological condition often don’t help.
Note: If you prefer to use techniques that more closely determine an SAU, refer to the box “Factoring in Physiological State and Wildlife Needs” (under “Forage and Drought Reserves”) and use whatever technique you are most comfortable using.
Ideally, you’d like to know the exact amount of forage each acre or hectare could contribute to the animal-days of forage your herd will take or require. The “animal-day per acre” (ADA) or hectare (ADH) is a practical alternative. Herds of different sizes may spend varying lengths of time in paddocks of different sizes, but you can still reckon how much forage the average acre or hectare in that paddock will supply, as shown in figure 2.2.
Animal-Days Per Acre/Hectare of Grazing
Example: 50 animals spending 4 days in a 100-acre (or hectare) paddock will take 50 × 4 ÷ 100 = 2 ADA(H) from that paddock. An average acre (or hectare) will yield enough forage to feed 2 animals for a day.
Example: 50 animals spending 4 days in a 50-acre (or hectare) paddock will take 50 × 4 ÷ 50 = 4 ADA(H). An average acre (or hectare) will feed 4 animals for a day.
Figure 2.2. Computing the animal-days per acre or hectare tells you how much forage the average acre or hectare in a paddock will supply.
Working Out the Animal-Days Per Acre/Hectare the Land Yields
Figure 2.3. Animals have been through all the paddocks three times. In one 500-acre (or hectare) paddock, 100 head spent 3, 4, and 3 days. The same 100 head spent 1 day each on a 100-acre (or hectare) piece of bottomland, but on the last day they were joined by an extra 100 head gathered for shipping.
The example in figure 2.3 shows something of what this means in practice. In a winter’s grazing, cattle have been through all the paddocks in a cell three times. In one 500-acre paddock, 100 head spent three days, four days, and three days. The same 100 head spent one day, one day, and one day on a 100-acre piece of bottomland, but on the last day they were joined by an extra 100 head gathered for shipping. Both paddocks had acceptable amounts of litter and forage left after the last grazing. You want to know the relative production from these two paddocks.
Obviously, if one paddock seems to respond differently (for better or worse) than others, you can compute the ADA(H) taken from it and change your plans in subsequent years.
The term “overgrazing” applies to individual plants, not to ranges or pastures. Simply stated, overgrazing occurs when an animal remains in an area for too long and grazes the same plant repeatedly as it tries to grow, or when the animal returns to a previously grazed area and regrazes a plant before it has recovered from the last grazing. The greatest damage to plants from overgrazing occurs when the plants are growing, especially when growing conditions are excellent. That’s why scattering stock, or merely “turning them out” for a summer, as some American ranchers do on public lands, can do so much damage. This logic is counterintuitive, making it difficult to change engrained practices.
As chapter 21 in the textbook explains, a grazed perennial plant must use stored energy to grow new leaf before it can reestablish the root or crown material from which energy was withdrawn to provide that growth. In general, the more leaf removed in a grazing, the more energy that has to be drawn from the roots (or stem base or crown, depending on the species) so the plant can recover. Successive energy withdrawals, without intervening periods to reestablish root growth or energy reserves, can severely damage or destroy the plant. Overgrazing can be viewed as a repeated pruning of roots.
The thinking used to be that annual grass plants could not be overgrazed, but recent research is changing that view. Annual grass roots and aboveground parts are, in fact, hindered in their development when grazed too frequently. Fortunately, overgrazing of annual grasses is generally avoided when you base recovery, and thus grazing periods, on the time it takes a perennial grass plant to recover from a severe bite. This holds true even when you are managing grasslands that appear to be made up entirely of annuals, such as those found in the degraded grasslands of Mediterranean-type climates.
Overgrazing happens when animals linger too long among rapidly growing plants—or if they return too soon when growth is slow.
The recovery requirement varies with the site- and plant-specific growing conditions and the growth form (erect or runner) of the plant. Runner-type grasses tend to recover more rapidly than those with a bunched and upright form, because a lesser percentage of leaf is removed in a single grazing of a given height. A bunchgrass plant grazed down to three or four inches will have had most (80–90 percent) of its leaf removed; but a runner grass plant, which can cover many square yards or meters, will have had relatively little (perhaps 10–20 percent) leaf removed if grazed to the same height. Thus, runner grass plants under irrigation, or in weather conditions that produce rapid growth, can recover in as little as ten days.
At the other extreme, erect bunchgrasses that tend to characterize rangelands under weather conditions that produce erratic growth or long periods of little or no growth can take ninety days to a year or more to recover from a grazing. Climate and geography also influence recovery rates. Recovery is generally rapid in low-lying humid areas, for example, but much slower in high-elevation arid areas. Using times fairly typical for brittle-environment ranges worldwide of moderate to high rainfall, the diagrams in figures 2.4 and 2.5 show how this principle works.
When judging plant recovery times, it is better to build experience by observing the plants on your own place than to try to fit to time periods suggested by others. Generally, bunched or runner grasses will have recovered enough to be grazed again when grazed plants look like ungrazed plants growing nearby. Some people have found it helpful to flag, or place a cage over, severely grazed plants and monitor their actual growth rate compared to the ungrazed plants.
Recovery Time — Poor Growing Conditions
Figure 2.4. During poor growth conditions on rangeland, perennial bunch grasses may need 90 days or more to recover after being severely bitten.
Recovery Time — Good Growing Conditions
Figure 2.5. When proper moisture, temperature, and aeration combine, perennial bunch grasses may grow fast and need less recovery time. Animals may bite them off after as little as 30 days.
There are also different degrees of recovery. For instance, a bunchgrass grazed severely once in the growing season and once again in the dormant season will not be overgrazed, but it will not develop as extensive a root system as it would have if grazed only once in the entire year. Sometimes, or in some areas, you will be more concerned with high animal production and merely want to avoid overgrazing. In that case, you would opt for grazing a bunchgrass twice and a lesser degree of recovery. At other times, or in other areas, you might be trying to achieve maximum root development to mitigate droughts or waterlogging, or to break up deeper compaction. Then you would opt for a single grazing and a greater degree of recovery. Bear such principles in mind as you manage to produce what your holisticgoal requires.
If your holisticgoal calls for the development of a complex, stable grassland supporting many species, you’ll adjust the timing to the most severely grazed grass plant and never to the average. The more any grassland is characterized by distinct plants easy to identify as a single plant, the easier it is, of course, to judge a severely grazed plant. Severely grazed plants recover much more slowly than moderately grazed ones, as the graph in figure 2.6 shows. You should judge by the worst case (most severely grazed plant), even when the majority of plants have been grazed more lightly. This principle holds in any grassland or pasture situation.
The importance of judging by the most severely grazed plants, no matter how hard they are to identify, cannot be overstated. In a planted pasture situation, especially, where severely grazed grass plants are easy to miss in the sward, farmers often give inadequate recovery times. As a result, highly desirable nongrass plants, such as legumes, are killed out.
In principle, a recovery period between grazings as long as, or longer than, the entire growing season will enable most plants to fully recover from a severe grazing, regardless of daily growth rates. If you want to avoid any overgrazing during the grazing periods, you must have enough paddocks, generally, to ensure that grazing periods are 3 days or less in any one paddock. If your growing season was 180 days, and you used that as your recovery period for running one herd through 100 paddocks, your grazing periods would average 1.8 days, and you probably would not overgraze grass plants or over-browse woody or herbaceous plants.
Figure 2.6. Severely grazed plants recover much more slowly than moderately grazed ones.
In rangeland situations a dilemma always arises over grasses that recover at different rates because of species characteristics, slope direction, or other factors. If you have only a few paddocks—and thus have to use long grazing periods in order to maintain recovery periods—you are likely to overgraze some plants. Rapid moves favor the fast growers, but the herd returns too soon for the slow ones. Slow moves may expose fast growers to a second bite before they have recovered. Some plants will be weakened, and some may even die. But on rangelands in particular, partial rest (due to low animal impact) is far more damaging, in terms of the bare and capped soil that results, than the overgrazing of some plants.
To overcome the problem of varying recovery rates, as well as the high levels of partial rest, most ranchers try to build up to high paddock numbers as quickly as economic progress and planning allow, or turn to herding if the costs pencil out.
As chapter 38 in the textbook explains, grazing and recovery periods are always linked. Every time you shorten a grazing period in one paddock, you shorten the recovery period in all paddocks in that grazing cell and risk overgrazing many more plants. To minimize this risk, it’s important to plan the recovery period first. Once you’ve determined what an adequate recovery period should be, that figure will dictate what the average grazing periods for each paddock should be. In a cell of six equal paddocks, for example, a ninety-day recovery period dictates eighteen-day average grazing periods (figure 2.7).
Figure 2.7. In a cell of six equal paddocks, a 90-day recovery period dictates 18-day average grazing periods.
During rapid growth, severely bitten plants might require only a thirty-day recovery period. Thus average grazing periods would fall to six days. The rule of thumb, unless you have many paddocks per herd, is
Slow growth = slow moves (and a longer recovery period)
Rapid growth = rapid moves (and a shorter recovery period)
When in doubt, use slow moves to minimize overgrazing. This rule runs counter to instinct. You naturally want to keep animals longer on dark green flushing grass and move on sooner when it’s paler and obviously growing slowly—but as mentioned previously, every time you leave a paddock a day early, it cuts a day off the recovery time for all paddocks. Thus, by the time you have moved through ten paddocks a day sooner than necessary, all paddocks have lost ten days of recovery time. Because this fact is so easily overlooked, all stock moves should be planned on a chart rather than in a notebook. The chart enables you to immediately see this loss of recovery time and avoid the overgrazing and loss of production that could result.
Timing and planning on a chart—these are the keys to holistic grazing management. As explained both here and in detail in the textbook, overgrazing occurs when animals take regrowing foliage before the plant has recovered from a previous bite. This happens when animals linger too long in one area or return to it too soon. Since, in all environments, plants grow at different rates, timing demands thought and vigilance even without such complications as calving and lambing, poisonous plant seasons, water scarcity, weather, and competing land uses.
With almost all holisticgoals involving land management—from small, tidy pastures to wide-open desertifying rangelands—land divisions are the instrument for striving toward what you need to achieve. These divisions can be demarcated by fences or natural barriers, or for herders by blazed trees or natural features. In the future, technology may provide a practical form of virtual fencing.
Whether you’re running a multipaddock radial cell, leased land transected by ancient barbed wire, or unfenced range, you will have to decide how long your animals will stay together in one place, how big that place will be, where they will move next, and when they will come back.
As the diagrams in figure 2.8 show, the more divisions of land you have, the more recovery time per day of grazing each paddock gets. Increasing the number of paddocks doesn’t change the ADA(H) yielded by the cell as a whole. It just means that each acre or hectare gives up its share in a shorter time.
Once paddock numbers have built up to the point where the longest recovery period (slow-growth conditions) dictates grazing periods averaging no more than 3 days, you have the option of using a single recovery period—say 150 days, rather than 30 days for fast growth and 150 days for slow growth—which simplifies the arithmetic when you get down to planning. You can do this because, even if the growth rate is fast, there is little danger that plants will be overgrazed when exposed to animals for 3 days.
However, you may prefer to stick with using a range of recovery periods to better cater to the nutritional needs of your animals. Although you are not likely to overgraze plants over 3 days using that longer recovery period, you could get better animal performance during periods of rapid growth by dropping to a 1-day grazing when growth is fast. Not only would the animals be moving more rapidly onto fresh grazing, the plants they would be selecting from would be less fibrous. Depending on the number of days that growth was rapid before you again experienced slow growth and had to lengthen grazing periods, this would shorten all recovery periods to less than 150 days. This should still allow adequate recovery time since all paddocks would likely have experienced rapid growth.
As the number of paddocks increases, the grazing periods become too short for overgrazing to occur, as mentioned, but other dangers increase, as figure 2.9 shows. Note that at thirty paddocks or so, slow moves during fast growth cease to cause overgrazing. However, if for some reason animals do return to any paddock before the plants in that paddock are fully recovered, you will experience great damage.
The reason is simply that the stock density will also be rising with decreasing paddock size, and so if any paddock is badly handled, a great many plants will be overgrazed at the same time, leading not only to damaged plants but also, in a brittle environment, exposed soil. Once you attain high paddock numbers—up to 100 or more—the chances of returning before plants have recovered generally diminish.
More Paddocks Mean More Recovery Time/Day of Grazing
With 2 paddocks, each would get 90 days of grazing and 90 days of recovery in a growing season of 180 days.
With 4 paddocks, each would get 30 days grazing followed by 90 days of recovery. Each of the first two paddocks grazed might then get a further 30 days of grazing followed by recovery until the 180-day growing season ends.
With 16 paddocks, each paddock gets 6 days of grazing followed by 90 days of recovery, with some (but not all) paddocks getting another grazing of 6 days until the 180-day growing season is over.
Figure 2.8. The more divisions of land you have, the more recovery time per day of grazing each paddock gets.
Effects of Timing with Various Paddock Numbers
Figure 2.9. As the number of paddocks increases, the grazing periods generally become too short for overgrazing to occur. However, moving too fast during slow growth cuts the recovery period by a month in a 30-paddock cell and the animals may overgraze every plant.
Moving too fast is a great temptation because a large number of animals crowded into a small area will deplete it quickly; moving them a day early leaves a paddock looking much better and the animals happier. However, in a thirty-paddock cell, this cuts the recovery period in every paddock by a month, and the combination of both increased stocking rate and increased stock density could overgraze every single plant. The best way to avoid any of these dangers is to plan the grazing using a planning chart on which you are able to keep an eye on recovery periods for each individual paddock and the cell as a whole.
Most ranches are understocked as their managers begin to manage holistically, and thus, in terms of holistic financial planning, “product conversion” is the weak link. In these cases, the best marginal reaction per dollar comes from increasing animal numbers rather than paddock numbers. However, once the point is reached where the resource (energy) conversion link is weakest, the return on producing more paddocks—either fenced or demarcated for herding—is amazingly high. Seldom if ever can the provision of additional water or any attempt to reduce heavy invasions of woody plants begin to compete dollar for dollar. It is because of such reasoning that while paddock numbers are low, it generally pays to find an inexpensive way to confine animals to smaller units of land—such as strip grazing within the larger paddocks.
At some point, water also becomes a limiting factor, but again be cautious in how you deal with it. Avoid rushing into costly water provision prematurely. Water, like fencing or livestock, should have money spent on it only when it alone will push production from sunlight to solar dollar further than any other measure.
Up to about thirty paddocks, each new division significantly shortens the average grazing period, as figure 2.10 shows. After that, the time gains (in terms of your ability to minimize overgrazing) taper off. However, as we will see, additional paddocks continue to increase stock density on a straight-line basis. As partial rest is commonly a greater problem than overgrazing on brittle-environment ranges, you will want to increase stock density or herd effect to help overcome it.
Paddock Number and Grazing Periods
Figure 2.10. The curve shows how the grazing period derived from an average 60-day recovery period shortens as the number of paddocks rises.
If you are running stock in a nonbrittle environment, the rule of thumb about maximum density and minimum time still applies, although for slightly different reasons. For instance, in 100-inch-rainfall tropical forest environments, farmers found that only by moving the animals frequently could they get reasonable animal performance. These fast moves automatically came from high paddock numbers and higher density.
In any environment, increased paddocks will simultaneously improve the graze-to-recovery (and trample-to-recovery) ratio. In desertifying, low-rainfall, brittle environments, the better that ratio, the more rapid the reversal of desertification tends to be, provided animal impact is adequate. And in nonbrittle environments, the better that ratio, the better animals tend to perform and the easier it is to slow the natural tendency of pastures to revert to forest. Aesthetic and legal considerations, type of terrain, cost of labor, herders, wildlife needs, and, above all, your holisticgoal will control both the pace and the level of development. All this becomes easier the better you grasp the principles governing time, density, land, and animal performance.
Stock density is the number of animals per unit of land (animals per acre or hectare in this book) at a given moment. Since it involves both animals and acres or hectares, it influences the ADA(H) consumed from paddocks in a cell:
The “acres” (and “hectares”) in this equation refer not to the total acres or hectares in the cell, but to the acres or hectares in a given paddock. Thus, you could have high cattle numbers and low stock density or vice versa.
Because stock density includes the same animal and acre or hectare factors we use to compute ADA(H), it also represents how many ADA(H) the herd will take from the paddock every day they are in it. Every acre or hectare in a paddock stocked at ten cows per acre or hectare density will have ten ADA(H) removed every day the herd spends in the paddock.
At high density, therefore, the impact on an acre or hectare in one day becomes very great, as illustrated in figure 2.11. If your planning is good, this will address many problems and speed land improvement. If your planning is sloppy or nonexistent, this will greatly increase the damage you can do to both land and animals. In other words, greatly increasing paddocks and stock density reduces the risks in ranching (drought, flood, disease, etc.), but it increases the penalties for poor management. The choice is yours.
The advantages of high stock density are as follows:
• Animals tend to graze a greater proportion of available plants and graze them more evenly, leaving fewer ungrazed.
• Distribution of grazing, dung, and urine becomes more even.
• Animals move more frequently onto fresh ground, stimulating it and providing a more constant level of nutrition.
Paddock Numbers and Stock Density
Figure 2.11. These two cells show visually what a fourfold increase in density looks like when fifty animals run in thirty-two paddocks instead of eight. Even when control of time keeps ADA (or ADH) harvested the same, both land and livestock benefit at higher density.
• Tighter plant communities tend to develop, providing more leaf and less fiber in many grass plants.
• Animal performance improves.
Note: If forage is growing and very rich, your animals’ performance may actually drop due to lack of roughage. Or if recovery periods are very long, grasses may be excessively fibrous. In either case, you will need to use supplemental feeding as well as sound culling practices to assist in obtaining optimum individual animal performance in your herd. Good evidence also indicates that abrupt changes in diet often cause a drop in performance, as it takes several days for ruminal flora to adjust to the new regime. Watch for circumstances where this would occur on moves from paddock to paddock.
Consider a cell that has six equal paddocks, as shown here. A grazing period of twelve days in each will allow each paddock sixty days to recover. The herd will cover the whole cell in seventy-two days.
Cutting paddock 1 in half to create paddock 7 will obviously double the stock density in those two paddocks. If, to keep the ADA(H) constant, you then graze the small paddocks for only six days, you’ll notice that they now get sixty-six days to recover instead of only sixty.
In practice, for the sake of convenience, we compute the grazing periods from a desired average recovery period rather than a minimum, like sixty days in this example. The numbers don’t look quite so neat, but the principle remains: When you subdivide paddocks, you reduce grazing periods and increase stock density and recovery periods in those paddocks.
In your planning you’ll probably consider increasing stock density in some areas before others and proceed by dividing existing paddocks or grazing areas (see part 4 for details). When you do this, you’ll soon begin to notice the subtle relationship between stock density, paddock numbers, grazing periods, and recovery periods. As a general rule, smaller paddocks with higher stock density will begin to improve faster than large paddocks with lower stock density. The planning procedure in the next section (“Creating Your Plan”) explains the mathematical rules. The box “Effects of Splitting Paddocks” demonstrates the principle.
When you initially increase stock density, you may experience a slight fall off in individual animal performance, even though overall production and profitability are enhanced. This poorer individual animal performance can be due to a variety of factors, some of which are associated with a lack of diversity in plant species and poor age structure following years of partial rest and overgrazing. There are several things you can do to avoid the performance drop.
The first and most essential is simply good grazing planning that ensures a nearly even plane of nutrition. You want to give animals the opportunity to balance their diets for protein, energy, and fiber as much as possible. The best way to ensure this is through quick moves to fresh grazing—as fast as adequate recovery periods will permit—and by giving animals access to forage that provides protein, energy, and fiber in good measure. Never hold animals back, forcing them to eat everything and preventing them from selecting what they need. The only exceptions would be when you’re running a class of animal whose performance doesn’t matter, or when you’re using your animals to clean up old material in the nongrowing season.
Some ranchers in very tall, fibrous grassland have avoided individual performance drops by giving animals access to previously grazed paddocks while they graze in the paddock that has had the longest recovery. Others have achieved the same result through supplementation programs that supply what the forage lacks—energy, protein, or various minerals.
In all environments, ranchers and farmers will face adverse years when rainfall is short. In the more humid nonbrittle environments, the shortfall may be slight, but relative to normal rainfall it could be serious enough to result in substantially less growth. Nonbrittle environments can also experience less growth in abnormally wet years due to drainage problems associated with a poor water cycle. In the more brittle environments, where rainfall is always erratic, dry years are more frequent and predictable.
Traditional practice calls for keeping some land in reserve to carry animals in time of drought, fire, or other catastrophe. It’s reassuring to look over at tall grass waving in the lower forty and know it’s there if you need it. On the other hand, owing to natural processes explained in the textbook, forage simply left standing for long periods of time loses nutritional value and in brittle environments is more prone to oxidation and fire loss. In addition, overrested grassland in both brittle and nonbrittle environments promotes shifts to forbs and woody species.
Add up these problems, and the traditional habit of setting aside land for drought reserve becomes an unwise practice. And if you don’t use the reserves, when animals graze those areas in the following growing season, they will select new grass and leave the old to weather yet another year, again encouraging a shift to forbs and woody plants. Withdrawing some land from production reduces the graze-and-trample-to-recovery ratio, which puts heavier pressure on the remaining land, causing you to lose production over a larger area, and on animals that must now remain longer in paddocks.
Compared to the extra forage production possible when planned grazing encompasses all the land, withholding land for drought reserve typically results in a net forage loss and lower animal performance—a high cost to pay for a drought that may not occur. This practice of setting land aside in case of possible drought persists mostly as a defense against human nature. You know that in theory you need only one bank account, but putting something in a second account with a penalty for early withdrawal helps suppress the temptation to dip into savings. A pasture withdrawn for drought reserve serves the same function, but in this instance it lowers the return earned on all the money invested in all the bank accounts!
A Note on Forage Digestibility
The more digestible the forage is, the more a cow can eat, assuming protein and mineral requirements are met. The less fiber, or lignin, in the forage, the faster the rumen microbes can digest the forage and the faster the cow can empty and refill her rumen. The more lignin in the forage, the slower the rumen passage and the longer she stays full. That means she refills less, and thus her total dry matter intake is less. This is why the better the forage, the more the animals gain; they not only can digest more, they also can consume more total dry matter.
Since holistic grazing planning offers a way to compute how many animal-days a whole cell can supply, you can budget a certain amount of days or months of grazing for reserve. Then you can handle the accounting separately on paper, just as the bank does, yet manage total capital on the land in the best interests of plants and animals at all times.
The example in the box “Holding Reserves in Time or Acres” illustrates the mathematics of reserving area versus reserving time and shows how plans that may be equal in terms of forage consumed result in quite different treatment of the land. Having extra paddocks available increases management flexibility as well as overall production of forage for a possible drought, and it enables you to get your animals through the drought period in better condition.
A simple technique allows you to estimate at any point how many animal-days of forage you have on hand if growth should stop right now. Applied another way, the same technique will tell you how many ADA(H) the cell will have to supply in order to carry your animals for a given time. Then you can evaluate sample areas against that figure and look far down the road as droughts develop. Even more important, it allows you to plan for predictable nongrowing seasons, such as winter.
Holding Reserves in Time or Acres
Compare different reserve strategies for similar 1,000-acre, ten-paddock cells.
In terms of forage consumed, the plans seem equal.
Cell A grazes 800 acres and saves 200 acres for times when drought causes insufficient winter feed. In a good year, the 800 grazed acres should yield:
The reserved feed will be roughly 200 acres × 91.25 ADA = 18,250 ADs. The yield could be lower, as it is only a nongrowing season yield when finally used.
Land in Cell B will yield:
Assuming grass grows equally in both cells, each acre of the time-reserve cell will have roughly:
91.25 – 73 = 18.25 AD of feed left.
Total reserves are again:
1,000 acres × 18.25 ADA = 18,250 ADs
In a bad year, when reserves are necessary, all the numbers will be smaller, but the arithmetic will still show both plans equal.
A. Acre-Reserve Cell
B. Time-Reserve Cell
1,000 acres, 10 paddocks, 200 cows, 210-day growing season
In terms of production, however, the time-reserve cell will do much better:
1. Cattle in the acre-reserve cell take 25 percent more ADA from the land they graze, meaning more grass starts recovering from lower on the growth curve (see figure 2.6). Thus it regrows less in the same time than grass in Cell B.
2. Given an average sixty-three-day recovery period in each cell, grazing periods are two days shorter in Cell B:
3. Cattle move to fresh grass 25 percent more often in Cell B, converting more of it into beef.
These calculations do not involve stock density at all, but rather stocking rate. Density, remember, refers to the concentration of animals in a paddock at a particular moment. Stocking rate is the number of acres or hectares you determine to be able to support one animal for the time you expect a herd to remain in the cell as a whole. In other words,
Figuring Approximate Stocking Rate (Acres)
Imagine a sheep ranch in very poor country with a stocking rate of about 1:20. That means 20 acres for every sheep. To keep the numbers simple, assume you’re keeping no lambs through a winter, which lasts from mid-October to mid-April (180 days). Thus every 20 acres has to supply 180 sheep-days, or animal-days (ADs), of winter feed:
180 AD ÷ 20 acres = 9 sheep-days per acre (ADA)
So 1/9 of an acre must be able to feed one sheep for one day.
Now look at your land after the first frost and see if one sheep could eat for one day on a selection of 1/9-acre samples:
1 acre = 4,840 square yards
1/9 acre = 4,840 ÷ 9 = 538 square yards
Pushing the square-root button on a pocket calculator will quickly tell you that one side of a square covering 538 square yards is 23 yards. You can then step off several random squares (see figure 2.12), and in each case ask: Could this square feed one sheep for a day? (It helps greatly if four people do the pacing, so that one can stand at each corner while you judge whether the area could feed one sheep for a day.)
You can also work the same problem the other way to find out what stocking rate your land can carry through the winter. After a very dry summer, suppose you find that a square of 23 yards to a side will not feed one sheep for one day. Suppose you find that the square has to be at least 35 yards on each side. From this you can determine how much stock you must sell to get through the winter (or how many sheep-days of feed you must buy):
35 yards × 35 yards = 1,225 square yards needed to feed one sheep for one day
Therefore, to find out how many sheep one acre would support for a day, you divide 4,840 (square yards in an acre) by 1,225 (area required for one sheep) to give you the answer: 3.95, or 4 sheep.
A 40,000-acre ranch supplies 160,000 ADs (4 ADA × 40,000 acres = 160,000 animal days). (Note: You need to subtract from your total land area places such as roads and steep hillsides that will obviously never be grazed. This ranch might have a total land area of 42,000 acres, but only 40,000 would actually be grazed and thus should be considered in our estimates.)
To figure an animal-day plot
to figure ADs available
For 180 days, 160,000 ADs feed only 889 sheep (160,000 ADs ÷ 180 days = 889 sheep). If you normally run 2,000 sheep, you can expect them to run out of forage in about 80 days (160,000 ADs ÷ 2,000 sheep = 80 days).
Figuring Approximate Stocking Rate (Hectares)
Imagine a sheep ranch in very poor country with a stocking rate of about 1:5. That means 5 hectares for every sheep. To keep the numbers simple, assume you’re keeping no lambs through a winter, which lasts from mid-April to mid-October (180 days). Thus every 5 hectares has to supply 180 sheep-days, or animal-days (ADs), of winter feed:
180 ADs ÷ 5 hectares = 36 ADs per hectare (ADH)
So 1/36 hectare must be able to feed one sheep for one day.
Now look at your land after the first frost and see if one sheep could eat for one day on a selection of 1/36-hectare samples.
1 hectare = 10,000 square meters
1/36 hectare = 10,000 ÷ 36 = 278 square meters
Pushing the square-root button on a pocket calculator will quickly tell you that one side of a square covering 278 square meters is 17 meters. You can then step off several random squares (see figure 2.12), and in each case ask: Could this square feed one sheep for a day? (It helps greatly if four people do the pacing, so that one can stand at each corner while you judge whether the area could feed one sheep for a day.)
You can also work the same problem the other way to find out what stocking rate your land can carry through the winter. After a very dry summer, suppose you find that a square of 17 meters to a side will not feed one sheep for one day. Suppose you find that the square has to be at least 25 meters on each side. From this you can determine how much stock you must sell to get through the winter (or how many sheep-days of feed you must buy):
25 meters × 25 meters = 625 square meters needed to feed one sheep for one day.
Therefore, to find out how many sheep one hectare would support for a day, you divide 10,000 (square meters in a hectare) by 625 (area required for one sheep) to give you the answer: 16 sheep.
A 10,000-hectare ranch supplies 160,000 ADs (16 ADH × 10,000 hectares = 160,000 ADs). (Note: You need to subtract from your total land area places such as roads and steep hillsides that will obviously never be grazed. This ranch might have a total land area of 10,100 hectares, but only 10,000 would actually be grazed and thus should be considered in our estimates.
To figure an animal-day plot
to figure ADs available
For 180 days, 160,000 ADs feed only 889 sheep (160,000 ADs ÷ 180 days = 889 sheep). If you normally run 2,000 sheep, you can expect them to run out of forage in about 80 days (160,000 ADs ÷ 2,000 sheep = 80 days).
Factoring in Physiological State and Wildlife Needs
Factoring in the physiological state of the animals is important if they are heavily lactating cows coming to the bull, for instance, or young stock on which you want to see high daily weight gains. In earlier days we used to convert to standard animal units (SAU) using sophisticated tables that factored in the class, weight, physiological condition, and desired weight gains of the animals. If you have access to such tables and are more comfortable using them, as most Australians are with their Dry Sheep Equivalent tables, then do so.
In practice, it has often proved just as effective to convert to SAU based on weight or size only (as explained in the box “Conversion to Standard Animal Units”) and to factor in physiological condition or needs when assessing forage samples in the field. All you do then is rephrase the question you ask about feeding an animal for a day. When you look over each sample square of forage, pose the question as follows:
• If all of your animals are dry pregnant cows and you have no wildlife populations dependent on the same forage, simply ask, Could this square feed one animal today?
• If the bulk of your cows are lactating, and thus require a higher plane of nutrition, or if you have steers needing to gain weight, ask, Could this square feed one animal comfortably today?
• If you also have a significant population of deer, antelope, or other wildlife, ask, Could this square feed one animal comfortably today and leave enough forage for the wildlife?
• If you also want to ensure that abundant cover remains for game birds or other wildlife, ask, Will this area feed one animal and leave plenty of cover?
• If you are trying to cover soil as rapidly as possible, you might ask, Will this feed one animal today and leave plenty for litter cover?
You get the idea. Vary the question depending on the needs of your stock, your wildlife, and your land. When asking the question, particularly in the case of lactating animals or those from which you are expecting high weight gains, it helps to “think like” a cow, goat, sheep, or whatever animal you are judging for.
To do this, imagine you have a sack the size of the animal’s stomach tied around your neck that you have to fill in a limited time with an exact percentage of fresh, leafy material and an exact percentage of fibrous material, and you have only one hand to do the filling. If, in looking at the plants on your sample area, you feel that would be difficult due to the sparseness of the forage, or an excessive amount of old, oxidizing material or fibrous stems, then it would probably also be difficult for a cow, sheep, or goat.
If you’re running mixed herds of lactating mothers you hope to breed, plus young stock you want to gain, as well as culls, what do you do? Or if you run a mixed herd of sheep, goats, cattle, or whatever, and they are in different stages of lactation or breeding, you will be called upon to apply that rarest of all human traits—common sense. If in doubt, err on the side of caution.
Here’s an example: If you have 100 cows in a 10,000-acre cell continuously, that is a stocking rate of 1:100—year-round. A similar cell that carries 100 yearling steers only through the summer would have a stocking rate of 1:100—growing season only.
In planning, all stocking rates are handled similarly—except that when a cell supports livestock only part of a year, you’ll have only the animal-days required by wildlife to worry about the rest of the time. The examples in the boxes “Figuring Approximate Stocking Rate (Acres)” and “Figuring Approximate Stocking Rate (Hectares)” illustrate how to estimate the proper stocking rate for any piece of land. Also see the box “Factoring in Physiological State and Wildlife Needs.”
It takes some experience to decide what size square of land will support an animal for a day—and you must check several places on your land because there will be big differences among sites even on what superficially looks like a fairly uniform pasture or rangeland. Records for past years (old grazing charts) will tell you what your land really does yield in ADA(H). Monitoring and fixed-point photos will also give you a feel for changes from year to year.
Estimating the Area Required to Feed One Cow One Day
Figure 2.12. The two men have paced out a sample square they believe could feed one animal for one day. Markers aren’t necessary when you have four people doing the pacing.
Roughly, however, if you can imagine yourself successfully filling a sack the size of an animal’s stomach or making half a bale of hay while picking with only one hand, as a cow with one mouth and no hands would, you are in the ballpark. If judging for animals that browse and graze, remember that you will be looking at all the vegetation. Be aware that animals will be selecting their diets, taking leafy material of the season, some fibrous material, and no old oxidizing material, and they have a limited time to do so, since they have to ruminate and sleep. So consider not only the bulk of forage present but also its quality. Eventually, you’ll find that just as a farmer who regularly weighs animals can estimate the weight of animals with remarkable accuracy, so a farmer who regularly assesses the land in this manner becomes increasingly accurate.
In practice, when you go out on the land and lay out sample squares to see if your forage will last the winter, if all is well, there should be no doubt and the answer would be yes. If you find yourself fudging a bit on whether a sample will feed an animal for a day, or dragging your feet on testing areas that you suspect fall below the average, you’re probably in danger. As a general rule of thumb, any time you hesitate call it a no.
If, after sampling a good number of squares, you find that on average they would not provide the required feed, your next step is to calculate how many animals you can run. What size square will carry an animal for a day? This gets tricky. Even though the procedure outlined here, and illustrated in figure 2.12, provides the best information you are likely to get, it’s crude. A few yards can make a huge difference in your calculation of total reserves, so be prepared for some soul searching, and don’t be afraid to get multiple opinions and to always err on the conservative side.
If your paddock arrangement allows you to do it in a relatively short grazing period and it would not disrupt your plan too much, you might plan to take all the nongrowing-season ADs planned for one paddock in one grazing toward the beginning of the season. That will give you a precise reading on how well you estimated for that paddock, and you can use that evidence to check your estimates in others.
Although we stress the difficulties and dangers, experience has shown over the last thirty years that the worst mistakes managers make when planning their grazing are not nearly as serious as the mistakes routinely made by managers who don’t do the planning.
The technique of measuring available forage by checking the area needed to feed one animal for one day can also help you during the growing season to determine if your stocking rate is reasonable. Start by sampling the longest recovered paddock that animals are soon due to graze. Compute the size of the square necessary to feed one animal for one day during the shortest grazing period allowable for that paddock. Because you would use that size square only during ideal growing conditions, you are certainly overstocked if that size square doesn’t pass the test. For example, suppose you plan 800 cows for a 600-acre paddock on three-day to nine-day grazings:
800 cows × 3 days ÷ 600 acres = 4 ADA
4,840 square yards per acre ÷ 4 ADA = 1,210 square yards per animal-day
Square root of 1,210 square yards = 35 yards (one side of an animal-day square)
Or for an example in hectares, suppose you plan 800 cows for a 200-hectare paddock on three-day to nine-day grazings:
800 cows × 3 days ÷ 200 hectares = 12 ADH
10,000 square meters per hectare ÷ 12 ADH = 833 square meters per animal-day
Square root of 833 square meters = 29 meters (one side of an animal-day square)
If this size square would feed one animal for a day, compute the smaller square that would support one animal for one day given the longest grazing period in that paddock (nine days in this case); see figure 2.13. If that doesn’t pass, you’re probably gambling on rapid growth. Monitor carefully.
If animals seriously deplete forage or start to eat litter before they’re scheduled to move, suspect overstocking but check other factors:
• You might have overestimated a paddock’s capacity. Taking more ADA(H) from a better paddock might relieve the pressure.
• Low stock density can produce forage too rank to eat. Mowing, burning, or herd effect can solve that problem, but plan for higher density as soon as you can.
In year-round grazing situations, overstocking usually takes its toll only when animals exhaust forage during the nongrowing season. If overgrazing in the growing season is minimized, overstocking will hurt animals, wild and domestic, more than it will affect plants or the land. Nevertheless, the effect is undesirable. Consider the following:
Longer Grazing Periods Mean Smaller Sample Areas
Figure 2.13. The longer the grazing period, the smaller the square that must provide each animal-day of forage.
• As reserves dwindle, grazing animals will eat litter, reducing the soil cover so essential to the healthy functioning of all four ecosystem processes.
• Scarcity of plants tall enough to penetrate snow harms species such as pronghorn that do not forage through snow. (Plants that penetrate snow cause it to melt faster and may actually open up patches of grass. They also hold blowing snow, returning more moisture to the soil.)
• Certain animals will shift exclusively to browse, creating “browse lines” below which younger, shorter animals can find nothing.
These problems appear most frequently in yearling operations that do not plan to keep livestock through the dormant season and do not budget a winter reserve for wildlife. Even so, year-round grazing plans must recognize the danger too.
If you intend to manage for any significant wildlife population at all (remember, diversity is almost always an asset), careful planning of forage will affect game populations more than any single factor, including hunting. Forage and cover govern how many wild animals survive the nongrowing season and where they spend it. An elk herd breaking fences to get to a haystack can cost plenty.
Use your imagination, as some managers once did at the Los Ojos Ranch in eastern New Mexico. They developed a way to train themselves to judge more accurately by subjecting one paddock to the grazing pressure they figured all their land would have to stand, on average, during the winter, but they fenced off some sample squares representing what they estimated would have to feed one animal for one day at that level of use (figure 2.14).
Figure 2.14. The Los Ojos Ranch staff used a cow-day enclosure to check their estimates of nongrowing-season forage reserves. The enclosures were placed in one paddock that was grazed at the grazing pressure they figured all their land would have to stand, on average, during the winter; then they compared the grazed land and the ungrazed enclosures to see how good their estimates had been.
At the end of the test period, they could look at the grazed land and the ungrazed squares and discuss how close they came. If the ground that was grazed still contained acceptable litter and forage, they could expect that similar use through the winter would benefit the land and cattle performance would not suffer. Then they could use the fenced-off patch as a proper example of a square that could indeed feed one animal for one day. The Los Ojos people rejected the idea of putting one heifer in a fenced-off square, on the grounds that she wouldn’t graze normally under those conditions, nor would the ground get the treatment it would from a complete herd.
An underlying principle of Holistic Management holds that naturally functioning wild herds do not destroy land. Animals may die off occasionally because of drought, late springs, and other climatic surprises, but almost by definition those setbacks occur when plants are not growing and the danger of overgrazing is minimal. Thus, wild population levels generally reflect the amount of forage and cover available in the nongrowing season.
For domestic stock, also, the amount and quality of standing forage available at the onset of the nongrowing season (or in some less brittle environments, the slow-growing cold season) is what largely determines your stocking rate. No other factor tells as much about the carrying capacity of your land.
If, as in a yearling operation, your land doesn’t have to carry a herd through the nongrowing period, regulate your numbers to leave enough animal-days of forage for wildlife and some reserve against a late return of growing conditions. But when you carry animals year-round, your numbers will have to reflect what you can carry through the nongrowing period, plus a reserve for wildlife and drought.
Only in the most extreme cases of overstocking combined with bad grazing planning do animals run out of feed during a growing season. Far more typically in brittle environments, a dry summer does not leave enough standing forage to last through the winter. In the northern hemisphere, if the supply runs out in February and you don’t expect significant growth until the end of March, you’re in trouble. Good planning will compensate for that by treating every year as though it is going to be a dry year—as 50 percent or more are likely to be in low-rainfall brittle environments.
Droughts are often just as predictable as dry years. In northeastern Arizona, for example, ranchers can expect some moisture in March or April, but if mid-May arrives dry, they had better figure out what their stock will eat and drink until August. The odds get very long in June and July. Again, good grazing planning will help you avoid such a calamity.
The condition of the land will tell you much more about the likely frequency of droughts than sophisticated weather models ever can, simply because droughts are largely the result of noneffective rainfall, rather than insufficient rainfall. You can judge the degree of your own rainfall effectiveness simply by looking down at your land as you walk across it and noting the amount of bare soil between the plants. The higher the percentage of bare soil, the less effective your rainfall, and the more likely you are to experience droughts.
Whenever you think you may run out of feed during a time of minimal or no growth, keep these points in mind:
• Before cutting stock, do field checks to see how many animal-days of forage you actually have. Use the Los Ojos technique just described if it will make you more confident in your assessment.
• Consider changing plans to enhance any growth that plants do achieve and to amplify the rebound when good conditions return. This generally means combining stock into fewer, larger herds. In fact, seriously consider combining all herds into one to extend recovery periods and keep animals moving as frequently as possible.
• Consider various ways you can use available forage more efficiently—for example, by increasing paddock numbers with temporary fencing or herding within existing fencing, gaining additional grazing through the use of portable water troughs, or supplementing poor-quality forage.
In the 1960s in Zimbabwe, when Allan Savory was pioneering his grazing planning ideas, he came to the assistance of two brothers, Ben and Boet van Vuuren, who had four ranches bordering one of his own. The rains had failed completely, coinciding with a massive invasion of armyworms that had devoured everything in their path but coarse sticks. Ranchers in the area could not destock, as they had nowhere to send their cattle. Many had resorted to shooting their animals.
Desperate, the van Vuurens asked Allan for help. Lacking any experience in a situation this bad, he fell back on an observation of French pasture specialist André Voisin that animals perform better with constant moves to fresh ground. He suggested the van Vuurens amalgamate the eight herds on their four ranches into one herd of over 1,000 and plan daily or half-daily moves through all the paddocks. The four ranches, in effect, became one large grazing cell.
Over the next six months or so, the animals subsisted on twigs and leaf fall, but they did appear to receive some stimulation with the daily moves to fresh, unfouled ground. Although they were desperately thin by the time the rains broke, every animal made it through. Nearby ranchers who had half the van Vuurens’ stocking rate but had scattered their animals lost hundreds to starvation.
• If you must destock, the sooner you know it and act, the less you will have to cut.
At Holistic Management training sessions, hundreds of professional land managers have faced this question: “If you have to destock, why should you do it right now, not later?” Most people just resort to prayer until the hand of God forces the issue, but in a classroom they think up a reason fast. Ninety percent say, “So you can sell before the price falls.” The rest usually split between “Performance may drop if you wait” and “You’ll beat hell out of the ground.”
Very few ever see the main point: If you have to destock, the sooner you do it, the less you have to cut. The graphs in figure 2.15 illustrate why this is true. They show what happens to 500 cows in a 160-day winter season when forage reserves fall 25 percent short. Normally, the herd would consume 80,000 animal-days of forage during that time. What plans make most sense when you estimate you’ll have only 60,000 ADs standing at the onset of cold weather?
The example in figure 2.15 is extreme, because in reality mature animals don’t often starve to death. They just abort, fail to conceive, shrink down to scratch, get hauled to the sale barn, or dine on the benefit of emergency loans. Nevertheless, forewarned still proves forearmed.
Earlier we looked at the many advantages of greater stock density during the growing season, which you can get by increasing paddocks, amalgamating herds, and so on. The nongrowing season poses a slightly different challenge, as there are more factors to consider.
Let’s say you have enough standing forage after the first freeze of autumn to last you till spring, including plants that cure well enough to supply nearly all the protein and minerals your livestock and wildlife require. Nevertheless, though all animals can find enough bulk throughout the season, its nutritional value drops steadily under continuous or rotational grazing. Both wild and domestic animals will select the best first, getting more than they need during the first half of winter and less during the second. You can buy supplements to make up the difference for the livestock. Wild grazing animals will go short.
Other nasty things can happen too—such as increased poisonous plant danger in the spring, as many of the most dangerous species green up early. For the same reason, given few paddocks, cool-season grasses and forbs suffer intense early grazing and, especially in milder climates where plants go dormant for only a short time, overgrazing.
On rangelands, grasses with better curing properties, which make them a higher-value feed for livestock, give a reddish hue to an autumn in America or a dry season in Africa and Australia. By late winter, however, that color not uncommonly pales to the straw yellow of the less nutritious plants that remain. This drop-off in feed value tends to be worse on high-rainfall leached soils, as even growing vegetation offers less in protein and minerals and more in fiber. In the tropics certainly, and probably in other environments, feed value falls off dramatically once grass is frosted.
500 animals × 160 days = 80,000 AD but 60,000 AD ÷ 160 days = 375 animals
60,000 AD – (500 animals × 40 days) = 40,000 AD ÷ 120 days left = 333 animals
60,000 AD - (500 animals × 80 days) = 20,000 AD ÷ 80 days left = 250 animals
60,000 AD ÷ 500 animals = 120 days before everything is gone
Figure 2.15. If you have to destock, the sooner you do it, the less you have to cut.
In figure 2.16, graph A assumes that supplementation will be necessary after exactly half the forage has been selected, and the need will increase. The stock, being scattered, foul a wide area, causing inefficient grazing, and are not allowed the stimulation of a move onto fresh ground.
Real situations are never neat, of course, and require close monitoring of both stock and forage, but the principle still holds. The stock have more than they need early in the season and less than required at the end. The mining industry calls this “high grading”—taking out the best ore first. At some point, the ore that remains is too low grade to pay for mining it.
Miners can’t make any more ore, just as you can’t grow any more grass in some environments and very little in others over winter. But by mixing high and low grades, miners can economically mine much more. The more paddocks you have, the better you can achieve the same thing by intelligently planning the use of the forage through the entire nongrowing season and drought reserve period.
The ranchers referred to earlier, in the discussion on stock density and animal nutrition, are an example of the principle in practice. They’ve planned their nongrowing-season grazing so that when animals enter a new paddock, they also have access to previously grazed paddocks, which enables them to better balance their diets. (While plants are dormant, you don’t face the same overgrazing dangers, so you can manipulate grazing and animal impact more easily.) Since these ranchers are in high-rainfall areas with highly fibrous vegetation, the animals are also offered mineral supplements free choice.
Balancing Nutrition in the Non-Growing Season
Graph A: Continuous grazing creates a large nutritional deficit at the end of the season.
Graph B: Even a few paddocks will somewhat balance nutritional needs across time.
Graph C: A rapid rotation creates a deficit at the end of the season.
Graph D: High paddock numbers keep nutritional plane high throughout.
Figure 2.16. The nutritional value of forage drops steadily during the nongrowing season. Animals will select the best first, getting more than they need during the first half of the nongrowing season and less during the second. You can avoid this problem to a large extent if you keep animals moving through the paddocks and minimize the number of times they have to return to already grazed paddocks. The more paddocks you have, the fewer times animals need to graze them again, and thus the more even the plane of nutrition.
Graph B in figure 2.16 shows the effect of using ten paddocks one after another. The cattle spend 20 days total in each paddock, by going through them twice in a 200-day dormant period. This scheme has several advantages. Stock do occasionally move to fresh ground. The paddocks will provide some forage for wildlife right to the end of the season. And even though forage value will not meet minimum daily requirements for the second 10 days in each paddock, the carryover from the first 10 days helps reduce the need for excessive supplementation. On the other hand, fouling will still cut grazing efficiency, and you won’t eliminate supplements completely.
People who follow a rigid rotation schedule don’t usually change it in winter. A three- to four-day grazing period would look like graph C. This scheme would keep stock moving onto fresh ground and greatly reduce the fouling problem. You might get by with minimum supplementation through the second grazing in each paddock. You would not meet the requirements of wildlife, however, and the supplement bill during the last pass through the paddocks would be high.
Suppose, however, you have 100 paddocks and the herd stays only two days in each. Then the pattern would look like graph D. Your stock move to fresh ground every other day. Forage use becomes extremely efficient. And the need for supplements is minimized. Remember, this diagram shows you the principle. In your actual plan, if you had some low-lying areas prone to frosting, you would be taking all of the grazing that you could out of those prior to frosting. That would delay the animals coming into the frost-free paddocks, and you would balance out the diet in those through the remaining season.
These examples are, of course, purely theoretical. Other considerations may count much more in your planning. Some paddocks may, as mentioned, be prone to frosting or snow cover. Some may provide cover or a convenient place for monitoring calving or lambing. Some areas may need to be avoided at certain times because of high predation, and inevitably your plan to minimize fire risk or forage loss from fire necessitates grazing certain areas earlier in the nongrowing season. Nevertheless, amalgamating herds in the nongrowing season means more paddocks, more density, better nutrition, better mineral cycling and improved land health, and greater efficiency. (This applies to the growing season too, of course.)
The policy of reserving time (in animal-days) rather than area (in ungrazed paddocks) merits another look. If you experience a drought even worse than you planned for and are forced to make a pass through all paddocks yet again, your stock will face a depleted nutritional selection without doubt. But your animals will always be better off than if you had planned for the same situation by reserving an ungrazed area.
If a drought does not occur, the accumulated grass is generally not a liability in a low-rainfall brittle environment, even when the “time reserve” planned runs a year or more. The old grass can be remarkably nutritious, especially if growing on highly mineralized soils. In a high-rainfall brittle environment, however, even six-month-old grass, especially on poor, leached soils, can be of low nutritive value—so planning for drought in terms of time rather than area becomes doubly important.
In drought-prone areas, you know that the chances of experiencing a drought are high, and thus you always assume the growing season will be a poor one, either because spring rains fail to materialize or because early rains are all you get. A time or drought reserve will get you through the former, but you’ll need to replan right through to the anticipated start of the next growing season in the case of the latter.
The point at which you replan is a matter of individual judgment based on historical rainfall records. But never wait until the end of the growing season before taking action.
At the first pang of worry about the prospect of a summer without rain, estimate your animal-days of standing forage to get an idea of how long you can last in a worst-case scenario. Review all the measures you might take that could help pull you through (see the earlier section “If You Run Out of Feed”). Then weigh your options. If you normally run several herds in separate cells or paddocks, you may be able to avoid buying feed or destocking if you amalgamate your herds and keep them moving through all the paddocks you have (see figure 2.17). The section further on entitled “Single versus Multiple Herds” covers the practicalities.
Combining herds and treating several cells as one cell gives land longer recovery periods and additional benefits from greater stock density. It may also help you maintain a constant level of nutrition, thus reducing the need for supplements.
Lack of water is the most common reason people give for minimizing herd size. That’s why it is so important to plan for large water supplies as you create your land plan (part 4). In most cases, this will involve building larger storage reservoirs and/or piping water from two or more weak points to create one stronger one.
In the meantime, if you are faced with a drought and need to amalgamate your herds, there are temporary solutions to watering one large herd, such as transporting water to the animals. Or, if large supplies are available only at some points on a ranch, you can drive animals to those points every second or third day, which has been done successfully on many ranches.
Even breeds that did not originate in arid zones can adapt to a surprisingly long time between drinks and cover much more distance to water than generally expected. However, they must be worked into a routine and must never be disappointed in finding sufficient clean water when they are brought to it. If the water point they are counting on is dry when they get there, they will tend to hang around waiting for every drip that comes and may stop grazing altogether.
How Joining Herds Affects Grazing and Recovery Periods
Four herds of 125 cows each in four 1,000-acre (hectare), 8-paddock cells.
Cells combined into one 4,000-acre (hectare), 32-paddock cell.
Figure 2.17. In the top example, there are four herds of 125 cows each in four 1,000-acre, 8-paddock cells. Density is 1 cow per acre. A 14-day grazing period yields a 98-day recovery period. In the bottom example, the cells have been combined into one 4,000-acre, 32-paddock cell. Density is now 4 cows per acre. A 3-day grazing period gives a 93-day recovery period.
On the Barlite Ranch near Marfa, Texas, 1982 saw a severe drought in which most ranches were forced to destock drastically. The manager faced reduction of the 1,200 cattle, which were divided among seven cells, containing a total of 101 paddocks. Early in the growing season, the manager had started buying in and storing hay, but as the drought progressed, he grew increasingly worried and called Allan Savory, a consultant to the ranch, to see if there was any way to avoid destocking.
Having learned from his experience with the van Vuuren brothers, Allan suggested that he combine the seven herds into one and move them through all the paddocks, which would maximize animal impact and minimize the risk of overgrazing. The two of them did some calculations and found that even if the Barlite had only an inch of rain in the remaining season, the ranch could grow at least another ounce of grass per square yard. That added up to a great tonnage of feed over the ranch as a whole.
With one herd and 101 paddocks, the cattle were able to move daily. This gave each paddock a maximum dose of dung, urine, and trampling, followed by one hundred days of recovery. “I didn’t think anyone could move that many cattle every day,” the manager said later. “But they were so used to the fences already, they pretty well moved themselves.”
Finally, in October and November an inch and a half of drizzle blessed the Barlite. The manager figured it grew them 21 million pounds of feed. The sudden lushness of their ground stopped abruptly at their boundary fence—beyond which their neighbors’ cattle had grazed continuously at half the Barlite’s stocking rate. While the neighbors continued to destock, the manager bought 206 cow-calf pairs at distress prices and cut the Barlite’s supplemental feed bill by $26,000.
There are undoubtedly countless creative ways ranchers have found to meet this challenge when so much is at stake. Given a little creativity, you can meet it too.
Animal impact is the tool of choice for offsetting the adverse effects of partial rest in any environment. It is achieved either through stock density, which involves a mathematical relationship between the number of animals and the size of the grazing area, or herd effect—the hoof action of excited animals on plants and soil—which is a matter of herd size and animal behavior. In nonbrittle environments, stock density is generally all that’s needed to deal with partial rest. But herd effect may also prove useful in healing gullies, reducing brush encroachment, and dealing with weed invasions.
In brittle environments, stock density alone, unless pushed to extremes, cannot overcome partial rest. Herd effect is what’s needed, in regular doses. And the bigger the herd, the better the herd effect.
This is not a linear relationship. A herd of 1,000 can generate much more than ten times the amount of herd effect produced by 100 head. Very small herds can achieve herd effect over only small areas of land at a time. Where a herd of 1,000 is good, a herd of 2,000 is better, and a herd of 10,000 to 20,000 is even better.
In Holistic Grazing Planning, the idea is to anticipate the areas where you will apply herd effect for any number of purposes, including the following:
• to suppress brush directly by breaking it down and opening up dense thickets;
• to return oxidizing, ungrazed plant material to the soil as litter so it can decay;
• to promote tighter spacing between plants, holding more litter in place and thus causing more water to soak in rather than running off or evaporating from the soil surface;
• to soften the banks of gullies and start plants growing in eroding areas or cropland being returned to pasture;
• to reduce infestations of noxious weeds by direct impact and by creating soil conditions that favor fibrous-rooted grasses over tap-rooted species; and
• to clear firebreaks or roadsides.
In the past, the presence of large numbers of pack-hunting predators in the world’s brittle environments ensured large herds and more or less continuous high herd effect at some point over most ranges. Unfortunately, both wild and domestic animals tend to spread and remain calm when free of that danger. Driving livestock with cracking whips or dogs obviously causes herd effect but at an unacceptable price in lost animal performance and handling qualities. One rancher in Wyoming, Tony Malmberg, uses the help of ranch guests on horseback to bunch his cattle as they move to fresh grass each summer day. In doing that, he creates herd effect through ultra-high density—1,000 head per acre—impacting a fair amount of ground.
Attractants are generally the most practical way to induce herd effect:
• Supplements such as hay or cake fed on the ground will quickly gather and excite any herd trained to expect a handout.
• Salt will gather a herd that has been denied it for some time. Granulated livestock salt, simply fed on the ground, works best.
• Diluted molasses sprayed on weeds or firebreak areas will stimulate both grazing and herd effect on specific locations.
• Static inducements such as salt blocks and liquid mineral licks do not produce herd effect. Animals visit them singly and tend to loiter. Putting mineral supplements on a trailer that can be moved from place to place works better but commonly falls short of the ideal.
The downside of using attractants is the disappointingly small area actually affected—basically, the zone around the attractant. However, attractants remain the most practical alternative for creating herd effect to heal eroding gullies, thin dense brush thickets, and accomplish a variety of other site-specific, landscape-enhancing objectives.
Training plays a large role in the effectiveness of using attractants. Animals that have never tasted molasses, for instance, will not recognize the smell and may ignore it at first. Livestock will quickly learn to come to a whistle, though, if it consistently means a treat. Such training not only helps in stimulating herd effect but also simplifies the business of moving stock to new paddocks or grazing areas. Holding back a few trained animals to mix with untrained stock vastly speeds the training.
Increasingly, ranchers in the United States are adopting calmer livestock handling methods, such as those developed by animal handling specialist Bud Williams. These offer great promise in enabling us to concentrate animals without stressing them, to increase animal impact (not necessarily herd effect) wherever desired.
Once you fully understand the ramifications of time, herd size, stock density, plant growth curves (figure 2.6), and increased energy flow to the land’s productivity, you will think twice before you form an additional herd. Each additional herd carries hidden but real costs that can be enormous in terms of your holisticgoal.
If you must pull bulls or heifers out of the herd at some point, consider running them on continuous graze in a sacrificial paddock that changes from year to year. This will limit the loss in productivity, because it leaves the bulk of the paddocks available for the main herd to be moved through them at greater stock density, with shorter grazing periods and longer recovery times. As a result, any precipitation you receive is more effective and forage production is enhanced.
The greatest obstacle to reaping the benefits of combining herds into one is worry about handling so many animals, and handling classes or species together. “Can I water that many animals at a time?” “What will happen if I put my heifers in with the bulls, steers, and cows?” “What will happen if I run horses, cattle, sheep, and goats in one herd?”
Figure 2.18. Multispecies herd. Cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and horses. Chapa de Mota, Mexico.
Specialized breeding programs and other considerations may make separate herds necessary, but simple numbers usually don’t. The doubters generally do not believe that animals can learn behavior that makes herd size almost irrelevant to the question of handling—or that the layout of handling facilities and the calmness of handling are far more important than herd size. Running multispecies herds is routine for some folks (see figure 2.18), and cattle herds that include all classes of stock (bulls remain in the herd year-round, and calves are weaned without being separated from their mothers) have been run successfully for years. Once cows or ewes are pregnant, why remove the bulls or rams from a herd? If you want calves or lambs to fall over a two-month period, regulate it through your culling program, not by removing herd sires. Any young heifers that get bred too early can also be culled.
How do you handle single-sire breeding without many herds? One method that worked well in Namibia many years ago involved 500 registered Simmental cows running in a single herd. Not only was the rancher able to specify which cow went to which bull, he had exact conception dates on all cows, a record of each bull’s performance, and no breeding of young heifers. Because each bull served the cows only once, the rancher could run up to ninety cows per bull. And fewer bulls meant he could afford to buy better bulls. Part 4 describes how he did it using a radial cell with specially designed facilities at the center.
That method worked well for that rancher, who was determined to keep both his single-sire bulling and a single herd, to maximize the improvement on his land. Despite the fact that he had to feed the bulls over the two-month breeding period, this strategy proved very profitable because he did not suffer a loss of forage or reduce the effectiveness of his precipitation, which would have resulted if he’d split his cattle into twenty herds. Management was eased, and the investment in fewer, better bulls more than paid for the feed required.
Use your creativity in working out challenges such as this. It is your life, your ranch or farm, and your holisticgoal. Don’t let old beliefs, peer pressure, or fear handicap you. Given the cost in lost production that runs parallel with the number of herds, use care in testing any decision toward your holisticgoal that involves running multiple herds. Remember that, although production per animal is important, production per acre or hectare is more important if you are serious about profit.
That said, there may be times when running two or more herds does make the most sense and actually passes testing toward your holisticgoal. The box “Deciding the Number of Herds” illustrates a method you can use to help determine your herd strategy.
The timing of livestock moves will affect wildlife in a variety of ways. You should, of course, plan to ensure that your stock avoid areas where game species are rutting or fawning, and only lightly graze areas where thick cover is needed to protect the young of ground-nesting birds. There are steps in the planning procedure to remind you.
But what about wildlife that graze or browse the same paddocks your livestock do in the growing season and pay no heed to your carefully timed grazing and recovery periods? In the early days, when we first planned the grazing for large livestock herds on ranges where wild herds were also abundant, we found the wild herds quickly linked up with the domestic ones. This was possible because the fencing was simple—one or two strands of wire—and it was desirable from the wildlife’s point of view because the forage one or two moves behind the livestock was resprouting and highly nutritious.
Initially, this was a concern, because it was altering planned grazing and recovery periods. A two-day grazing with a ninety-day recovery became an eight-day grazing followed by eighty-two days of recovery. The eight-day grazing came from the two days cattle were grazing, followed by four days of inadequate recovery, then another two days of wildlife grazing and browsing—making it effectively eight days that plants were exposed to animals. In cases where livestock herds were large and animal impact high, so many new plants established that the number of plants overgrazed by the wildlife was not a problem. It could be a serious problem if the impact supplied by the livestock herd was minimal. We don’t yet have enough experience with large wildlife herds running in conjunction with stock to give more advice than this: Make every effort to maximize animal impact while minimizing stock time in a paddock; anticipate that wild grazers and browsers will associate with your herd in the growing season, grazing behind it on the regrowth; monitor carefully and keep us posted.
Ranchers and farmers may argue forever about the best time of year for calving and lambing. Many variables govern the decision—markets, parasite hatches, seed and awn problems, weather, and more. That said, however, tradition often outweighs most other factors. If profit enters into the forms of production in your holisticgoal and you aim to lessen the burden of supplemental feed, low conception rates, and care of young stock, checking your herd’s varying nutritional demands against the natural cycles of forage might prove interesting.
Traditional practice in the United States usually dictates that calves come in early spring to be weaned and sold in the fall. If the market looks bad, some may be held over till the next spring. But if other factors (say the absence of screwworms) permit it, why not consider summer calves? Generally, the economics of holding them over and selling them at eighteen months look much better than for calves dropped in early spring.
Once again, the standard worksheet provides a handy form that allows you to compare several strategies or classes of stock and different kinds of country. Once you start considering possibilities, the decisions can become extraordinarily complex and might be best sorted out with the gross profit analysis test. In that case, you would treat each possible breeding and production policy as a separate enterprise and compare it with the alternatives, taking into account the costs associated with each policy and the anticipated income at varying risk levels.
You have 600 steers on 3,000 acres or hectares divided into 56 paddocks, averaging 54 acres (hectares) in size. You’d like to push 100 steers ahead and market them early. Consider four strategies in terms of your holisticgoal:
1. Keep all 600 together in one herd, and select the best 100 at sale time.
2. Separate the 600 into two herds that graze through all of the paddocks but are separated in time by the recovery period being used. This allows the 100 head a greater ability to select their ideal diet, and all paddocks still benefit from the larger herd.
3. Separate the 600 into two herds in two cells; graze the 100 steers in the cell made up of the 20 best paddocks and the remaining 500 steers through the other cell of 36 paddocks.
4. Let the 100 make the first selection in each paddock, and let the 500 remaining follow right behind with no break between one herd and the next. (Note: Both herds must run in the same cell. Instructions for planning this option—follow-through grazing—are included in appendix 2.A. Attempt it only after you have several years’ experience in planning and an abundance of paddocks.)
If you desire a ninety-day average recovery period, these factors will bear on your decision: length of grazing period, stock density, and ADA(H) harvested.
Consider the following:
• Land, and thus overall production, benefits from larger herds, high density, and short grazing periods.
• Livestock benefit from rapid moves to fresh ground and lower ADA(H) take.
To choose, think first about impact on the land and overall production, then about impact on livestock.
• From the land’s point of view, strategy 1 gives the lowest grazing pressure in terms of ADA(H) harvested per grazing period, the highest stock density, and the shortest grazing period. This will undoubtedly grow the most forage and make rainfall most effective. The second best alternative is strategy 4.
• From the cattle’s point of view, strategy 4 will give the best results on the 100 early-marketed steers but not on the main herd of steers, which would be slightly better off in strategy 1.
• Strategies 2 and 3 are poor from the land’s point of view because forage production and rainfall effectiveness would decrease significantly.
• From the cattle’s point of view, strategy 2 is likely to be better than strategy 3 for both herds.
THE CALCULATIONS
Average Grazing Period
Average Stock Density
Average ADA(H) per Grazing
Roughly speaking, cows need a rising plane of nutrition for conception and above average feed for six months of lactation. They need less when dry and pregnant. Wool sheep follow a similar pattern, except that they’re usually not lactating and pregnant at the same time. The graphs in figure 2.19 show the general nutritional needs of cattle and sheep.
Rethinking the cycle of forage may even turn up the fact that keeping stock through the winter doesn’t pay at all. Or you might want a combination of operations, so that market times support a constant flow of cash.
The point is that when you actually begin to do your grazing planning for plants, animals, and soils, no tradition need be sacred if it stands between you and your holisticgoal. And as your land improves, new possibilities will open—for instance, more cool-season grasses or an improved water cycle extends the grazing season, fibrous plants give way to those higher in energy and protein, poisonous plant problems fade, and water supplies increase.
A handbook of this nature has to stick to principle rather than detail because the latter varies so much from ranch to ranch, farm to farm, region to region, and year to year. In working the details out in practice, you will want to consult others. But beware. There is a great deal of expertise available on animal nutrition, animal production strategies, and more, and you will be pressured by your friends, neighbors, and even by some of the experts themselves to heed it. Remember that you are the only expert on the whole that you are managing—which includes your family, your ranch or farm, and your animals. So be careful to test all decisions toward your own holisticgoal, especially those informed by a narrow area of expertise.
The sequence of paddocks grazed can affect a host of considerations besides the productivity of plants. Most of these relationships are too case specific to detail here, but the principle is simple: You can probably manipulate any situation characterized by a strict routine by changing your own routine, if you can find the critical point. Here are some examples:
• Many parasites, such as liver flukes, leave their livestock host for part of their cycle. Records will show where your herd was grazing at this critical period. Planning to have your animals elsewhere when the parasites again need a host may nearly eliminate the problem.
• Some pests either breed in manure or seem to spend a lot of time on moderately fresh manure. Moving animals frequently onto fresh ground will keep them ahead of emerging young flies and may leave some adults behind.
• Livestock losses rise when predators have good cover, insufficient wild prey, and young to feed. Plan to calve, lamb, or kid on safe sites when natural prey is plentiful and predator needs are low.
• Predation is always higher on livestock spread thin over large areas of land and is reduced with larger herds and mixed herds accompanied by imprinted dogs or llamas, for example.
• When floods occur in predictable seasons, plan to graze affected areas afterward, since ungrazed plants will slow the flow and catch sediment.
• Many poison plants threaten stock only for limited periods or when other forage is scarce. Graze those areas at safe times, or take out very light grazings in susceptible times.
• Ground-nesting birds and other animals may require certain habitat only for nesting or breeding. Keeping stock out of those areas at critical times and while heavy cover is required by the young birds should increase their numbers.
• Grass fires may threaten certain areas during the dormant season, but grazing them early may cut the danger; if they do burn, every day your animals were on them is a day saved on later grazing elsewhere.
The number of options that must be sorted in the process of making a good grazing plan can obviously overwhelm even the most able intelligence that tries to cope without a method for organizing and displaying information. Fortunately, such a method exists.
Forage Availability
Figure 2.19. The top graph shows that nutritional requirements for both cattle and sheep are high when breeding and that both need to be on a rising plane of nutrition prior to breeding. The aim is to match those requirements to the forage ability shown in the graph below. Should you run summer calves and early lambs, or ewes and yearlings on the U.S. Forest Service permit? If south slopes and low-elevation parks were not grazed late in summer, would elk winter there instead of on alfalfa? Could you sell a better hunt? Could you substitute grazing for the last alfalfa cut? Wean lambs onto residue? Finish them on alfalfa?
Holistic Grazing Planning, commonly referred to as planned grazing, is done according to an aide-memoire (French for memory aid) because, as the textbook explains, the task involves more variables and complexity than the average mind can handle. As used here, the Aide Memoire for Holistic Grazing Planning differs from a simple checklist because it gives a sequence for making small decisions that takes into account the effect of one decision building on another. All the factors you have to consider—dry water points, fires that have burned half the paddocks, poisonous plants, physiological state of the animals, ground birds nesting, and so on—are dealt with in a logical order. You don’t have to worry that something else should have come first.
The Aide’s main benefit is that it forces you to concentrate on one step—one small piece of the larger puzzle—at a time, but in the full knowledge that the pieces will build to the best possible plan. As you complete each step, wipe it from your mind and focus on the next. Nothing gets left out, so relax and enjoy yourself.
The years of experience embodied in the Aide Memoire ensure that you will incorporate all the concerns you may have, even if they don’t turn up in the order you anticipate. Don’t skip ahead. Along the way you will decide where to apply the tools of rest, grazing, animal impact, and technology to create the landscape described in your holisticgoal. The guidelines for time, stock density, herd effect, and population management will assist you in preventing overgrazing and applying animal impact where needed. Other steps will enable you to plot the application of other tools and uses of the land. As you constantly monitor your progress, you’ll be able to modify and replan according to changing circumstances.
Where sophisticated day-to-day management may not be available—often in communal or tribal areas in developing countries—simple guidelines are currently under test at the Africa Centre for Holistic Management learning site in Zimbabwe. These guidelines work for planning the concentration and movement of herds so that land improves and stocking rates can rise, but individual animal performance may not reach its full potential. Wildlife needs and other land uses will benefit only indirectly from the general improvement in habitat and productivity.
The Aide Memoire for Holistic Grazing Planning will generate a plan that takes into account any number of variables and displays them graphically and in great detail. Thus you can advance several priorities at once, see your situation at a glance, and change the plan easily as circumstances demand.
As in the case of the financial plan, the instinctive human fear of planning in general is your greatest enemy. More than you wish to admit, however, that fear reflects the old “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” syndrome. Planning will show areas where you can’t attain the ideal—and that hurts. Specifically, remember the following:
• Follow the Aide Memoire carefully, following the steps in the order they appear. Concentrate only on what you are asked to do in each step.
• Plan on paper—specifically, the Grazing Plan & Control Chart, because with planned grazing, you will be focusing on the recovery periods (rather than grazing periods), which can only be seen on a chart like this. The number of relevant factors can prove overwhelming unless noted somewhere, and others cannot contribute much to a plan they can’t see.
• Keep your first plans simple—minimize the number of herds and avoid sophisticated grazing strategies. More advanced practices are indicated by the symbol 
. Don’t attempt them until you have mastered the basics.
• Plan pessimistically on any point on which you have any doubt at all. This will help you avoid unpleasant surprises later on.
• Plan creatively every time. Easy planning year after year will tempt you to abandon the process and fall into a routine that will sooner or later lead you far enough from your holisticgoal to cost you plenty.
• Create one plan per herd for the growing season and one plan per herd for the nongrowing season and drought reserve.
• In the growing season, aim to maximize forage production.
• In the slow or nongrowing season, aim to ration the forage grown in the previous growing season and return any old, standing forage to the ground, where it can be incorporated and enhance mineral cycling.
• Monitor the plan. Remember that no plan ever goes exactly to plan. What you expect to happen rarely does, and thus planning is always a process of planning, monitoring, and controlling or adjusting. Reread Step 16 (Implement the Plan) often and refer to it whenever you are unsure of what you’re observing, when you experience a drought, or when you run into trouble of any kind.
Holistic Management requires you to plan, monitor progress continuously, control deviation as soon as possible, and replan whenever necessary. Even though this plan-monitor-control-replan sequence proceeds without gaps and covers emergency situations, livestock operations usually call for major planning twice a year.
Make your first plan at least a month before the onset of the main growing season. Over the growing season planning period, you will be trying to grow as much forage as possible, and you do not have to plan to a specific date. The plan remains open because while you are steadily building up the volume of forage, you don’t know when growth will slow or end.
Make the second plan toward the end of the growing season, when forage reserves available for the nongrowth period become known. During this planning period, you ration the forage over the months ahead to a theoretical end point, which should be a month or more after your most pessimistic estimate of when new growth could occur. This additional “month or more” becomes your drought reserve. And because you’re planning to a specific date, this becomes a closed plan.
Figure 2.20 illustrates the principle of the open-ended and closed plans, showing how the time reserve for drought fits in. In some regions, where rainfall is very low and unreliable, there will be a major overlap of the drought reserve in the closed plan and the potential start of the next growing season due to the necessity in some environments of making drought reserves extend to a year or more.
Figure 2.20. The growing season plan is open ended because you don’t know when growth will end or exactly how much forage will grow before that date. The nongrowing-season plan goes into effect once growth stops (point A). It is a closed plan, in that you are rationing out a known amount of forage over a specific period of time (from A to B), which should extend a month or more later than your most pessimistic estimate of when new growth could occur. This additional time (from B to C) is the drought reserve.
Gather for a preplanning session all the people responsible for putting the plan into effect. Think of all the factors and influences touching livestock, wildlife, crops, haying, other uses on the land, fire dangers, heavy frost or snow periods, times when critical people are away, and so on. Then also consider the changes you need to make to bring about the landscape described in your holisticgoal. Remember that in the growing season your aim is to maximize forage production and in the nongrowing season it is to ration the forage you have on hand and to trample any old, standing forage onto the soil surface to speed mineral cycling. Don’t judge any contribution or go into detail. Just write down all the things people can think of that will need to be taken into account over the planning period, and keep the list handy.
Next, think over the months you’re planning for and try to envision the whole ranch or farm. Then answer the following questions on paper:
• Is the entire area going to serve as one grazing cell with one herd, or will different areas become different cells for separate herds? Your answer will determine how many plans you need to create. Remember: The fewer herds, the better.
• What stocking rate do you intend to carry? This could change in the course of the planning, but at this stage you’ll probably have an idea of what you want and what you think is reasonable.
Figure 2.21. An example of a master worksheet to show any fields being used for crops and when they would be available for grazing of crop residues. Worksheets can be used to show many years of cropping practices.
• What crops will be planted and where? Use a worksheet to schedule planting, cultivating, and harvesting and to plan crop rotations and so on, as shown in figure 2.21. Keep it handy so you can see clearly when livestock should avoid fields and when they are needed on them.
• In the nongrowing season what drought reserve will you hold, and when would you start to use it, based on the history of your area?
• Has your biological monitoring (see part 3) identified any problems that need to be resolved? Do you need to increase animal impact in some areas? Increase rest in other areas? Reduce partial rest all over?
Grazing cells are planned on the Grazing Plan & Control Charts illustrated in color plates 2.1 and 2.2 (open-ended and closed) and in appendix 2.A
(blank copy). Figure 2.22 shows details of the property used in completing the sample charts in this section.
Use one planning chart per cell—that is, for each herd you plan to run. If you are running a breeding herd and are not convinced that herd sires or young females can be left in the herd year-round, consider allocating a sacrificial paddock to them that can be changed each year (see “Single versus Multiple Herds” under “Mastering the Basics”). Bulls would spend all but the breeding period on continuous graze in that paddock. If necessary, heifers could be moved to it over the breeding period. This simple arrangement will enable you to plan on one chart, since you would have, in effect, one herd moving through all paddocks but one. In a later step you will note the specific paddock to be continuously grazed for the year.
Figure 2.22. Sometimes a whole ranch is planned as a cell. This example is used in completing the planning charts illustrated on the pages that follow.
If you have more than twenty paddocks or grazing areas or are planning for more than seven months, cut apart other charts and paste on enough sections to give every paddock a line and every month a column. Then do the following:
• Across the top of the chart, record the year and the name of the grazing cell and circle “Open-Ended” (growing season) or “Closed” (nongrowing season) depending on the plan.
• In the blank row at the top of the chart, write in the names of the months for which you are planning. Each month has fine lines that demarcate thirty-one days. For months that have fewer days, draw a line down the column through the extra days.
• Record the paddock numbers in both column 3s and the paddock sizes in the left column 3.
• If any crop fields will have stock on them in the months being planned, transfer those fields to the chart as paddocks. If you are subdividing a field into small divisions (with temporary electric fencing), treat the land as one paddock in this step.
• Closed Plan only: Change the heading of column 4 to “Nongrowth” and write the heading “Drought Reserve” in the blank column to the right of column 4.
Avoid making notes in the month columns on the main area of the chart or marking in anything that is not described in the steps to follow. You need to keep the chart uncluttered.
Using color-coded felt pens, box in all the management events that could affect your animals or your management, no matter where stock are later placed. Draw vertical lines through all the paddocks on the starting and ending dates of the management concern (bulling, calving, etc.) and connect them across the top of the chart (above the months). Explain the meaning of the lines by writing the title of each event on the top connecting horizontal line:
• Consider livestock events such as breeding (red), calving, lambing, kidding (blue), and weaning (yellow).
• Use the list of planning factors you created earlier to help you think of all the events that affect the whole grazing cell—wildlife factors, hunting seasons, and so on—and mark them in.
• In a closed plan, mark the expected start of the next season’s growth, which would also be the date you would have to begin using the drought reserve to be planned.
• Enter scheduled events such as family vacations and times when critical people are away.
Record the types of animals and their numbers each month in rows 29 to 33. If you are running multiple species and several classes of animals and need more space, record two to a line and separate them with a slash, or cut and paste in additional rows.
Next, convert stock numbers to standard animal units (SAUs) using one of the methods suggested in the box “Conversion into Standard Animal Units” in the previous section. Record the total SAUs for each month in row 34 and note the peak figure in the first column, as shown in figure 2.23. If you have some animals in a sacrificial paddock, do not include them in the SAU calculations except in the months when they join the main herd.
Figure 2.23. The peak SAU figure, shown in the first column of row 34, is used to calculate the stocking rate (cell size divided by peak SAU).
Enter the total cell size in row 35. Calculate the stocking rate by dividing the cell size by the peak SAU figure and record the result in row 36.
Using a fine, color-coded pen, draw a horizontal line through (or box out) any time periods when a paddock cannot under any circumstances have the herd in it—for example, because of lack of water, annual flooding, hay cutting, trout spawning, ground-nesting birds, land preparation for crops, recreational uses, timber plantings. If you plan to remove herd sires to run in one continuously grazed, sacrificial paddock, note which one it is.
Use a different color for each factor and explain the meaning of the color with a legend in the “Remarks” space at the bottom of the chart. Do not write on the main body of the chart.
If this is your first year to plan, move on to the next step. Otherwise, look over past grazing charts and clearly mark (again with coded colors) any paddocks that repeatedly received an “H” (for heavily grazed) early or late in past growing seasons. To avoid any repetition, exclude the affected paddock, or paddocks, entirely for the early and late periods this growing season.
Check to see if any paddocks failed to receive adequate recovery time—because growing conditions were inadequate—in the last growing season. Plan to avoid those paddocks early in this growing season.
If the growing season has begun early, leaving you with “drought reserve” forage in some paddocks, plan to remove the old growth before it affects new growth or livestock performance.
In row 26 under each month note the number of paddocks still available. If you see that a paddock is available for more than 50 percent of the month, count it as available for the whole month if this is your first time to plan. You can graze the paddock on either side of the unavailable period, and this keeps your paddock numbers higher, which is an advantage.
Once you have experience with the planning and an idea of the recovery periods you’re likely to use, count a paddock as available if the unavailable period is less than the average recovery period you are likely to use. For example, if a paddock was marked unavailable for fifty days and your recovery periods were likely to range from thirty to ninety days (an average of sixty days), count that paddock as available.
Focus on each paddock individually. Then, using a color-coded highlighter you can later write over with pencil, clearly mark through or place a dot beside any paddock that needs special treatment over any particular time period. Factors to consider might include the following:
• a sacrificial paddock in which you plan to run some animals on continuous graze;
• bare, eroding ground that needs healing, or noxious weeds you want to reduce—both of which could require herd effect;
• areas you want to rest more to create brush cover for wildlife;
• areas from which you want to remove the bulk of forage toward the end of the growing season as part of a fire prevention plan; and
• paddocks you plan to strip-graze.
At the same time, think about any limitations that could affect your stock or require management attention—proximity to crops or a neighbor’s bulls, poisonous plants, sharp seedheads that could harm lambs, lack of shelter, parasite cycles that need to be broken (see “Pests, Parasites, and Other Headaches” in “Mastering the Basics” for more information), and so on. Review the list of planning factors you created earlier. Note any wildlife management factors and crop preparation plans. And don’t forget to consider multiple-use factors that could affect a paddock, such as logging operations or hiking trails.
Explain the meaning of the highlighter colors with a legend in the “Remarks” space at the bottom of the chart. Do not write on the main body of the chart.
If you are creating your first open-ended plan, you can use a simple 1–10 scale to get an approximate quality rating for each paddock. Rate the best paddock—the one you think has the best-quality forage—a 10. Then rate all the other paddocks relative to that one. A paddock with forage half as good would rate a 5 and so on. Record the rating for each paddock to the right of the slash in column 1.
While this method gives a good approximation, switch to either of the methods in the following list, which rate paddock quality in terms of ADA(H), as soon as possible. If you are creating your first closed plan, you have no option but to start by estimating ADA(H) yields.
• Use the method described in “Mastering the Basics” (under “Forage and Drought Reserves”) for estimating forage reserves that shows what each paddock could yield in ADA(H) during one grazing. In each paddock, pace off several randomly chosen squares that could feed one animal for a day and compute the area in square yards or meters. Be pessimistic in your judgments about the area required. When you have done a few of these in each paddock, average the answers to get an estimated ADA(H) yield for that paddock.
Note: This is difficult to do with much accuracy when the terrain is varied and you are new to estimating. Paddocks might have inaccessible hilly areas, heavily brushed areas, roads running through them, or rocky outcrops, as well as well-grassed areas. To truly randomize your sample areas would entail dividing paddocks into many smaller areas based on type of terrain, which is hardly practical. One way to address this challenge is to remove all the acreage from the paddock size covered by the inaccessible areas, roads, dense brush, and so on and sample within the grassed areas. To overcome the subconscious desire you will have to “find” that forage yields will be adequate, sample within the poorer grassland areas more than the good ones. Record the figure for each paddock to the right of the slash in column 1 (open-ended plan) or in column 5 (closed plan).
• Use the ADA(H) figures from column 8 in your last closed plan. If you didn’t total those figures on the previous plan, add them up now—they appear in ink to the right of each grazing line.
Open-ended plan: Transfer these figures to column 1 to the left of the slash. Make commonsense adjustments for paddocks grazed late in the prior growing season.
Closed plan: Transfer these figures to column 5. Make adjustments up or down for each paddock based on how much better or worse you feel the production was in the growing season just experienced.
If any paddock is unavailable for the entire period, such as a sacrificial paddock for herd sires, do not include it in the following paddock ratings calculations.
In an open-ended plan, proceed as follows:
1. Multiply the paddock rating (column 1) by the size in acres or hectares (column 3) and enter the result in column 2 (“Estimated Relative Paddock Quality”). These numbers will probably be large, so list them in thousands for simplicity. Don’t worry about being precise. These figures have no meaning except to indicate the productivity of paddocks in relation to each other.
2. Now compute the average rating for all paddocks by adding all the figures in column 2 and dividing the sum by the total number of paddocks. Enter this figure in the box at the bottom of column 2, as shown in figure 2.24.
In a closed plan, do the following:
1. Multiply the ADA(H) figures in column 5 by the number of acres or hectares (column 3) in each paddock to get the estimated animal-days (ADs) of forage for each paddock. Record these figures in column 6.
2. Add all the figures in column 6 and record the total in row A. Now compute the average ADs of forage for all paddocks by dividing the figure in row A by the total number of paddocks. Record the result in the box at the bottom of column 6, as shown in figure 2.25.
Rating Relative Paddock Quality (Open-Ended Plan)
Figure 2.24. The average rating for all paddocks, shown in the box at the bottom of column 2, is derived by adding all figures in column 2 and dividing the sum by the total number of paddocks.
Rating Relative Paddock Quality (Closed Plan)
Figure 2.25. The average ADs of forage for all paddocks, shown in the box at the bottom of column 6, is derived by dividing the figure in row A (lower right of chart, not shown here) by the total number of paddocks.
Unless you have a great many paddocks per herd, you will need to determine a range of recovery periods to allow for fast and slow growth. In doing so, remember the following:
• Shorter and longer recovery periods reflect the length of time that severely bitten plants need to recover depending on how fast they are growing.
• The faster the growth, the shorter the recovery period required; the slower the growth, the longer the recovery period.
• On arid and semiarid land, 30 to 90 days will usually suffice. Given higher or more effective precipitation and more fibrous vegetation, 20 to 40 or 60 days may do. For pastures (irrigated or not), particularly those with runner-type grasses, try 15 to 30 days.
• These times are only guidelines. In areas that receive prolonged periods of adverse growth conditions, you may have to lengthen recovery periods further—to 150 days or more.
Record your minimum and maximum recovery periods on row 27 under each planned month on the chart.
If you have a great many paddocks, are strip grazing within paddocks, or are herding with many “virtual paddocks” and no fences, you have the option of using a single recovery period. A recovery period between grazings as long as, or longer than, the entire growing season will enable most plants to fully recover from a severe grazing, regardless of daily growth rates. You must have enough paddocks, though, to ensure that grazing periods are three days or less in any one paddock. If your growing season was 180 days and you used that as your recovery period for running one herd through 100 paddocks, your grazing periods would average 1.8 days; you should not overgraze plants.
If You Have Very Few Paddocks …
Although the ideal is to plan a range of recovery periods, and thus grazing periods (step 11), the reality when you have only three or four paddocks is that the grazing periods become so long that plants are going to be overgrazed whatever you do. But the overgrazing will occur in the grazing period, which is less detrimental than the overgrazing that occurs following an inadequate recovery period. So feel free to plan with just a single recovery period, using the longest recovery period—that is, ninety days if your range is thirty to ninety days—and in step 11 one grazing period. Try to get paddocks up to ten or more as quickly as your financial planning and the weak link in the livestock enterprise allow.
First calculate the average minimum and maximum grazing periods for the cell as a whole and record these figures in row 28:
Now convert the average grazing periods you just computed into actual minimum and maximum grazing periods for each paddock, according to the paddock ratings shown in column 2:
This gives you the actual minimum grazing period for each paddock, to be used when growth is fast, and the actual maximum grazing period, to be used when growth is slow. Record both figures, rounded off to whole numbers, in column 4 (see figure 2.26).
Figuring Grazing Periods (Open-Ended Plan)
Figure 2.26. Check to see that recovery periods are adequate in longer-grazed paddocks by adding together all the minimum grazing periods and subtracting the longest minimum grazing period from the total. If any recovery period is too short, add days to the minimum grazing periods in paddocks that can absorb them.
If paddock numbers change during some months (check row 26), you will end up with two sets of figures. Record the second set in the blank column to the right of column 4. In calculating these additional figures, make sure your average paddock rating is based only on the paddocks used, not on the total number of paddocks.
Note: If your paddock numbers change several times over the season due to cropping, hay cutting, and other operations, a commonsense solution is to calculate the grazing periods based on the average number of paddocks available (you will need to make adjustments to these grazing periods as you plot them in Step 14).
If you are using a single long recovery period, either because you have a qreat many paddocks or because you are strip-grazing within a few paddocks, the mathematics is much the same:
If you have many paddocks, the average grazing period in each paddock will be only a few days—for example, 1.5 or 2.6 (record the full decimal figure in row 28). If you have few paddocks per herd but intend to strip-graze within them, the figure will reflect many days of grazing in each paddock because of the long recovery period. In reality, however, each strip within a paddock will be grazed for only a few hours up to a day or so. Convert the average grazing period into the actual grazing period by factoring in paddock quality. Record the figure for each paddock, rounded off to a whole number, in column 4:
If some paddocks have much longer grazing periods than others, you must check to see that recovery periods are adequate:
1. Add together all the minimum grazing periods.
2. From the total, subtract the longest minimum grazing period to find the actual recovery periods for these paddocks.
3. If any recovery period is much too short, you must add days to the minimum grazing periods in other paddocks that can absorb them.
4. Follow the same procedure for maximum grazing periods, though the problems will probably be less critical if you can’t make complete adjustments.
If you wish to plan follow-through grazings, in which two or more herds run in the same cell, one herd entering a paddock as another leaves, see appendix 2.B. This is tricky to plan, and you should have considerable experience under your belt before you attempt it.
Before you proceed further you need to determine whether you will have roughly enough forage to carry your animals through the nongrowing season and drought reserve period. Later, you will make a more accurate assessment paddock by paddock. Use the rows on the lower right of the chart (see the sample grazing chart in color plate 2.4) to record the following:
• Expected days of nongrowth. Think hard about this figure and use all the past records you have to guide you. Record your estimate in row B at the right side of the chart.
• Days of bulk feeding. If you expect prolonged periods under heavy snow, or any other situation that would lead to bulk feeding of the animals when they are taking little if anything from the land, record the days in row C. Work out the bulk feed requirements for those days and record the type and amount of feed under the appropriate month in row 24.
• Days of drought reserve required. Enter the number of days you need to set aside as drought reserve in row D. This figure reflects the number of days of grazing you plan to reserve in case the next growing season is a late or dry one. In some very arid and erratic-rainfall areas, the drought reserve could include most of the year.
• Total days grazing required. Add the figures in rows B and D and subtract the figure in row C (if entered). The resulting figure is the total days of grazing required off the land. Record this figure in row E.
• Estimated carrying capacity. Divide the animal days in row A by the figure in row E. This is your estimated carrying capacity—the number of animals the land can support without additional bulk feeding. Record this figure in row F.
If the figure in row F is much lower than the number of animals you now have, you may want to reduce animals now. If you have to reduce stock, remember, the earlier you do it, the less you have to reduce.
Once you feel reasonably comfortable with the number of animals you can carry through the nongrowing period plus the drought reserve, and believe that you have ensured sufficient feed and cover for wildlife, as well, proceed to the next step.
When plants aren’t growing, it is difficult to overgraze them, so you are less concerned with recovery periods in the nongrowing season. You just want to be sure that you keep stock concentrated for their impact and to enhance mineral cycling, and that paddocks are given enough time between grazings for the fouling (dung and urine) to wear off. In a closed plan your focus is on rationing the forage through the nongrowing season, as well as the drought reserve period you are planning, while keeping the plane of nutrition for your stock as even as possible, as explained in “Mastering the Basics” (under “Nutrition During Non- and Slow-Growth Periods”).
Each time the animals return to a paddock, they are selecting their diets from forage that has decreased in volume and quality. Thus the fewer times a paddock is grazed the better. But the length of the grazing period also counts, as animals tend to become nutritionally stressed the longer they remain in a paddock. If, to shorten the grazing periods, you end up with insufficient recovery periods for fouling to wear off, that can also be detrimental. So you have some thinking and weighing of possible alternatives to do.
Number of Selections and Average Grazing Period
Your ability to minimize selections (number of times animals graze a paddock during the nongrowing season and drought reserve) is dependent on the number of paddocks you have, which influences the amount of recovery time and the average grazing periods. Here’s how you work it out:
• Divide the total days of grazing required in the nongrowth period (row B) by the number of selections you would like to use—try for one or two—to see what your recovery period would be. If your total days of grazing required is 211 and you want to use 2 selections, that would give you 211 ÷ 2 = 106 days of recovery from fouling between grazings.
• Then divide the recovery period by the number of paddocks (in a closed plan, there’s no need to account for the one they’re in) to get the average grazing period you will use during the nongrowing season: If you have 14 paddocks, grazing periods would average 106 days of recovery ÷ 14 paddocks = 7.57 days.
As you see, 2 selections with only 14 paddocks means your animals will have two grazing periods averaging 7.57 days. In 8 days ruminal flora will be changing as forage quality drops off, and you may need to supplement in each paddock from the start of the closed plan. If you went to 3 selections (as in the sample plan in color plate 2.4), you would have 70 days of recovery (211 ÷ 3), which is adequate for fouling to wear off. Paddocks would be grazed three times for five days, reducing the need for supplement in the first selection. The same amount of grazing is being taken out, but more evenly, delaying the nutritional stress on the animals until later. You might have to begin supplementing during the second selection, and you almost certainly would during the third, but overall you would probably require less supplement.
On the other hand, in the early years especially, when you are likely to have few paddocks, one selection might be best. In that case, other concerns, such as the need to train animals to electric fences and to gain management experience, might outweigh livestock nutritional needs. Bear in mind that, with few paddocks, stock density is automatically also low, and thus fouling is not the big factor it becomes as paddocks increase and stock density rises.
Take all of the above into account in deciding which number of selections is best for your situation and your animals right now. Record the number of selections in row 27 and the average grazing period on row 28.
If you have a great many paddocks or are strip-grazing within fewer paddocks, you can use a single selection. This is because grazing periods would be so short (one to two days) that animals would not remain long enough in a paddock to be nutritionally stressed. For example, if you had 180 days of nongrowth and used a single selection, your recovery period would be 180 nongrowth days ÷ 1 selection = 180 days of recovery; 180 days of recovery ÷ 100 paddocks = 1.8 days average grazing period.
As in an open-ended plan, it is important in this step to keep at least one decimal place in this calculation, since rounding the figure in row 28 to a whole number can lead to animals spending additional time in some paddocks unnecessarily.
Drought Reserve
Use the same procedure to calculate the average grazing period for the drought reserve. For example, if the figure entered in row D (“Days of Drought Reserve Required”) was 60, and you were taking one selection and had 14 paddocks available, the average grazing period during the drought reserve would be 60 ÷ 14 = 4.3 days.
Enter the average grazing period for the drought reserve in row 28 under the appropriate weeks or months.
Actual Grazing Periods
Convert the average grazing periods (row 28) into actual figures that take into account forage quality according to the paddock rating (Estimated ADs of Forage Available) in column 6. Use the figure in the box at the bottom of column 6 as your average paddock rating. Record these figures, rounded off to whole numbers, in column 4:
If paddock numbers change (check row 26), you will have to do a second calculation. Important: Make sure you adjust the average paddock rating to reflect only the paddocks used during this period. Record this second figure in column 4 beside the first one, using a slash to separate them.
Using a soft pencil, mark in the actual moves of the herd on the chart. Show the length of the grazing period by the length of the penciled line, as illustrated on the grazing chart in color plate 2.3. Have a map of the ranch or farm handy so you will know whether the moves you choose are practical, and follow these guidelines:
• Look over all the color-coded events you recorded previously to ensure that your animals go to the right place at the right time and for the right reasons.
• Events such as calving, lambing, and kidding show clearly on the chart if they occur in the planned months. In planning the moves, you will want to prevent separation of mothers and young. For example, if you have a radial fencing layout with gates along the fence lines, you could plan to move animals through adjacent paddocks while calves, lambs, and kids are small. Or, if you have gates only at the center, you might plan to move the animals through opposing paddocks. In both these cases, you would need to leave gates open between moves so that mothers have freedom to go back to hidden young in the least confusing manner.
• Plan grazings backward from periods when livestock nutrition, or other needs, is critical. To do this, reserve paddocks that you know will have high-quality forage or ample cover at critical times, and then plan which paddocks animals should come from in order to get there. Planning forward or, worse, merely rotating animals rarely ensures that. Animal performance consequently suffers.
• Where you have problems or special management concerns in some paddocks, as indicated by your color-coded marks, you need to address them. In paddocks with a poison plant danger, for instance, you might cut grazing times to the minimum figure, or even lower, so that grazing pressure won’t force consumption of the problem plants. If you see that ground-nesting birds or other wildlife need cover soon after a grazing, you might also want to drop to the minimum grazing period.
• If you drop to the minimum grazing period in several paddocks, keep an eye on the recovery periods. You may have to lengthen grazing periods in other paddocks that can take them to ensure that recovery time in all paddocks is adequate.
Open-Ended Plan
In an open-ended plan, follow these additional guidelines:
• Use the longest (maximum) grazing period given in column 4 so that your plan is conservative.
• As you plot the grazings, constantly watch the recovery periods. Remember that every day taken off a single grazing period takes a day off the recovery period in every paddock. (This cumulative effect on the recovery periods, which can have disastrous consequences, won’t show up in a notebook or on scraps of paper, but it will always show up on a chart.) The greatest danger of overgrazing stems from recovery periods that are too short, not grazing periods that are too long. When in doubt, slow down.
Note: If your paddock numbers change several times over the season and you calculated grazing periods based on an average number of paddocks (see note in Step 11), make sure that as you plot the moves now, you adjust the grazing periods to ensure that all paddocks have adequate recovery times.
Remember that in creating an open-ended plan, you simply plan the grazings until well into the growing season, knowing there will tend to be more forage available as you proceed through those months. If the season turns out well, you simply keep extending the plan. If the season turns out to be a dry one or one with a drought, and growth stops, close your open-ended plan and immediately create a closed plan.
Closed Plan
In a closed plan, you will plot the moves of the animals through from where you are at the end of the growing season until you expect the next growing season to start, with an additional amount of time added as drought reserve (see color plate 2.4).
Remember that you have a fixed amount of forage you need to ration over the nongrowing and drought reserve periods. If growth starts around the time you expect, then all is well, though you will have some old drought reserve forage to deal with during the coming growing season.
Up to this point, you have not factored in the physiological state of the animals or changes in herd size. Here’s how you do that:
Calculate the ADA(H) you are planning to take out of the paddock during each grazing period planned. To do that, look below the actual time of the grazing (indicated by the penciled grazing line) to row 34 and multiply the SAU figure, which will reflect any herd size changes, by the number of days you are planning to be in the paddock. Divide the total by the size of the paddock (column 3). This figure is the ADA(H) you will take out and should be written lightly in pencil just to the left of the grazing line (as shown in color plate 2.3). For example:
A more sophisticated method for adjusting grazing periods when herd size changes significantly is included in appendix 2.C.
Open-Ended Plan
Make any adjustments needed to the grazing periods based on paddock quality and the physiological state of the animals. If you see that the grazing pressure is likely to be too high in a paddock you rated as poor, reduce the grazing period by a day or so. If lactating cows are being bred, you might want to move them more quickly.
However, any time you cut days in any paddock you need to add about the same number of days to other paddocks you think could take more grazing. In making these adjustments, you are trying to even out the plane of nutrition on your animals, but you are only guessing. To be safe, you should actually go out in the field and check the paddocks.
Make a field check. Check several sample areas in any paddock of concern to see if they could feed one animal for one day. To get the sample area size, divide 4,840 (square yards to an acre) or 10,000 (square meters to a hectare) by the ADA(H) figure to the left of your penciled grazing line and punch the square root button on your calculator. This will give you the length of each side of the square, in yards or meters, needed to feed one animal for one day. It’s important that you factor in the physiological state of the animals at this point by qualifying your question. If they are lactating cows, ask, “Would this area feed one cow comfortably today?” If lactating cows were about to be bred and you wanted them to be on a rising plane of nutrition, you could ask, “Would this area feed one cow comfortably and with forage to spare?”
Closed Plan
Add together all the ADA(H) figures you penciled in to the left of the grazing line in each paddock to get the total ADA(H) you are demanding from each paddock over the nongrowth and drought reserve periods (see color plate 2.4). Record the total figure for each paddock in column 7. Then check to ensure that the paddocks will yield what you plan to take from them.
Make a field check. To get the sample area size, divide 4,840 (square yards to an acre) or 10,000 (square meters to a hectare) by the ADA(H) figure in column 7 for all paddocks, or any that concern you, then punch the square root button. This will give you the length of each side of the square, in yards or meters, needed to feed one animal for one day in that paddock. After pacing out the square, ask yourself, “Will this area feed one animal adequately and still leave enough to provide litter for the soil and feed for wildlife?”
Although you have now produced the best plan you could possibly produce, circumstances are bound to change over time, and adjustments will have to be made. Monitoring becomes a critical part of the process. No plan ever unfolds exactly as expected. That’s why a military planning procedure, based on hundreds of years of experience in handling dramatic changes quickly, was used to develop the Aide Memoire.
Open-Ended Plan
In implementing your plan, follow these guidelines:
• Monitor daily growth rates. You need to determine how quickly grazed plants are regrowing. When growth becomes rapid, you need to drop to the minimum grazing period unless grazing periods are short enough (one to three days) to ignore growth rates. Compare grazed plants in the paddock the animals have just left to grazed plants in the paddock the animals are now in to help you judge the rate of regrowth. You can also mark grazed plants in any paddock with flagged wire stakes or other markers to help you observe regrowth. Alternatively, you can place portable wire cages over some plants and later compare them to the grazed plants surrounding them.
Growth rates will seldom be rapid for more than a few days at a time. As the growth rate slows, move back toward the longer (maximum) grazing period shown in column 4. If ever you have doubt about the growth rate, assume it is slow—it normally is. If you are very observant, you will find the color of the grass also indicates whether growth is rapid.
If the growth rate continues to be rapid for a prolonged time and the grazings thus shift far off the plotted moves, you will need to replan from that date forward. This replanning normally involves changing only the plotted moves.
When you have many paddocks and are able to use a single long recovery period, you do not need to monitor daily growth rates. It is difficult for plants to be overgrazed when given the entire growing season, or nearly as long, to recover. But you do need to continue monitoring livestock, forage bulk, wildlife factors, and other concerns that affect your plan.
• With low paddock numbers, overgrazing can occur either when stock stay too long in a paddock during fast growth or when they return too quickly during slow growth.
• With higher paddock numbers, the greatest danger is in returning too soon during slow growth. This rarely happens when paddock numbers are as high as 100 or more, but you still need to keep an eye on the recovery period in each paddock if for any reason you have to shorten grazing periods.
• If you are using a range of recovery periods, move livestock as slowly as nutritional needs and the maximum grazing period guideline permit when growth rates are slow. Animals generally perform better when moving through paddocks faster, but if they move too fast, plants will be overgrazed. If you can see ahead that animals are going to return to paddocks before plants have recovered, you are moving too fast and you must slow down. Not doing so (generally because you want to favor your animals) is one of the most common mistakes people make, with costly consequences.
• If you are using a range of grazing periods and find that animals run out of forage in any paddock, even though you are using the minimum (shortest) grazing period, you have seriously misjudged the paddock. If you run out of forage in many paddocks, your judgment could again be at fault, but you are more likely to be overstocked.
If you have many paddocks and are using a single grazing period (and single long recovery period) and run out of forage, the reasons will be the same.
• If you suspect paddock quality was misjudged, move the animals immediately and note on the chart that the paddock was not as good as you thought it was. If you suspect that animals may run out of forage in other paddocks (and that you might be overstocked), do a stocking rate check out in the field:
Field check for stocking rate. To determine the size of your sample areas in each paddock, multiply the minimum grazing period listed in column 4 by the SAU figure in row 34, and divide the total by the size of the paddock (column 3). If the sampled areas in most of the paddocks will not feed one animal for one day, you are definitely carrying too many animals and will need to reduce their numbers quickly.
Closed Plan
In implementing a closed plan, follow these guidelines:
• Monitor forage consumption. If your animals run out of forage in any paddock, you probably misjudged the volume or quality of the forage. Note on the chart that the paddock was not as good as you thought it was. If you run out of forage in many paddocks, you are more likely to be overstocked and must take action before animal performance is seriously depressed.
• If the health and stability of wildlife populations are mentioned in your holisticgoal, monitor to ensure that cover, feed, lack of disturbance at critical times, and any other factors are being allowed for.
If You Experience a Drought
If the growing season does not start when expected, you will need to begin using your drought reserve. Remember that your drought reserve is feed that is spread over all your paddocks and left for this period, which stretches from the time of anticipated growth to the last possible dates for growth starting, and that you estimated the amount of feed conservatively. Nevertheless, before going into the drought reserve period, you should reassess your plan to take into account actual animal days used during the nongrowth period. Adjust your remaining available ADs, and, where necessary, recalculate the grazing period for each paddock for the drought reserve—see Step 14.
You may well experience some greening up in this period, even without rain, which can help improve nutrition, but it means that the plants are very susceptible to overgrazing. Follow these guidelines:
• As some growth begins, with rising temperatures or early showers, you must not speed up the moves to chase the green growth. Actively growing plants require adequate recovery periods before being regrazed, even if it means putting some stress on the animals. Remember this simple rule: For every day that animals stay in a paddock longer than they need to, their performance will be poorer. But for every day that animals move out of a paddock sooner than they need to, you lose a day of recovery time in every paddock. Failure to understand this cumulative effect on recovery periods leads to managers favoring animals to the point that they run out of forage entirely, which they then blame (falsely) on the “drought.”
• If the rains never materialize and you run through your drought reserve time without significant growth, then create a new closed plan without delay. The same holds when you have early rains and then nothing more. You cannot afford to hold out in hope of rain. Assume that you won’t get any rain until the next growing season and plan right through until then. As you now complete a totally fresh closed plan, your field checks are likely to show that you are carrying too many animals. If that is the case, remember that the earlier you reduce numbers, the fewer you have to reduce. If you are not already running one herd, think seriously about doing so. If it ever comes down to merely saving the animals that remain, do not scatter them, but keep them concentrated and moving constantly onto fresh ground, no matter how poor the forage. Reread “If You Run Out of Feed” in “Mastering the Basics.”
• When the rains do start and growth gets under way, create an open-ended plan. If the rains begin before you are through your drought reserve, you will have some old forage to remove as early as you can in the season.
• If you ranch in a very low and erratic rainfall environment where it is customary to plan drought reserves of six to twelve months, start a new grazing chart (and a new closed plan) once you run through the start of anticipated growth. Because you were planning such a prolonged drought reserve, your stocking rate will reflect that by being relatively low. However, when you’re creating your new closed plan, your field checks may show that you are carrying too many animals. If so, the sooner you reduce numbers the better.
Thoughtless rotation is a major cause of stock stress in the nongrowing season.
The main purpose for recording what happens is to fine-tune your paddock assessments and management decisions for future planning:
1. Record actual events in ink as the season progresses. For every paddock, ink in a line on the chart that covers the number of days the herd actually spent there.
2. Behind or to the right of the actual grazing line, record the volume of forage taken by the animals in ADA(H) and then follow that figure with your assessment of how heavy that grazing was. Use “L” for light (you can hardly see the paddock was grazed), “H” for heavy (you had to remove animals), and “M” for medium (everything in between). Do the judging not close to water but well out in the paddocks. If you wanted to show that grazing over the days marked was 34 ADA(H) and was medium in terms of total bulk, your record would look something like this (see figure 2.27): 
34/M.
3. Clearly flag, or mark, any paddocks where serious errors were made—for example, grazing periods were too long or recovery periods too short—so the same mistakes won’t be made in the next plan. Also, note any paddocks that had noneffective recovery periods due to grazing pattern and season.
Remember that you have based paddock assessments on ADA(H) estimates or actual performance in previous seasons (with adjustments). In brittle environments especially, errors are certain to occur in your estimates. You will find that livestock at higher densities in smaller, better-defined areas, are going to show up assessment faults better than you could have determined them by any other means. Therefore, keep an open mind and make note of all errors that can affect the next plan.
Figure 2.27. Note that the inked-in grazings (heavier lines) do not match the grazings originally planned. After rain was received on March 18, growth became rapid a little over a week later (not immediately!), and the grazings dropped to the minimum time, i.e., from 3 days to 1 day. 3.0 ADA was planned to be taken, but only .75 was taken, and the grazing was light (L). As soon as growth slows down, all penciled-in grazings must be replanned because the faster moves will have changed the plan.
4. Record precipitation received in rows 21 and 22, as shown in figure 2.27. The spaces between the heavier lines represent five-day periods. You may want to note the exact day of major storms with a dot and a written comment in the “Remarks” section of the chart. Note your average annual precipitation in row 37. Record the total precipitation received for the season in row 38.
5. Add any comments that will help you do better in future planning—not on a piece of paper that can get lost but on the back of the chart, where you have plenty of space.
6. Finally, summarize livestock and land performance in the cell over the year in the lower right corner of the chart, as shown in figure 2.28. The two blank lines provided are for recording any other significant measures. Most important is to note the total yield per acre or hectare of products sold—meat, milk, wool, and so on.
Open-Ended Plan Only
For an open-ended plan, also record the following:
• Put your opinion of daily growth rates in the same five-day periods on row 23, using “S” for slow, “F” for fast, and “0” for no growth.
• When you judge that the growing season has ended and you are ready to move to a closed plan, draw a brown line down through all paddocks and label it “Growth Ended.”
Figure 2.28. This is also a summary of land performance, an important measure of which is the total yield per acre or hectare of products sold.
Closed Plan Only
For a closed plan, also record the following:
• If any growth at all takes place over the period planned, mark in the letter “G” (for growth) in row 23 in the five-day periods provided. Some greening-up or very slow growth does occur in many areas in the nongrowing season. If this growth spreads over more of each year, as it can with an increasingly effective water cycle, this record should prove useful.
• When the next growing season begins—make your best guess of the actual starting date—draw a green line down through all paddocks for that day and label it “Growth Started.” At this point, you are ready to create your next open-ended plan and abandon the rest of this plan, which usually includes only the drought reserve.
• Record the forage each paddock yielded in this nongrowing season. To get those figures, add together all the grazings noted in ADA(H) in each paddock from the green line you have just drawn, back to the brown line you drew to mark the end of the previous growing season and the beginning of the present nongrowing season. Using a light pencil, record these figures in column 8.
• Now go through and make some adjustments to the figures you just recorded in column 8. Paddocks that you can see were grazed late in the last growing season and thus did not fully regrow could potentially yield more than your penciled-in figure shows. And those paddocks that have an “M” or an “L” behind the last grazing taken also had more forage in them than the ADA(H) taken shows. In either case, estimate how much additional forage each of those paddocks could yield and add that amount to the yields in column 8. Record the final figures, in ink, in column 8. These figures represent the best possible comparison of paddock quality and “performance.”
The Aide Memoire for Holistic Grazing Planning and the concepts behind it represent nearly forty years of trial and error on four continents in many situations. It works. Each step builds on the previous one, so the order is important. Don’t skip any. If a step truly doesn’t apply to your situation, pass it by—but think about it anyway. You’ll find yourself in control of an amazing array of varied and subtle factors affecting your operation.
There must be something philosophically significant in the fact that of all the procedures in this book the one for grazing planning is the most orderly. Its object—the health and growth of plants and animals—is, of course, the most unpredictable, complex, and baffling subject that human intelligence ever sought to fathom. Without thinking this paradox all the way through, you still have to live with its significance and realize that those who don’t recognize it fail.
Because living organisms never stop changing and even microbes have plans of their own, you yourself can never stop planning. If you do, you will fall into habits and routines that worked when you first planned them but will make you miss the opportunities of the ever changing game. Eventually, they will lead to ruin.
The human weakness for routine runs deep, but we’ve come a long way from our wild roots, and we often confuse the wonderfully dynamic patterns of nature and the reassuring regularity of machines. The greening cottonwoods in spring, the wedges of geese in fall, the grasshoppers of summer, as timeless in their regularity as they may seem, cannot scheduled like the flight of the New York to Los Angeles Boeing overhead.
You plan for living things, not because you can ever hope to bind them to your pattern, but so you can fit into theirs. Thus you must do it every year and sometimes more often to stay with the game.
Nothing is perfect, though, and the Aide Memoire for Holistic Grazing Planning that has evolved continuously over the years will continue to develop. Do your planning, keep track of your ideas, and if you develop improvements, let us know.
Grazing Chart (Open-Ended Plan)
Grazing Chart (Closed Plan)
Grazings Plotted (Open-Ended Plan)
Grazings Plotted (Closed Plan)
Sample Grazing Chart (Open-Ended Plan)
Color Plate 2.1. This partially completed chart shows the major management concerns in the growing season for the River Bench Ranch—calving and breeding—and special concerns in individual paddocks, such as loco weed, starting in May. The yellow line running from March through September shows that this paddock will be under continuous graze for the entire season, as indicated in the “Remarks” section below. On line 25, note that in each month there will be one herd, but that herd size changes in some months. Line 27 shows that a range of recovery periods will be used—30 to 90 days—throughout the season.
Sample Grazing Chart (Closed Plan)
Color Plate 2.2. This partially completed chart shows major management concerns for the River Bench Ranch in the nongrowing season and drought reserve (which begins in March)—hunting during October and November and the beginning of calving in March. The only special concern noted in individual paddocks is the crop preparation that will begin in mid-March. Line 25 shows one herd each month, but that herd size changes in some months. Line 27 shows that there will be three selections taken over the nongrowing period and drought reserve.
Chart With Grazings Plotted (Open-Ended Plan)
Color Plate 2.3. Because this is an open-ended plan, grazings have been plotted only through mid-June—the middle of the growing season in this case. The grazings for the remainder of the season will be planned as the plan is implemented. Paddocks D2 and H3 have been removed from the paddock average, because they are cropfields; and paddock F1 has been removed from the paddock average, because it is a sacrificial paddock being used for bulls, then heifers, then bulls again on continuous graze.
Chart With Grazings Plotted (Closed Plan)
Color Plate 2.4. The drought reserve period covers March and April in this case; the cropfields (D2 and H3) will be grazed during the nongrowth period but not in the drought reserve period, as they will require cultivation and planting; the sacrificial paddock (F1) changes to F2 over the drought reserve period and will carry into the new growing season when it starts (which could be in March or April).
