HOLISTIC LAND PLANNING:
Designing the Ideal Layout of Your Infrastructure
Holistic Land Planning and Grazing Planning developed in tandem as both grew out of our new understanding about the role of time in grazing and trampling. To keep animals moving continually requires new thinking about the way fencing, water points, roads, and handling facilities are laid out—even more so when you’re dealing with large tracts of land that require a considerable investment in that sort of infrastructure. The procedure described in part 4 focuses on such large operations but can be easily adapted to smaller-scale ones. The steps remain the same—only the detail changes.
Some may ask why land planning comes last in the sequence of this handbook. The reason is both practical and psychological. You cannot in practice assess the possibilities for your land plan without a background of financial and grazing planning. More important, many ranchers and farmers think Holistic Management cannot begin until they’ve fenced their land in some special way. In fact, whether or not you ever invest anything in fencing, you must start managing the land as you find it. A land plan is not a starting point. It is an end point toward which you build from your experience and success.
Conceiving the matter backward often leads to quick disaster—yet no end of impatient people rush to borrow heavily for fences, pumps, cattle, or whatever to create a structure that proves inconvenient and cannot support itself until the whole operation matures (if ever). The social and environmental costs of an ill-wrought plan can be even worse.
A holistic land plan represents the marriage of a holisticgoal and step-by-step practice. Its implementation will proceed, like biological succession, as one stage makes the next one possible. Because investments in land represent long-term commitments, this land planning procedure and its gradual implementation acquire extreme importance.
Alongside Holistic Financial Planning and Grazing Planning, the Land Planning is a major aspect of management for the rancher or farmer running livestock. It differs, however, in that it can involve very long-term and occasionally irreversible commitments. Success depends on exploring all the possibilities and trying to avoid decisions that permanently eliminate large areas of choice.
The steps for developing a land plan that are outlined here emphasize broadness of vision. The plan you create will map all future developments on your land, and it will affect future generations, as well. You want a land plan that goes beyond maximizing yield from a particular kind of animal. In combination with the financial and grazing planning, the land planning should advance all three parts of your holisticgoal and enhance as many aspects of the land’s fruitfulness as possible. Your land plan should also recognize the goals and aspirations of other people who may depend on, or be affected by, the land in one way or another.
Anyone can whip out a “plan” without following the steps described in this section, but no abstract blueprint for a distant future will have as much immediate practical use as the knowledge you’ll gain from completing the tasks in each of these steps. In fact, your final plan will develop almost as a by-product of the process. These are the steps:
1. Gathering important information
2. Preparing maps and overlays
3. Deciding on herd and cell sizes
4. Preparing maps for planning
5. Holding the planning session
6. Designing the ideal plan
7. Implementing your plan
The first section of part 4, “Mastering the Basics,” will cover the first three steps. The second, “Creating Your Plan,” will cover the last four, as well as layouts and hardware.
MASTERING THE BASICS
Land planning, to be successful, should never be a solitary exercise. Your land plan will affect more than you, the owner or manager. It will also affect those who work with you, your neighbors, and the generations to come. Bring as many minds to the table as you can, both when gathering the information that goes into the plan and in brainstorming possible plans later.
If you’re ranching on public lands, or sharing your land with multiple users, you will need to enlarge participation even further. If you don’t, the roads or fences or other structures you plan could easily lead to unnecessary conflict.
Well-informed communication among those contributing to the planning is essential. And for that, you will need good information and good maps. Lacking that ballast, good discussions tend to list into arguments that cannot be resolved. Spare no pains in gathering every scrap of background material that will help you plan wisely.
Gathering Important Information
A land plan is no better than the information that goes into creating it. Seek ideas from everyone who has an interest in your land or knowledge to contribute. People who participate in lending their ideas become supporters—even if they say no more than “You have a rare plant over there,” or “We collect berries along the stream below your place.”
Map Your Future Landscape
If your land covers an extensive area and varied terrain, record on a map, or better still on a transparent or clear plastic overlay, the broad landscape features described in your holisticgoal—for example, wetlands, tree-lined riparian areas, woodlots, cropping areas, dense brush areas, open grassland. Indicate only generally where you intend to produce these features. You will refer to this map when you brainstorm different layouts and later when you are ready to choose the best of them.
Start a Checklist of Issues
For each item on the list, you want to answer questions such as, Where on the land do we need to consider this? Who is involved? What would I like to see happen? Show the list to others and get their input. Keep adding to the list. Think in terms of the following categories:
• Natural issues: weather factors, such as the direction of prevailing winds and areas that are likely to be covered in deep snow or prone to flooding; geographic features such as water sources and riparian areas, eroding catchment areas that lead onto your property, major differences in soil types (because they could determine the placement of crop fields); areas of major fire threat and wildlife concerns such as the need for roosting, mating, and nesting sites and seasonal movement routes; areas of heavy predation and areas where endangered species are present.
• Social issues: present ownership boundaries—some properties may be divided among different owners or portions may be leased—and future boundaries (an estate plan might require that the land be divided later among several family members); areas where mineral rights are leased or could be; water rights (both yours and your neighbors’) and how those might affect your own water use; any future developments planned on the land surrounding the property; recreational access areas for hunters or hikers; areas prone to vandalism; archaeological sites needing protection; and so on.
All of these issues can affect your plan in one way or another. The prevailing winds might influence the placement of roads that can serve a duel purpose as firebreaks. You wouldn’t want to place a home or a road in a flood-prone area and be forced to engage in costly repair work year after year. Locating a fence where it would inhibit the movement of the public in an area they have access to could invite vandalism.
Identify Management Factors
Review your holisticgoal in its entirety. Make sure you address all the relevant forms of production, not just those related to producing profit. Quality of life and aesthetic concerns are also major considerations. List all the management factors you can think of. Many of them will require further research before you start to plan. Consider the following:
• Livestock production:
– Possible future stocking rates. These will influence the size and number of grazing cells, or grazing areas, and handling facilities.
– Herd size. This will enable you to determine how much water needs to be available in any one place. In the future, you are likely to require many more divisions of land (fenced paddocks or unfenced areas in which livestock moves are planned) than you now have.
– Access to water and other points (e.g., a milking facility or overnight holding area). You want to avoid repetitive movement over the same ground, and to site corridors and any other sacrificial areas carefully to minimize damage from trampling and pollution problems.
– The brittleness scale. Less brittle environments tend to need high stock density—meaning small paddocks—and frequent livestock moves to ensure good animal performance. More brittle environments tend to need higher herd effect, as opposed to stock density. Paddocks can be large if herd effect is routinely induced by running a very large herd, using attractants, or strip-grazing within them (see the box “A Land Plan for Ultra-High-Density Grazing”).
– Water storage and delivery. Consider potential dam sites (check your water rights) if additional water is going to be needed, and where to site reservoirs.
– Multiple species. Think seriously about running more than one species of livestock. In many situations doing that will result in better use of a wider range of forages and higher production. If you are now running cattle only, consider adding sheep or goats, hogs, pastured poultry, and so on—all of which could affect the amount and type of fencing needed, water availability, and handling facilities. Though you may not run additional species for years to come, planning for the possibility now saves having to modify your plan later, when it would be more costly to do so.
• Crop production. Will you run animals on crop fields at certain times of the year? If you irrigate, do you plan to change the form of delivery? How would that affect your historic use (there could be legal implications)? Will your machinery have access? Remember: Small fields are more manageable ecologically than large ones; the more “edge” (where different habitats such as fields, hedgerows, tree belts meet) you have, the more you encourage diversity in insect, bird, and game populations.
• Timber production. Will you graze livestock in the forest area to assist with fire mitigation or for any other reason? You will need to ensure access to the timbered area and try to minimize soil damage from machinery. What harvesting methods will be used (clear-cut, in which large swaths of forest are harvested at once; selective harvesting, in which the best trees are taken; or selection harvesting, in which the best trees are left to produce seed for future generations)?
Start a List of the Infrastructure Needed
Based on all the management factors you have considered, you should be starting to get an idea of the infrastructure required to achieve your holisticgoal. Draw up a list of the basic facilities and keep adding to it as you move through the next steps.
Circulate Your Lists and Ask for Feedback
When you have written down people’s opinions and suggestions on the issues, management factors, and infrastructure desired, and the lists have circulated long enough to ferment a bit, you can begin to consider specifics.
Preparing Maps and Overlays
A good topographical map, one that shows contours as well as natural features such as rivers, is essential for land planning. It should not show existing fences, water points, ranch roads, and the like, lest they force thinking into the old pattern. You will put those features on an overlay to use later in testing new ideas.
Create a Master Map of the Property
Use the best topographic sections you can find (see box “About Maps”) and paste them together to create your master map. The only constructed features that should appear on the map are those that would be illegal or genuinely impractical to change, such as public roads, railway tracks, and homes.
Prepare a Map of Existing Developments
Existing developments would include water points, buildings, fences, croplands, ranch and farm roads, working facilities, and so on. Prepare a map that shows all these things, and then set that map aside.
About Maps
You will need the best contour maps available and of a scale suitable to work on in some detail. In the United States, U.S. Geological Survey 1:24,000-scale maps are generally adequate for planning most ranches and other extensive properties, though you may have to cut and paste several of them together.
In the case of smaller properties, you will need a larger-scale map that shows more detail. These can generally be made by using a copy machine to enlarge existing maps. Avoid using aerial photographic strips and stereo viewers, because these are generally too small in scale, and contours tend to be exaggerated in the three-dimensional view.
Create Overlays
The information you gathered in the first step now needs to be recorded on clear plastic or transparent paper sheets that will be superimposed on the master map. You can get several kinds of clear plastic overlay material in rolls or sheets, as well as indelible and wipe-off markers in a rainbow of colors, from an engineering supply house, art store, or blueprinter.
Several items can be put on one overlay as long as the sheet doesn’t become cluttered. Usually, the information will fall into three or four categories, requiring three or four overlays. Many of the following examples could be grouped together; others will require individual sheets:
• map of the future landscape described in your holisticgoal (where you want to develop open grassland, forested areas, or brushed areas, etc.)
• hunting areas
• winter wildlife range
• wildlife factors, such as roosting, mating, and nesting sites; food plants; movement routes
• deeds, leases, and permits
• rights-of-way
• features involving multiple users (camp sites, trails, etc.)
• fire danger and prevailing wind
• crop or timber areas
• inaccessible areas
• existing facilities, fences, and roads
• water sources and water rights
• snowdrift areas
• flood areas
• estate plans (may involve future land divisions)
• mineral rights and leases
Study the maps in figures 4.1 and 4.2. Note how the fence pattern on the second map immediately suggests a cell layout—even though in this case it derives from old property boundaries that have no relationship to the lay of the land. This is why you should do your creative planning on a map stripped down to basic geography.
Breadth and Depth in Your Thinking
You’ll begin to understand why gathering information must precede drawing lines on maps or overlays as you confront decisions that can influence everything that follows—such as whether to hire herders or build fences or how you lay out cropfields.
HERDING VERSUS FENCING
Are there public opponents to fences? Are there legal restrictions on public or leased lands? Can herding ease predator problems? Does permanent fencing fail the testing toward your holisticgoal? Will movable fencing or permanent posts with movable tape or wire need to be used?
Herding requires a good deal of skill and initial training of animals. What about labor costs and availability? Can you substitute dogs for people? What do you know about stock dogs, and where can you learn more? How about the economic question? How large would your herd size have to be to produce the income to cover herder salaries?
Are there partial options involving seasonal herding on some land or skillful use of natural barriers, drift fences, movable fences, poly wire, and so forth in combination with herding?
CROPLAND
Now, and probably more in the future, you can plan crop and livestock production as one unit, integrating crop rotations such as the corn-soy-wheat-clover sequence often seen in the midwestern United States into the feeding of livestock.
Aside from the usual advantage of some grazing and hay production, your information gathering may turn up ways to apply animal impact, rather than fire or machinery, to deal with crop residues, or strategic feeding of winter hay, or other techniques.
What you discover about the relationship of field size and crop sequence to weed and pest control and wildlife may well lead to a fence layout that lets you easily incorporate fields into the grazing plan.
In herding situations, informal fences extending some distance from the center can help direct traffic where a big sacrifice zone would otherwise develop.
Figure 4.1. Topographic map with no fixed features.
Figure 4.2. Topographic map including fixed features.
Measure Acres and Hectares
Throughout this book we talk about acres and hectares in one context or another. In land planning, you must constantly relate land area to stocking rates, cell sizes, and, of course, topography. Unfortunately, most people are terrible judges of area. Though an acre happens to be about the size of an American football field, who can easily tell how many football fields fit into an irregular 12,000-acre cell with a river and a highway through the middle?
Acres
Squares of overlay material or even thin paper divided into 10-acre squares make these measurements easy on a map. The grid shown in figure 4.3 is for the 1:24,000-scale U.S. Geological Survey “Seven Minute Series” map often used in planning. Remember: You’re not buying urban lots by the square foot. A quick and dirty estimate by grid does fine.
Among other things, such grids show that there is some logic after all in the American system of measurement. One-eighth mile squared is 10 acres, and 1 1/4 miles squared is 1,000 acres. You can take both of these units right off the mile scale of any map.
Hectares
A 1-cm grid works well for those using the metric system. Maps covering extensive rangeland areas tend to be scaled to at least 1:50,000 and often much greater—1:100,000 or more. The clue to the area in a grid square is the scale itself. On a 1:10,000-scale map, which is typically used in more intensive agricultural areas, each centimeter represents 100 meters. Each 1×1-cm grid square is 1 hectare (100 meters by 100 meters = 10,000 square meters = 1 hectare). On a 1:50,000-scale map, each centimeter represents 500 meters, so a 1×1-cm grid square is 25 hectares (500 meters by 500 meters). Simply multiply the number of grid squares that fully cover the block of land being measured by the area per grid square for your map scale. Given that you are not looking for decimal-point accuracy in rangeland situations, it is relatively easy to estimate the area of a grid square that covers only a portion of the block. For example, at 1:50,000, if a grid square covers only 33 percent of a paddock’s area, assess the grid square as 8 hectares, and add that to the sum of all the fully covered grid squares.
Government offices and professional surveyors measure land area with a planimeter, a cunning little instrument that computes the size of an area when a stylus is run around the perimeter. Cows and sheep don’t worry much about accuracy, however. Unless you happen to own a planimeter already, stick with grids and guesses.
Deciding on Herd and Cell Sizes
You’ll need a rough idea of how large the grazing cells will be and how many animals you might run in them to help you make better decisions about land divisions, water developments, and the like. We use the term “herd” to refer to any group of animals run together, including flocks of sheep, or mixed herds of cattle, sheep, goats, and so on. Remember that a grazing cell is the area planned on a single grazing chart and is not a particular shape or fencing layout.
On smaller properties, you might require only one cell, though livestock management requirements may call for more, at least initially. As you gain experience and come to realize the true cost of running more than one herd, you may well combine two cells into one for the whole property. Because smaller properties often have a higher carrying capacity, however, herd size might still be large and become a critical consideration.
As in many other aspects of management, you can’t find precise answers through rigorous mathematics because too many subjective factors enter in. But to get your thinking on the right track, consider your land as flat and uniform, with water available anywhere (if you’re willing to dig for it).
Where such conditions actually exist, a good argument can be made for a “wagon wheel” fencing layout, with water at the center and fences radiating at precise intervals. The radial design has many advantages, especially in large, dry areas. Once you let go of the idea that the paddocks must be equal and symmetrical and actually look like a wagon wheel, you can shape them to fit rough and hilly country and still have them feed to a common center.
Measuring Acreage Using a Grid and Topographic Map
Making a 1,000-Acre Grid with Ruler and Map Scale
The diagram shows how to create a 1,000-acre grid using a 1:24,000-scale map. The bold lines indicate the square mile lines already present on the map.
To create a 1,000-acre square you will need to increase the square size on the map to cover 1-1/4-miles per side and then divide this new square into 100 smaller squares.
The ruler shows a clever way to do this that avoids having to work in fractions. Tilt the ruler so the “zero” is on the lower-left corner of the square and the 3-inch mark touches the vertical mile line. Then, use the 3/8-inch marks on the ruler to divide the square into 8 equal parts. Finally, extend the square by marking two more 3/8-inch marks to the right of the vertical mile line. Turn the map 90 degrees and repeat the process. This will give you a square of 1-1/4 miles on a side, equal to 1,000 acres, and divided into 100 squares of 10 acres each.
Hectares Use a grid with 1 cm squares. On a 1:10,000-scale map each centimeter represents 100 meters. Each 1 cm by 1 cm square on the grid is thus 1 hectare (10,000 square meters). On a 1:50,000-scale map, each centimeter represents 500 meters, and each square on the grid 25 hectares. Since you don’t need to deal in fractions, no need for a ruler.
Figure 4.3. Squares of overlay material or transparent paper divided into 10-acre squares (or 1-hectare or 25-hectare squares, depending on map scale) make measuring land area on a map easy.
Whether you vary the design or build something quite different, you need to start thinking in terms of area per herd, location of handling facilities, and distance to water. A circle or square representing the size of an optimum cell cut to scale from paper or overlay material, as shown in figure 4.4, will enable you to see on the map how these relationships (distance to water, etc.) apply to your land.
Your final decisions may bear no resemblance to these planning circles—and in any case no cell is an immutable structure. We define a cell only as a piece of subdivided land, planned as a unit. In practice, therefore, you can treat any combination of paddocks associated with any number of handling and water facilities as a cell. Sometimes the whole property might be planned as one cell; at other times you might plan the same paddocks as two or more cells, depending on the herds you run—the point being that a cell is what is planned on a grazing chart as a unit at a certain point in time, rather than any particular layout of paddocks on the land. Nevertheless, keeping in mind the chunks of land you’ll probably plan as a cell most of the time will greatly focus your thinking.
The factors to consider are the following:
• Stocking rate. If you set up a cell big enough for your optimum herd now, and better management and improving land doubles or trebles carrying capacity, you may have to run more animals at one time than you can gracefully manage just to make efficient use of forage. (See figure 4.5 and the box “Thinking Through a Cell Size/Herd Size Problem.”)
• Herd size. Cattle, sheep, and goats can thrive in herds of any size. No limit has been found. Nevertheless, labor, handling facilities, water, and management factors such as calving, lambing, and kidding or weaning will offer significant practical challenges, and herd size may become unwieldy after a certain point, which you must determine for yourself.
• Number of herds. Although a single herd is ideal, there will likely be times when two or more herds might be run.
• Paddocks per herd. Ultimately, you will generally want many paddocks per herd to enable you to achieve great versatility and a consistently high graze-and-trample-to-recovery ratio for best performance of both land and livestock. So in laying out probable cells, it is important to think of their size and shape so they can be subsequently divided into many paddocks without needing realignment. For example, the West Ranch, near Ozona, Texas, was planned to have 50 paddocks feeding into four main water points. The layout uses radial fences, corridors, and unusual shapes because of the topography of the ranch. With that layout, each of the paddocks can at some later date be strip-grazed, giving us anywhere from 50 to 200 “paddocks.” Because permanent fencing did not pass the testing toward the West Ranch holisticgoal, those 50 paddocks have only fixed posts; two strands of electric fence tape are continually moved with the livestock.
• Water supply. Although cattle in Hawaii can survive on dew and the moisture contained in plants, water is frequently a limiting factor elsewhere—and 15 gallons per day per SAU (or 40–80 liters/large stock and 5–15 liters/small stock) is a common requirement. Given your estimates of future herd size, stocking rate possibilities, and cell size, you can compute the bulk delivery of water required. At times, a single well (or borehole) may not provide all you need, so plan for the possibility that you may eventually have to pipe water from more than one source. Planning for the possibility now could avoid heavy expenditures later.
• Distance to water. Cell size will also be limited by how far your animals must travel to reach water. This can vary greatly. In mountainous country, for instance, livestock don’t necessarily come in to drink daily. In areas of Africa and inland Australia, it is routine for animals to graze five miles (eight kilometers) and more to and from water. You will need to plan for what you feel is best in your situation.
Making Planning Circles
Miles × 63,600 inches/mile ÷ map scale = inches on map
Kilometers × 10,000 ÷ map scale = centimeters on map
Figure 4.4. Circles or squares representing optimum cell sizes, cut to scale from transparent paper or overlay material, greatly assist in land planning. They allow you to consider a number of possible cell sites simply by moving them around on the map. Even though you will ultimately design cells that are shaped quite differently, the thinking that went into figuring the size of the planning circles or squares—area per herd, distance to water and handling facilities—will be critical in determining the final design.
Grazing Cells and Herd Sizes
Figure 4.5. This table enables you to quickly determine the average herd size when considering different possible stocking rates and cell sizes.
Thinking Through a Cell-Size/Herd-Size Problem
Let’s say you have land that has supported a stocking rate of 1:20 for many years under continuous grazing. Now you contemplate running herds of at least 600 head. According to figure 4.5, a 12,000-acre (or -hectare) cell would accommodate one herd of that size. The bottom row of the chart gives a radius—the greatest distance to water—of 2.44 miles (3.93 kilometers) for a circle that big. Could your livestock handle that?
If you think so, consider what will happen when your carrying capacity increases—as you have reason to expect, judging by historical data and the performance of a neighboring ranch under Holistic Management. A 50 percent increase in carrying capacity to 1:15 will mean 800 head. Could you handle that? If capacity doubled to 1:10, could you increase to 1,200 head? And if so, how long would it take? Could you supply 18,000 gallons (68,000 liters) of water daily to 1,200 head?
If you expect to double your stock numbers, perhaps you should build two 6,000-acre (or -hectare) cells to take your 600 head now. What will that cost?
If you build one 9,000-acre (or -hectare) cell and plan the grazing, perhaps that will allow a stocking rate of 1:15 now, which would accommodate your 600 head. Then an increase to 1:10 would raise your herd to 900. Is that better than 1,200?
Let’s say that water limits you to 600 head, and you see no chance of developing more. If you figure you can count on a 1:15 stocking rate 9 years in 10, what options will you have when drought does strike?
This is the kind of reasoning that will lead you to a rough idea of the planning unit that best suits your conditions.
Radial Layouts on Convex and Concave Slopes
Figure 4.6. Water points should be located at the bottom of concave slopes and at the top of convex slopes in a radial cell to give animals the opportunity to walk to water along the contours.
• Topography. Clearly, topography is an important consideration in planning the layout of paddocks and centers, even where no fencing is used. Any combination of layouts can be considered, but if you opt for a radial layout, there is an additional requirement: If the land slope is concave (most common), the radials should converge toward the bottom of the slope. If the slope is convex, the radials need to converge toward the top of the slope. In both cases, this enables the animals to move across flatter ground as they approach water (see figure 4.6).
• Marginal reaction. In general, development cost per acre or hectare goes down as cell size increases—but figure this carefully. The same number of radial paddocks requires less fencing when arranged around several centers than when extended long distances from a single center. On the other hand, supplying each center with water may cost a lot.
• Land boundaries. Customs and prejudices surrounding land tenure often inhibit a flexible viewpoint, but both economics and ecology frequently justify management units quite unrelated to ownership units. If circumstances warrant and cooperation seems possible, amalgamating properties for management (not ownership) may make a lot of sense. Keep an open mind.
CREATING YOUR PLAN
When you’ve completed the background work—gathered information and opinions on the status and uses of the land, recorded all your planning considerations on overlays, decided on the guidelines for cell and herd size—the time has come to organize some group sessions over a day or two to generate a number of different plans.
This is a critical step and benefits from the presence of outsiders. Riding the same fences and working the same pens, corrals, and water points imparts a certain wisdom, but routine blinds the imagination. It costs nothing to reject a truly loony plan, but never seeing a new idea can be expensive.
Preparing Maps for Planning
Creative planning—especially if a number of people contribute to it—will generate far more plans than you can afford to record on expensive maps or even plastic overlays. One way of doing this is to get multiple photocopies of the master map you used when creating the overlays—at least ten for each planning team—and do the creative planning on those. Even copies are not cheap, however, when you need a lot of them. If the planners have access to a good map and overlays and can refer to those as they work, rough tracings on sheets of butcher paper or newsprint of land boundaries and such major features as streams and canyons will work nearly as well. Such crude outline maps are quick and simple to make—just tape a master map to a large window and trace over it. If your master doesn’t have an opaque backing, the backlighting will allow you to trace directly from it. Otherwise, you’ll have to make the tracing master from tracing paper or overlay material.
Finally, make one copy for each planning team of the map you created showing existing developments and set those aside. The teams will be given an opportunity to create a final plan using that map after they have exhausted all possibilities using the master map.
Holding the Planning Session
Armed with a good master map, overlays, a good supply of planning circle cutouts of different sizes, cheap tracings or photocopies, pencils, and markers, you’re ready to hold your planning session. Make sure you conduct this session when people are fresh and creative, not tired at the end of a day.
Divide the Planners into Teams
Divide the planners into small groups—not more than three to six people. You might have husbands, wives, employees, tenants, neighbors, management club members, and members of youth groups. Mix and match if you can. If you don’t have many people, it’s better to have four working individually than two pairs. Your goal, remember, is to get a large number of plans.
If certain people are likely to dominate others, put the bosses together. You will generate far more possibilities if you can avoid the thinking being dominated by a person who “knows what cannot be done”—bear in mind that the finest candle makers could not conceive of, let alone develop, the electric light bulb.
If you bear ultimate responsibility for the final plan and you sense that others are likely to defer to you without discussion, consider not joining a team yourself. Almost certainly your ideas will turn up as elements in others’ plans. If you have a foreman, local dignitary, or other leader whose authority can’t be questioned without embarrassment, that person might advance the work better as an organizer than a planner—answering questions of history and detail, for example.
Do not be concerned about excluding your most knowledgeable people, because once you’ve got a multitude of plans on paper, you and the people who know the land and the operation well will ultimately select the best plan, as you are most qualified to do so.
Brief the Planning Teams
Share with the teams those aspects of your holisticgoal that will influence the planning and display a copy of your future landscape map. Give a general overview of the management factors you listed in the first phase of planning and explain how those relate to the developments being planned. Display or pass out a list of all the infrastructure needed, so the planners can refer to it throughout the session.
Explain whether you want to emphasize herding or fencing and on which parts of the land you’d do one or the other. Ask for a specific number of paddocks or divisions, because high paddock numbers in particular affect the positioning of water and the approaches to it within grazing cells. Do this to force the planning teams to look hard at the topography and the complications in transporting supplies and moving, handling, and watering stock. If you have a vision of 100 paddocks, now is the moment to figure out how to create them—even if you cannot actually put in that many for years.
It may also prove helpful to show some layout possibilities to introduce the idea of handling centers designed to serve associated paddocks in a cell. (Several ideas are given later in this section.) If you do this, however, be sure to emphasize the variety of possibilities rather than any particular design.
Explain the thinking behind the herd and cell size decisions and the meaning of the cell planning circles.
Emphasize that at this stage you’re not committed to using existing facilities, water points, or fences—though, obviously, if the country is notoriously dry, planners can’t put a new water point in every paddock.
Brainstorm
Warm up with a brainstorming exercise. The game of listing solutions to some humorous problem, described in part 1, loosens up the mind and promotes healthy cooperation among the planners and competition between the teams.
After the warmup, provide each team with master maps (topography and natural features only) and planning circles, and ask them to create as many possible layouts as they can for the infrastructure needed, bearing in mind all the factors mentioned. Give them plenty of time to accomplish their task.
In creating each plan, they should be concerned only with the layout of major features such as grazing areas (not necessarily all the subdivisions within), access to water for livestock, cropfields, working and storage facilities, landings, staging areas for timber extraction, and so on. More detailed planning, such as the positioning of individual fences and minor roads, will be done later.
For now, you want the participants to avoid concentrating too much on any one possible layout because it may close their minds to further possibilities. As soon as any team has captured an idea of a possible layout on one of the maps, have them set it aside and start on a new one.
Occasionally, a group fails to take the process seriously and simply draws irrelevant lines, ignores the background information, or misinterprets a map (putting paddock lines over impassable cliffs). Stand ready to supply information or advice, but try to offer advice in the form of a question. (How will a cow get from here to there?) Stop short of outright criticism.
Though this is a serious exercise in many respects, it is important for each team to bring a playful attitude to it and have fun in the process. The more you can encourage that, the more creative and promising the results will be.
Create One Plan Based on Existing Facilities
When all teams have exhausted their ideas on possible layouts, give each one a copy of the map showing the existing physical structures. Ask them to creatively develop a layout for the infrastructure of the future based on the present situation. Most land managers instinctively do this first in the belief that they can derive the most “practical” plan from the current layout, because subconsciously they don’t want to spend money redoing any of it. Be assured that the existing layout, because it is based on old concepts of land and livestock management, is seldom the ideal for the long term, and it limits everyone’s thinking to a narrow framework. Thus, it’s imperative to generate some completely original plans from blank maps. On the other hand, the build-on-the-past option deserves consideration, too, and parts of it usually wind up in the final plan.
Doing your creative planning from blank maps first in no way implies that the old layout is useless. The point is that you may want to use it differently by incorporating what you can of it into the final plan, as shown in figure 4.7. If you start from a pattern of existing pastures, you’ll tend to visualize those pastures as cells and think only in terms of cross-fencing them.
Planning on a Sketched Map
Figure 4.7. Here is a land plan laid out on a sketch traced from the topographic map shown in figure 4.2. Because the sketch shows watercourses and permanent roads, you can plan according to watershed features, even without seeing the detailed contours. Note that the plan makes use of some existing fences to divide paddocks or cells.
Evaluate the Plans
Let the planners present their options, explaining how and why they did what they did. Don’t subject anyone to direct attack. The point, as in the brainstorming exercise, is to find new ideas, not to compete or keep score on bad suggestions. Do take notes, however, and use a marker or brush pen to highlight promising concepts.
After the presentations and the posting of the various plans where everybody can see them, start discussion of good elements in others’ plans. The group often generates ideas at this stage that you could never have thought of on your own, so don’t skip this important step. Remember, the people with the most knowledge, and that includes you, are going to develop the eventual plan.
Designing the Ideal Plan
Transforming the best ideas into a workable plan will take a while. Those of you who know the ranch or farm well should create the ideal plan from the many possibilities already proposed. Remember, you are seeking the best long-term plan from all points of view. You’ll probably manage to boil down your options to two or three without much difficulty through the following process.
Make Map Overlays Incorporating the Best Ideas
Superimpose overlays that incorporate the best ideas onto a map that shows existing facilities. Can you foresee a sequence of development that will keep prior structures in use until it makes sense to replace them, if they need replacing? Think both short and long term. For example, a capital-intensive layout may lead to higher short-term cost but much lower long-term operating costs.
Review Water Supplies
If you run your animals in a single herd all the time, or amalgamate them in a drought, do you have enough flow to sustain the higher numbers in all paddocks? If not, can you afford to haul water to deficient paddocks during the occasional year you may need it?
Review Your Checklists
Have you accounted for every item—all those details that weren’t considered when the planning teams created their layouts? For example, certain grazing cell layouts will facilitate many paddocks, while others may not. If you have planned many small cropfields that will be harvested mechanically, bulk handling from centralized crop collection points, and the routine use of livestock in the management of the cropfields, certain layouts will enhance management efficiency, while others might decrease it. In both examples, you are specifically looking for layouts that enable you to move livestock or machinery to almost any point without constantly moving over the same ground.
Check Each Plan against the Overlays
As you place your original overlays—the future landscape, natural and social factors—over each possible plan, you will begin to see both good and bad features from the point of view of each consideration on the overlay. Quite commonly at this point, you will begin to draw up new plans that combine the best features of the others. But don’t rush to any final decisions yet. Let these new plans sit a while. Let others mull them over and tinker with modifications while you work through the details of cost and construction. Then come back and create the final plan.
Check Your Ideal Plan against the Reality on the Land
As a final check, go out and walk the land. Compare planned fence lines and other developments with the reality of the topography, making adjustments as needed.
Implementing Your Plan
Once you have settled on the ideal plan for the future, you can begin the gradual process of changing over from the old to the new. Commonly, the cost of the changeover is a major determining factor in the rate of change. If adequate money is available and the rate of change need not be slow, it should nevertheless be sound and in line with your holisticgoal in every respect. In creating your annual financial plan, you will be allocating money toward the desired developments in a way that differs from the conventional.
Normally, you would regard most of the physical structures to be developed as capital expenditures—the capital coming from your previous earnings or, more commonly, from an outside source that involves repayment with compound interest. Eventually, capital expenditures yield a return on the investment, although there can be some delay before that return is seen. Provided a profit can be penciled in, the capital is usually invested. This approach can be very costly.
Fortunately, on many ranches or farms, having a lot of capital available up front is no more necessary than it is in a small start-up company run out of a home. No development should cost you outside money unless you choose to apply it. Over the years, the land itself should be able to generate most, if not all, of the funds you will need.
Implementing your plan in this gradual way, and generating the capital to do it from the land, means that you can continue to operate at a profit year after year, and that each year the other needs expressed in your holisticgoal will continue to be met.
Figuring Costs and Schedules
The speed with which you implement your land plan should be governed by your annual financial plan. If energy conversion isn’t the weak link in the chain of production from sun to money, then building fences is seldom wise. In many operations, product conversion will be the weak link initially—there are simply too few animals to eat the forage available. Using the West Ranch in Texas once again as an example, they built no fences there in the first two years. They simply used the four paddocks they had and created a grazing plan for them. All the money available was diverted to livestock purchases. They used those two years to experiment with different methods for making their fencing fully movable. When energy conversion did become the weak link, they were ready to put in fencing that was better for their needs than what they had originally contemplated.
As soon as energy conversion is the financial weak link, develop the elements of your plan that give the greatest marginal reaction in that area. The science of this is not exact, because of the number of variables and the difficulty of measuring them, but there are ways to make consistently better decisions.
Break the Plan into the Smallest Plausible Steps
Compute the cost of each step. A fencing layout might involve several stages of center construction, water development, and the fences themselves, fence by fence. There may be some items, such as a well (borehole) or pipeline, that you’ll have to build at once and completely in order for anything else to follow—even though you may not be able to use the full capacity of this facility for some time to come. Such cases are costly. You’ll do much better if you can find a way to build incrementally so that every improvement pulls its full weight through generating more income from solar energy the minute it comes on line.
Determine a Sequence of Construction
All the advice in the financial planning section of this book applies here, of course, particularly the three testing guidelines: Energy/Money Source and Use, Marginal Reaction, and Weak Link (Financial). The Energy/Money Source and Use guideline will lead you to give priority to those elements of your plan that contribute most directly to the production of solar dollars. This could be the development of a water point that will increase your usable range—but only if you have more livestock than the present grazing area they have access to can handle.
Far more commonly, when resource conversion is the weak link, some water is available (if inconveniently so) and the highest marginal reaction comes from raising stock density and decreasing grazing periods relative to recovery periods. If you decide to do this through fencing, you’ll probably find it wise to do as much as you can before investing heavily in a more efficient water system.
Then the question arises over which fence to build first (marginal reaction) when you have land of different productivity and an existing fence layout designed according to different criteria. The following examples show how these factors affect practice:
• Example 1. Fences or water? In this example, the plan calls for converting three large pastures into four radial-layout cells. The drawing in figure 4.8 shows the existing layout in bold ink and the planned four-cell arrangement in dashes. (Note that although we are referring to four cells, all four could be combined into one cell at times.) Here are the problems:
Which Facilities Would You Develop First?
Figure 4.8. A number of factors should be considered before spending money on water point development or fencing, including how long you can make do with what you have.
– Assuming that developing water at each center involves fairly major capital expense, how many fences included in the new plan could you build before having to change a water point to avoid a dry paddock?
– Assuming that, aside from the water, your centers will initially contain no expensive handling facilities and consist of only a corridor and gates, which would you build first?
– In which center would you first develop the water?
– How long would you use the existing fences (dark lines) before replacing them?
Doubtless you can think of circumstances that would dictate changing one of the water points earlier in the sequence, but you’d want to reason carefully.
• Example 2. Which fence first? The recovery approach. Generally, when you’re constructing permanent fencing, you’ll decide which fence to build first according to how it will reduce overgrazing on the largest number of plants. In this example, all fences cost the same and productivity is uniform across the planned paddock. The question is which two radial fences should you build first (see figure 4.9)?
Which Fence First?
Figure 4.9. Choice A would lead to unbalanced grazing periods (and overgrazing in 90 percent of the cell). Choice B would provide sufficient recovery periods but would not eliminate overgrazing entirely.
Grazing Periods for Choice B |
Paddock |
Min GP |
Max GP |
A1 |
2 |
6 |
A2 |
2 |
6 |
A3 |
16 |
48 |
A4 |
20 |
60 |
B1 |
10 |
30 |
B2 |
10 |
30 |
B3 |
10 |
30 |
B4 |
10 |
30 |
• Example 3. Which fence first? The productivity approach. This example, illustrated in figure 4.10, includes the added variables of productivity and fencing cost. Common sense is often your best guide here, but the choice usually looks less murky if you can figure the productivity of new paddocks you mean to create in animal-days and divide that figure by the fencing cost. This will rate each new paddock in animal-days per dollar (AD/$)—a pretty good index of the marginal reaction of each additional fence. (Normally, you want to gain the most production for the least amount of money.)
• Example 4. A composite case. This example was designed from an actual case by Montana consultant Roland Kroos; it illustrates the kind of choices you’ll have to make in practice. The drawings in figure 4.11 show two possible plans for the same ranch. The broken lines show the layout of eight existing pastures being grazed as paddocks in a single cell. By subdividing them, you can greatly increase density and control of time. The two plans are similar. In this case we will choose Plan B on the basis of absolute cost, though it’s worth noting that the difference results from less costly water developments. The more nearly radial fence design in Plan B actually requires more miles of fence.
Choosing Fences by AD/$
Figure 4.10. In this example, you know the productivity of each existing paddock in ADA( H). For the sake of simplicity, the plan calls for splitting each paddock exactly in half. Thus 700-acre paddock 1 becomes two paddocks of 350 acres each. (If your fence will split the paddock unequally, you must use the productivity figure of the smaller piece.)
Paddock |
ADs |
Min GP |
1 |
12,600 |
5.5 |
2 |
10,350 |
4.5 |
3 |
8,175 |
3.6 |
4 |
1,700 |
0.7 |
5 |
8,400 |
3.7 |
6 |
2,700 |
1.2 |
7 |
28,880 |
12.7 |
8 |
5,280 |
2.3 |
|
78,085 |
|
Average AD: 9,761 |
Average GP: 4.29 days |
Two Possible Plans for the Same Ranch
Figure 4.11. Here are two possible plans for the same ranch. They are similar, but plan B wins out over plan A, because water development would be far less costly in plan B. The AD/$ rule shows that fencing the shaded area first gives the best marginal reaction.
The AD/$ rule shows that fencing the shaded area gives the best marginal reaction. At 38 ADA(H) (it could be higher or lower than this paddock average), the shaded area rates
This would, of course, change the grazing period only in paddock 7; but there, instead of spending, say, 14 days in the paddock, animals would spend an average of 7 days in each half.
You can work out for yourself what the next division should be. One of the $150 fences crossing the shaded area looks like a good bet.
Allotting Time and Money for Development
All kinds of loss and headache can result from projects that come on line too late because of some bottleneck in the work itself or the financing. A fortune can vanish with breathtaking speed if lambing pens aren’t ready when lambs start dropping, or a water point isn’t ready when the summer gets hot. The procedure described in part 1 on financial planning shows you how to work the cash requirements of any long-term project into your financial projections. If you’re careful, you should have cash on hand when you need it and know what your debt level will be at any point.
Any major construction project—such as a cell center or miles of fencing—probably deserves its own column on the financial plan. It certainly requires a separate worksheet for planning the progress of the work and no doubt a lot of extra documentation on top of that. Most planning systems include at least the following steps:
The No Fencing Option
Although permanent fencing is not only desirable but practical in many cases, situations exist where fencing in any form—permanent or temporary—is either impractical or counterproductive in terms of your holisticgoal. For example, at Dimbangombe Ranch in Zimbabwe (managed by the Savory Institute’s sister organization, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management), we have a large and diverse game population, including elephant and buffalo, that would make short shrift of any fencing. In such cases, herding is one option to consider and is what we’ve opted for on Dimbangombe.
Herding can be much more effective when combined with the low-stress handling techniques promoted by innovators such as Bud Williams, who have demonstrated the degree of movement control that can be established with skilled handling and no (or very little) fencing. Virtual fencing, using electronic implants in the animals and movable beacons, may soon be another option.
If you do opt for no fencing, the land plan remains a vital concern. You still need to plan roads, handling facilities, and grazing distances from water and to demarcate grazing areas or paddocks to control time through the grazing planning process. The grazing plan is created using the Aide Memoire covered in part 3.
In the case of Dimbangombe Ranch, the land plan has relatively few “paddocks”—all of them demarcated by natural features. The ranch’s grazing chart, however, shows that animals are in those few paddocks for prolonged times (as there are so few paddocks, and recovery periods for plants need to be adequate). In fact, the herders ensure that animals do not graze the same area day after day but that they cover most of the paddock by the time they are due to move out of it. In this manner most of the ground (and plants) is subjected to no more than a day or two of grazing and trampling and then has a prolonged recovery time.
1. Break the project into separate tasks. You can note the tasks on file cards and them shuffle them into chronological order later. It’s often easier if you think backward, starting with the completed work, breaking that into large categories, then subdividing each of those into smaller and smaller tasks. For example, a completed cell center might require a water system, outside fences and gates, and handling facilities; each of those features would be broken into tasks and subtasks represented by separate stacks of file cards.
2. Assign a time requirement and a cost to each task. For example: Order pump, $800—delivery time, 3 weeks. Advertise for crew, $40—2 weeks.
3. Arrange the tasks in chronological order. One way to do this is to make a time line out of adding machine tape marked in 1-inch (2.5-centimeter) intervals (30 feet, or 10 meters, to the year, cut to 6-foot, or 2-meter, sections to stretch out on a table). Then lay out the cards, working backward from the completion date. This method shows graphically what tasks must occur simultaneously.
4. Adjust the schedule. Add slack for holidays and unexpected delays; add labor or machinery to shorten completion times where necessary.
5. Analyze the chronology for ways to improve efficiency. Opportunities for creativity and major savings are usually enormous. They range from coordinating labor and machinery (Can the same backhoe you lease to lay pipe also be used to level the floor of the shearing shed?) to finessing transport costs (If every pickup going to town hauls back a roll of wire, can you avoid paying a trucker to fetch the whole lot?).
6. Monitor progress. Your chronology will, of course, have completion dates for all the various stages, but it’s easy to underestimate construction times, particularly on long projects like fencing. You’ll tend to project progress from what you know of continuous work, forgetting that yellow-jacket nests, bad weather, and a myriad other things always intervene. Reduce all long tasks such as plowing, fencing, or clearing to units per day and check the rate frequently. This will give you an early warning of delays.
Layouts and Hardware
Over the years, many holistic managers have accumulated a good deal of experience in solving the technical riddles posed by the need to control the time, density, and impact of animals. New approaches turn up continually, and occasionally old ones prove faulty as evidence matures. Recorded here are some of the more durable ideas.
Paddock Layouts
Planning requires you to mark the paddock boundaries. Fencing, of course, serves this function. For herders, as the illustration in the box “Breadth and Depth in Your Thinking” shows, a little fence can greatly speed a day’s work. But rock cairns, flagging, and natural landmarks can also be used to designate paddocks.
Natural and ownership boundaries obviously play a major role in the design of paddocks and grazing areas, but there is no need to organize them around different soil or range types. Although in the past this was often recommended to avoid damage from livestock, with holistic planned grazing, the time animals spend on the land is always short relative to recovery periods, greatly minimizing the chance of damage. Instead, your design can reflect any number of social, managerial, political, ecological, and aesthetic considerations.
A cell in which paddocks radiate from a common point is hard to beat for flexibility. No other design allows for such a variety of moves from one paddock to another. Nevertheless, it doesn’t suit all situations—long, narrow canyons, for example. And under very boggy conditions, herds might concentrate too often near a center and overtrample the ground.
In principle, you want a design that allows maximum ease of movement from one paddock to any other paddock, minimum fencing distances, and most efficient use of water. Here are some thoughts and guidelines:
• Trails are most likely to form and be most damaging when livestock move up or down steep slopes in the narrow end of a paddock near the center. By siting the center on fairly level ground at the top of a convex slope or the bottom of a concave slope, as shown in figure 4.6 (in “Mastering the Basics”), you give animals enough space to move back and forth along contours.
• Trails are less likely to form along fences that follow the worst terrain, leaving the better country open to livestock movement. As a rule of thumb, try to build your fences along ridge tops and straight down the points of ridges. Even so, the location of trails is often a mystery understood only by the animals. In very hilly country, you’d be wise to build a few of the most obvious fences first and see how the stock move for a year or so. This trial will either confirm the rest of the plan or suggest changes. In steep country, fences constructed on the diagonal up a hill will often encourage stock to climb the hill more willingly. You might try temporary electric fencing first, as experience shows that small adjustments in location and angle often yield very different outcomes in animal behavior. Fences don’t have to be straight, though bends do require straining posts.
• On highly productive land where distances are likely to be short and high density obligatory, larger paddocks enclosed by permanent fences can be further subdivided by temporary fences, as shown in figure 4.12. Because high density causes rapid depletion of forage and intense fouling, livestock will concentrate on each additional section of an area encompassed by a single moving fence almost as if a second fence were moved along behind them.
Cell Centers
In most situations, you should build cell centers before developing paddocks. If you put up paddock fences that have no function until connected to a center, livestock will never respect them. Never introduce livestock to electric fences that don’t carry full current.
In well-watered, highly productive pastures where distances are short, initial paddock numbers necessarily high, and existing facilities adequate, you may choose to delay building a new center. Nevertheless, if your ultimate plan calls for one, design it thoroughly right at the outset, and make sure that it will fit gracefully into your construction sequence. Few rules govern center design, though long experience has uncovered a few ideas that will help you avoid the most common problems (see figure 4.13).
Paddock Subdivided with a Movable Fence
Figure 4.12. When strip grazing, it’s not always necessary to have a fence to keep stock from returning to grazed areas if grazing periods are short and density is high.
A Land Plan for Ultra-High Density Grazing
In an attempt to reduce the high degree of partial rest on his ranch in Zimbabwe, Johan Zietsman found a creative way to greatly increase animal impact through land planning. He spent a little over a year creating a number of different land plans until he ended up with one that enabled him to create an unlimited number of paddocks without having to develop any additional water points, as shown here.
Johan solved the water distribution challenge by turning existing roads on the ranch into temporary corridors (see inset). For grazing planning purposes, the entire ranch was considered to be one cell. Some of the “paddocks” (A–H) were demarcated by permanent fence (which was being taken down); others were merely imaginary lines. Each paddock was subdivided into strips (1, 2, 3); then each strip was divided numerous times into temporary mini-paddocks—up to 1,500 in all, giving him tremendous flexibility. When he hit a drought in the first year, he had more than enough paddocks to ensure that animals could move onto fresh forage throughout the day every day, without having to return to a paddock until the rains finally came many months later.
In the inset to the right, strip 1 has been grazed. The main herd—545 cows, calves, and bulls grazing at a density of 1,000 to 3,000 animal units per hectare (400 to 1,200 per acre)—is moving through strip 2. Ninety-one yearling heifers he’s planning to breed preceded the main herd in strip 2 and have now moved on to strip 3.
The grazing chart lists only paddocks A–H; it isn’t set up to plan or record 1,500 paddocks and moves that occur every few hours. Many would argue that grazing planning becomes unnecessary when you’re dealing with this many paddocks. That would be true if all you were concerned about was overgrazing, but far more is involved in creating the future landscape described in your holisticgoal.
The first grazing cells for cattle had many problems. The cattle came in to drink and stayed instead of going out on the range and getting fat. Also, the center filled up with manure that smelled bad and caused disease. To solve that problem, ranchers started building cell centers like the ones shown in figure 4.14. Although one cell center is for cattle and the other for sheep, both have a narrow “corridor” around the outside. It should be wide enough for a pickup to drive through but no more. Stock will not hang around long in a narrow corridor, and they will leave their manure out in the paddock, where it will help the land, but there is plenty of room in the middle of the center for all kinds of handling facilities. See the box “Handling Facilities—Good Ideas.”
Most ranchers build the corridor first and little by little add fancy facilities inside. When you build, always look ahead and leave space for all future needs.
Positioning Centers
When centers enjoy broad, level approaches, less trailing results—though if you plan a center around an existing water point where trailing was not a problem under continuous grazing, it should not become one now. Planned grazing will improve the situation no matter how the fences run.
Your next considerations must be access, water availability, construction obstacles, and proximity to roads or hazards. Many old corrals were built in potentially boggy areas because of their access to water, but you may spare yourself decades of grief if you can find a way to build on higher, drier ground.
You may want to build near a well-used road—but how near? Will every passing truck startle your animals?
Center Corridors
Ideally, you want cattle out in the paddocks, not lounging around piling up dung and fly bait in the center. Yet you also want space in the center for handling animals, storing supplies, and corralling riding horses, bulls, and sick stock. A narrow corridor built around a central area will solve both problems. The corridor communicates with all paddocks served by the center and can contain water facilities. Animals that come there to drink will have no incentive to loiter in the confined space and chew cud but will move back out on the range, where their dung is an asset. Meanwhile, you can enjoy a large, clean, central working space. The corridor might even surround an entire homestead.
Generally, you’ll figure the size of the central space according to the facilities you want to put there, but it’s easier to be generous at the outset than to expand later. Five thousand square yards (or meters) will easily accommodate the needs of a herd of 500 to 1,000 cattle that need daily handling.
Plan the center for all the paddocks, herds, and facilities you might ever want to handle—even if you initially build only the corridor around a large empty space. The corridor should be wide enough to drive through, but fifteen feet (five meters) will accommodate herds of almost any size, and the benefits disappear entirely at about thirty feet (ten meters).
Many people worry about damage in case two bulls fight in a narrow corridor, but that behavior occurs almost exclusively in wide corridors. In a restricted space, love triangles are less likely to form and seldom simmer long enough to explode. Even jealous contenders prefer to challenge where a retreat, if necessary, can be conducted with dignity.
The perimeter should be long enough to accommodate plenty of gates. If you are serious about production from the land, you can expect to have thirty or more paddocks at some point.
When you’ve planned your center on paper, lay it out on the ground with pegs and twine or powdered lime and test it as far as possible. If vehicles will have to pass through it or turn around to back up to a loading ramp, be sure they can do that before you start digging the postholes.
Cell Centers and Fence Patterns
Simple radial cell with water in center. Note gates away from center
Dry center—water available in all paddocks.
Fencing to avoid problem piece of land near center.
Dairy unit in center and water at satellites.
Split center:
Full facilities would be in the half serving the largest area. Half centers can be set well back from river or road. 1-, 2-, 3-, or 4-way splits are possible.
Radial fences in a fan design (takes more fencing than wheel layout).
Several fans used in a narrow area.
Figure 4.13. Careful thought should be given to positioning cell centers and the fences that lead into them. The examples here show a number of possibilities, which vary depending on the terrain, the operation, and the cost.
Alternate radials into a small center.
Two cells divided by rimrock.
Cell in canyon with sheer walls and a running stream.
Three cells without radiating fences
Simple Cell Centers
Wet cell center for sheep
Dry cell center for cattle
Round or oval centers are better for low-stress handling facilities with their curved chutes.
Figure 4.14. Cell centers can be any shape, but the corridors should be only wide enough for a pickup to drive through, particularly in “wet” centers that serve as water points. Stock tend to loiter in wide corridors, leaving dung where it becomes a liability rather than the asset it is out in the paddocks.
Handling Facilities: Good Ideas
Consider animal stress in designing your facilities. Animal behaviorist Temple Grandin offers free designs on her Web site (www.grandin.com/design) and in numerous publications available for purchase; her curved chute layouts reduce stress and enable you to work animals far more efficiently. Over the years, ranchers and farmers have developed a variety of innovations that have greatly increased management and handling efficiency.
LAMBING BOARDS
Newborn lambs and kids can remain at the cell center until large enough to discourage predators. To keep them there, merely place a board across the entrance to the paddock in use that is high enough to prevent young from jumping out until they’ve reached a certain size but low enough to let mothers in to suckle.
CALF TRAPS
If you need to frequently put mother cows through a dip or spray race and want to separate the calves quickly with minimal stress, here’s an idea developed years ago by Zimbabwean rancher Bob Rutherford, which enabled one man to bring in five hundred cows, separate their calves, and have the first cows through the plunge dip and grazing in their new paddock in three to five minutes. There was no bawling or any attempt by cows to look for their calves—as long as the whole herd was back in the paddock within an hour. After a brief training period, cows got used to their calves leaving them as they approached the dip entrance and joining them in the paddock later.
The cell center diagram shows how the trap works. The cows with calves are moved through the outer corridor to the gate at point A. As the cows are compressed toward point B, the calves automatically dart back and duck between the poles of the trap (D). These poles are wide enough apart that a calf, but not a cow, can pass through. Once some calves see others in the pen, they tend to move to it. After a few handlings, it becomes routine; calves simply duck into the calf trap, and cows go on toward C and the dip, spray race, or whatever.
The calves in the trap are then driven through the corridor and out at point E to join their treated mothers. When calves require treatment—for example, dehorning or castrating—it is done within the corridor to E.
Detail
Front view of rope ladder hanging down
Ladder stored up
Side View
Similar calf traps have subsequently been designed—some in round or oval centers—but always with the same principle: a crowding area and the chance for calves to escape backward or sideways through the bars and into the trap.
Once the calves are in the trap, you can contain them simply by lowering a ladder (made of nylon rope or chain and rebar rods) on the inside to block the entrance spaces between the upright poles (see detail). Because some cows do get agitated in the early training period, it’s a good idea to add one high crossbar (from which the ladder descends) to prevent a cow from jumping into the trap.
SINGLE-SIRE BREEDING
The desire for single-sire breeding is often quoted as a reason many small cow herds are essential. But since the resulting loss in forage production is so high, consider this alternative, developed by Allan Savory some years ago when working with a registered (pedigree) Simmental breeder in Namibia. Not only was this ranch able to run all five hundred breeding cows in a single herd, but staff also found they could use one bull to ninety cows (rather than the usual practice of one to twenty-five cows). What’s more, they knew the exact date on which each cow conceived and knew quickly if any bull was faulty, without testing.
Here’s the layout used at the cell center: The bulls were placed in separate breeding pens with color-coded gates, as some of the herders were barely literate. Each bull had a colored ear tag in each ear (because the bush was very thorny and dense) to match his pen color. Although the bulls were fed in their pens, this color-coding enabled them to be taken out together each day to water and have a good walk in a paddock well away from the cows.
Early each morning, the herders simply watched for any cows in season that came into the center close to the bulls. Each cow, like the bulls, had two colored ear tags. If they were red, she was put in the red bull pen, and so on. After she was serviced, the herders let her out and noted her number and the date in a book.
The rancher was able to use one bull to ninety cows because a bull did not service the same cow repeatedly. The date of conception was known if the cow did not return to the bull. And if the bull was defective, it showed in repeat visits by the cows assigned to him.
Remember that the part of the center facing the portion of the cell with the greatest grazing area will tend to have the most fences coming in to gates around the perimeter. Lay out radial fence lines from the actual gates rather than from a common peg in the center—otherwise, they’ll all be bunched together.
Water
If you have a winding stream or a dam that supplies all your paddocks and you plan to use them as your water point, bear in mind the following:
• Flowing river water is ideal if you have it, but it necessitates construction of walkways to prevent livestock overtrampling the bank and muddying the water.
• Dams, sloughs, and other catchments present a special challenge—especially if you use them to supply several paddocks so that stock have access to them over longer periods. Consider fencing them so that animals can’t stand in them or wallow and foul them, as shown in figure 4.15. You can drive several permanent posts that will allow you to change the access area occasionally or extend it when the level drops. Or consider siphoning water to a trough if the terrain allows.
Fencing to Protect a Dam or Small Pond
Figure 4.15. Moving wire to allow access to water at different points allows management of shore communities while preventing animals from standing in the dam or pond and fouling it.
If you don’t have a stream or dam available, and your water source is a well (or borehole), you’ll probably want to have water piped into the center. There are more combinations of solar, wind, and gas-powered pumps, rams, siphons, and pipes to help deliver water than this book can describe, and the technology keeps improving. Even if you don’t have water where you want to put a center, don’t abandon the idea without an up-to-date engineering study. Keep these principles in mind:
• You must have a flow such that livestock never have to wait. Otherwise, you’ll have animals packed into the corridors sniffing at drips. The dominant individuals will develop a persistent habit of driving others away. If all your livestock can trust the supply, they’ll come to the center only when genuinely thirsty and then leave. This means you’ll have to engineer a sufficient direct flow or make sure that storage capacity is big enough to handle peak demand. Where water sources are poor, it can pay to plan cells and then pipe small amounts of water from several minor sources to a reservoir at or near the cell center. This way you can supply a herd big enough to do the land some good.
• Large herds will require large amounts of water delivered, and more so in hot weather (at least 15 gallons, or 60 liters, per animal per day for cattle); do the arithmetic with herd size in mind.
• Rate of water delivery to a trough is more important than having large troughs, even with large herds.
• Depending on water source and pumping, it is generally wise to have several days’ water stored in case of breakdowns; the farther away you are from parts suppliers, the more days of storage you will need.
• Livestock will perform better with cool, shaded water than with hot water. Consider adding shade over large expanses of water whenever possible.
A Low-Cost, Low-Maintenance Reservoir
Thin-walled cement reservoirs resist cracking and can be built large enough to meet the storage capacity requirements on almost any ranch or farm. The secret is in the thickness of the walls (which should be no greater than 1.5 to 2 inches or 35 to 50 millimeters) and in the height of those walls (which should be no greater than about 5 feet or 1.5 meters). The construction principles are similar to those used in building concrete yachts. Water troughs can be built super thin too.
Reservoir construction is easy: Lay a foundation floor and erect the sides with weldmesh wire of suitable size. Wrap chicken-wire netting around the structure and then plaster it, making a thin concrete structure.
MATERIALS NEEDED
• Rolls of weldmesh wire of suitable size to form the stand-up structural base of the wall
• A role of fine (chicken) wire netting equal to the reservoir’s circumference
• Binding wire to attach the netting to the weldmesh form
• Cement, sand, water, and helpers
• Plastering trowels and a straightedge (if you want to work the wall to an even finish)
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Lay a circular foundation approximately 4 inches (100 millimeters) high by 1 foot (300 millimeters) wide at the top, which needs to be level. (If you’re building on sandy soil, cover the inside floor of the reservoir with rocks and reinforcing. Then pour a weak sand-cement mixture, at 10:1, over the rocks to almost cover them—this will reduce the amount of concrete you need in the next step.)
2. Set an outlet pipe into the foundation. Then concrete in the reservoir floor—3 to 4 inches (75 to 100 millimeters) thick.
3. Assemble the weldmesh foundation—fortunately, a weldmesh roll easily forms a circle and stands on its own. You may want to anchor the mold with steel stakes in case of wind.
4. Wrap the wire netting around the weldmesh and attach it firmly with binding wire.
5. Plaster the outside, using a 1:6 cement-sand mix, so that it covers the netting but is not too thick. You must do this in one session or cracks will form, so make sure you have enough cement, sand, water, and helpers on hand before you start plastering. If you want a smooth finish, use a straightedge to smooth out the bumps. In hot weather you may need to spray water around the base to keep it damp in order to get a good seal on the joint. Let the plaster cure overnight.
6. Plaster the inside using a 1:4 cement-sand mixture, again in one session, and allow it to cure overnight.
7. Prepare a mixture of 5 gallons (20 liters) of water, 2 tablespoons of caustic soda, and 2 pounds (1 kilogram) of salt. Let this stand overnight, and then add cement until the mixture is thick and creamy. Paint the inside and outside of the reservoir with this mixture to harden the surfaces. Let them dry.
8. Fill the reservoir. There may be some leakage in the first two to three weeks, but it will then seal up for good.
• If you are piping water and want to use portable troughs to help spread animal impact, consider using T-junctions rather than joiners when you lay your pipe. If you place the troughs at high points, you can more easily bleed any air trapped in the line. As with any other water points, you will need to ensure an adequate delivery rate. Some managers have used “tapping saddles” that clamp onto a pipeline to create a T-junction anywhere they want a take-off point; some tapping saddles are self-sealing, with a spring-loaded valve, which eliminates the need for a tap. More take-off points means you can move the trough within a paddock, not only to spread animal impact but also to better use forage or reduce trailing.
• In some circumstances you might consider using water trucks with a trough on the back as a way to provide water, and also to move livestock to distant areas.
• The concentration of animals at the center can create enough dust to affect large, open troughs. Long, narrow troughs, served by a rapid flow, do better and are easier to clean, especially if the ends slope. Calves may get pushed over and drown in troughs over 9 inches (225 millimeters) wide, so bars should be welded across the top. (This doesn’t seem to be a problem with lambs and kids.)
• Consider building ramps or steps on reservoirs and troughs (inside and outside) that allow birds and other small animals to drink without falling in and drowning. Not only will you keep the water unpolluted, you’ll also be helping to build up complex communities.
• For the many shy creatures that can’t or won’t brave cell center fences to get water, seeps or pools are easy to construct. Figure 4.16 shows one made with a regular float valve set in half a steel drum. This device functions like the tank on a toilet. The flow runs from the covered tank into the other half of the drum buried to ground level and filled with gravel and sand. Wild things can always scrape a bit to find a drink. An old trough or plastic-lined depression would provide an even better seep than half a drum.
Fences
Fencing technology is evolving, so treat the points here as lessons learned and keep up to date with new ideas through the Savory Institute’s website, and the many publications, such as the Stockman Grass Farmer, that devote articles to the subject.
Water Seep for Wildlife
Figure 4.16. The water level in the left barrel will maintain the level in the sand and gravel on the right.
For some years now, the solution most cost efficient, versatile, and least damaging to wildlife has been the free-running, slick-wire fences developed in Africa and electrified by high-voltage pulses from New Zealand–type energizers. There are numerous suppliers of electric fencing materials, as well as methods for powering energizers—mains electricity, periodically replaced car batteries, and solar-charged batteries.
Posts used in electric fencing do not need to be as sturdy as those used in conventional fencing because it is not the strength of the wire or tape that holds animals back but the fear of a shock. Should a fence prove to have been put in the wrong place, which sometimes happens, particularly in hilly country, it is not a large or costly task to realign an electric fence.
It is generally not a good idea to use electric fencing where animals are forced to touch it, as in cell centers, where crowded animals often get pushed.
How Many Wires?
Most people start out using far more wire than necessary, to the delight of the fencing industry. On dry soil, where grounding is poor, two wires, one hot and one grounded, will contain almost any domestic stock—if they’re not seriously stressed and if they’re well trained to respect the fence. Where grounding is good, one wire will suffice. Frequently, you can tell the sequence of fence building on a ranch by how the fences are constructed. The early fences have three, four, or more strands and closely set posts. Eventually, confidence grows to the point where the most recent fences have two strands and posts set so far apart that the wires droop between them.
Spacing the Wires
No ideal spacing has yet been determined. Most reasonable ideas work, so the question is not critical. A common arrangement for cattle is two wires 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) apart and between 24 and 30 inches (60 and 75 centimeters) above the ground. The top wire is hot and the bottom one grounded. For smaller stock the bottom wire should be lower. You should consider three wires in the case of mixed herds of cattle and sheep. With sheep or goats in the herd you might want to make the bottom wire the hot wire to discourage animals from creeping under the fence.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the same fencing that divides paddocks will work on the cell perimeter. Except for paddocks actually containing livestock, power will be switched off in most fences, including most of the perimeter fences, most of the time.
Posts
Almost any post can be used—wood, steel, or fiberglass. Usually cost and availability will make this decision for you. Poor-quality fiberglass posts will split out, decay in sunlight, or be sawn apart by the wire vibrating in the wind, so ask for references.
Most fiberglass posts and the lighter wooden posts will slide up and down in their holes. This seldom causes any problem, however. There have been many reported cases of deer learning to lift up fences and pass under. The posts simply drop back into place.
You can also use growing trees, but be careful not to tie wire tightly around them. A nail hammered into a tree is less damaging than wire that eventually cuts through the bark. A wooden slat or small branch inserted under the wire can sometimes prevent this problem. Theoretically, you can attach an insulator to any tree without harm, but there’s a good chance you’ll damage or distort at least some trees or, worse, leave wires or fittings grown into the bark—that mistake could one day wreck a saw or kill a logger or mill hand. If the wire bends around the tree, you can often run it through plastic insulator hose. The tension will hold it in place without any need to risk the tree at all.
Attaching the Wires
The wires must run free, and the attachment must be strong, durable, and easy to install (see figure 4.17). New devices turn up every day. The wires must be able to slide unrestricted. Otherwise, any shock or expansion and contraction of the wire will concentrate its force on a single post. A free-running wire distributes the force through the whole fence to end strainers designed to take it.
Attaching Free-Running Wires
Figure 4.17. Wire attachments must be strong and free running.
Straining Post
Figure 4.18. This strong, simple straining post is quicker to build than the conventional H-strainer used in barbed-wire fences, and it is all you need.
If you are using temporary fencing (or permanent posts and temporary strands) that involves frequent moving of the electric wire or tape, breaks will develop. In repairing the breaks, you’ll create knots, which can lead to headaches when winding up the tape or wire, as they will catch on the eyes of the posts. To minimize the problem, use eyes that allow you to lift out the tape or wire and drop it to the ground before you start winding up.
Beware of any connectors, or eyes, of weak design, especially plastic ones that become brittle in sunlight. Fiberglass and treated-wood posts threaded on the wire avoid the need for connectors, but you’ll have to cut the wire to replace damaged posts, and such arrangements are suited only to permanent electric fence where the wire is not repeatedly wound up.
Straining Posts
At each end of the fence and where there are significant bends, you’ll need a straining post. Along a long length of fence, you may want some substantial posts here and there but most can be lighter, and they are there only to hold up the wire (as opposed to taking the strain of a high-tension fence).
The design shown in figure 4.18 is a bit simpler and quicker to build than the conventional H-strainer used in barbed-wire fences. Most experts recommend a diagonal of 8 to 10 feet (2 to 2.5 meters). Set the post deep. There should be as much below ground as above. The pad at the end of the diagonal can be rock or treated wood.
Generally, a single stout wooden post can handle strain in the middle of a fence, because the pull on opposite sides cancels it out. Two electric wires add up to only about 400 pounds (180 kilograms) anyway.
Grounding
One of the most common faults with electric fencing is poor grounding, especially in dry climates. If your soil and air are dry, you may well need three or four 6-foot (2-meter) steel rods driven into the ground and attached in series, as shown in figure 4.19. These are connected to the charger and the ground wire in all fences. When the charger is located at the center, the power is often distributed to radial fences through wire strung around on posts above the paddock gates. If the ground wire is attached above the hot wire, it also serves as a lightning deflector.
Wiring a Cell Center
Figure 4.19. General wiring pattern for fences radiating from a center.
Gates
Although stock move a lot, most gates will be opened and closed only about a dozen times a year, unless they’re on well-used roads. But for the sake of flexibility, you can’t have too many gates. You absolutely must be able to move livestock from one paddock to the next at several points other than the center. Otherwise, you’ll train them to a destructive routine or sacrifice a piece of ground.
That said, any kind of gate will work. The two-strand fence doesn’t require anything elaborate. Wherever your ground is level enough to allow a good distance between poles, you can push the wire to the ground with your foot. A couple of hooks buried in the ground will hold it down, and horses, trucks, or herds can pass over. Savory Institute cofounder Jim Howell suggests another option in the box “Creating a Temporary Gate—Anywhere.”
Gully and Stream Crossings
The electric fence handles these easily. The wires pass straight over and have alternating hot and cold wires or fine chains dangling down into the gap. This barrier prevents stock from moving past but allows water and debris to wash through without damage.
To keep the drop wires from shorting, run the fence wires side by side on opposite sides of wooden posts, instead of one above the other, as they cross the gap. Wires or chains hung every foot or so on opposite wires will make an effective barrier, as shown in figure 4.20.
Educating Livestock
Animals usually learn quickly to respect electric fence. Occasionally, however, it may help to tempt a particularly unruly lot of goats, for example, to lick aluminum cans smeared with molasses and clamped to the hot wire. In dry climates, where grounding is poor, this method works best on a wet day or where the cans hang so the animals are likely to touch the ground wire in reaching for them.
Creating a Temporary Gate—Anywhere
If you’re working with permanent one-wire fences and you want to create a gate to give animals access to water, or for any other reason, all you need to do is prop up the single wire about 6 to 7 feet (2 to 2.5 meters) off the ground with an insulated pipe (PVC works well) wherever you want to make an “opening.” I first saw this in operation in the humid Pampas of Argentina, where they were finishing cattle. They don’t mess around with making any gates at all. It’s necessary to electrify the pipe so the animals don’t rub against it and knock it over.
MATERIALS NEEDED
• PVC pipe, 6–7 feet (2–2.5 meters) long, 2–3 inches (50–75 millimeters) in diameter
• One bolt, 8 inches (200 millimeters) long, 1/2–3/4 inches (13–19 millimeters) in diameter
• High-tensile wire (a little more than double the length of the pipe)
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Drill a hole through the pipe about halfway up its length and insert the bolt through it.
2. Drill a hole through the bolt at each protruding end, large enough for a high-tensile wire to pass through.
3. Drill a small hole through the bottom end of the pipe.
4. Cut a groove across the top end of the pipe.
5. Pass the wire through the hole in the bottom of the pipe, through one end of the bolt, through the groove on the top, then back down through the other end of the bolt, and tie in to the other end of the wire near the bottom of the pipe. When you prop up the fence wire, it will contact the pipe wire in the groove and be electrified.
Cattle that are well trained to an electric fence might not walk through the “gate” immediately, even though it’s 6 feet (2 meters) or more off the ground, but a few brave ones will figure it out within a few minutes, and the rest will follow.
We sure would have built a lot fewer gates on our place if we’d known we could make a gate anywhere we want just by lifting the wire.
—Jim Howell, Montrose, Colorado
Many people who annually acquire great numbers of untrained stock like to start them out in a small “training paddock” at enough density to make sure that a good number of animals get zapped. Try adding an extra wire or two in the fence and hosing down the ground to increase the likelihood of a powerful shock. In any case, retaining a few experienced lead animals each year greatly speeds the education of the rest.
Electric Fence Crossing a Stream
Figure 4.20. Chains hanging from parallel strands overhead create a hot barrier.
Unshorn angora goats and sheep present a special challenge. In one case, an especially wild herd of angoras ignored the molasses trick for days because they had never tasted molasses. Eventually, they learned that molasses stings, but they learned nothing about fences. They didn’t get the point until a good rain enhanced the conductivity of both the ground and their fleece.
Training stock to move to a signal such as a whistle, bell gong, or horn adds immensely to the ease of handling animals. Not only does it make your fencing more effective and secure, it’s also useful for concentrating livestock to produce herd effect.
A good many experienced cowboys will swear this is nonsense. Don’t believe them. There have been cases of small children on foot moving fairly large herds of bison that had learned the meaning of a whistle.
Training takes a little patience and a little art. Here are the ground rules:
• Choose a unique signal that the animals hear only when you mean to move them.
• Training to a pickup horn can cause you no end of problems when a passing vehicle honks its horn.
• Always associate the sound with a reward, such as hay or supplement cubes. Eventually, animals will find sufficient reward in a new paddock, but make the message absolutely clear while you’re training them.
• Don’t mix reward and punishment. If you drive them while blowing a whistle—even if you drive them toward a reward—they won’t get the point.
• Consider taking a training course in low-stress animal handling from an innovator such as Bud Williams, and you’ll never need to “drive” animals anywhere again.
• Mix older, trained animals with newcomers until the message gets across.
• Start the training in smaller paddocks, where the animals can see you and each other.
