When to Move Livestock for Optimal Grazing and Water Access

Описание: This livestock and water series explains essential tactics for rotating and moving livestock attentively to develop a thriving pasture operation with increased grazing efficiency and healthier pasture soil and plants.

(0:17) Michael Hall walks farmers through common sense ways of determining when it's time to move your herd. Often, in a grazing standard, rest periods are recommended before you return to the same pasture to graze again.

(0:38) Many of the cool season perennials we have across the state we want to graze down to about four to six inches and then allow that to recover. Because of that four to six inches of height remaining, there will still be a fair amount of leaf surface so the plant can recover quicker.

(1:08) On the warm season grasses, the Bermudas, the Bahiagrass, three inches is a desirable grazing height to leave enough leaf surface for the plant to regrow effectively. “We’d like to let that plant grow back to approximately six inches before bringing the cows back into that pasture.”

(1:36) It's easier to tell a producer to graze to six inches and wait for the plant to recover to eight inches or ten inches in return, but really, what farmers may want to look out for is the leaf surface, the tillers that are coming out on the plant itself– how much regrowth is taking place there.

(2:00) “Not the stems that are left, but looking back at that plant and seeing ‘that plant now has three to four leaflets that are grazable,’ and then turn them back in. Rather than– ‘well, this plant is tall,’ but I have to notice that there isn’t really much left here that they’d want to eat.” Rather than setting a time limit to return to that pasture, it can be more practical for farmers to monitor their forage and ensure enough leaf surface to graze.

(2:47) Hall reminds farmers that they are managing leaf surface – managing something that's picking up sunlight to grow – that's what we're trying to manage here. We don't want to take off all of this leaf, we want to take off part of this leaf.

There are all kinds of aids farmers can use to manage their forage. The typical aid around the country is the grazing stick, which is simply a ruler with different marks to measure various kinds of forage. “And once a grazer starts to look closely at it, most of the time he's going to figure it out pretty quickly and start leaving his stick in the truck.”

Whatever system farmers design, it's important to think adaptively and work within the USDA NRCS's Prescribed Grazing Practice Standard #528, available on the USDA's Field Office Technical Guide (FOTG) website.

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