Thoughts on Grazing
There is one rule that anyone who is thinking about rotational grazing needs to know. That rule is…..there ain’t no rules. Grazing is very farm specific, 10 different approaches on 10 different farms can all work great. If you made those 10 people trade programs, they might all fail. Every farm’s soil, grasses and average rain fall are unique to them, sometimes 5 miles down the road can be a whole n’other ball game. There are 100’s of articles written about grazing every year and they all have something in them that you can learn from, but you should never try to copy some other farms system for your own. Most grazing plans are built for the “best case senerio” which might happen every 10 years or so around here. The rest of the time you adjust and fudge the plan to make it work. I’d love to live where you have to go out with a tape measure and check whether or not the cows should go in the padock. Its ussually famine or feast, not enough grass or you can’t keep ahead of it. Now that the egg heads at extention have reconized that cows eat grass, they are spending lots of time studying it. Some of the “news worthy” findings crack me up. I read a while back that cows pick and choose what they eat. If they lack a certain thing they eat a certain plant. This was the result of some long study that cost taxpayers who knows how much money. Now, they could have just asked any 10 year old kid that spends any time around cows and he probably could have told them that. People are so far removed from watching a cow eat grass that this stuff is news! The “rule” when we started out was that you locked up the cows in a pasture and made them eat it. This means having water at every padock. Well, this is more work and expence than needs be. If you noticed, cows do most of their eating right after they go in a spot (there is now a “study” confirming this 
) So we lead the cows where we want them to eat that day and leave the gate open. After they are done with the primary munch down they go down to the central water tank and get a drink. After that they can go where ever they want to go and pick and choose their desert. Works good for us but contrary to popular opinion. The key to grazing is this, observe your cows, observe your grass, observe the weather, and use some common sence.
April 4th, 2007 at 11:06 am
I can’t imagine going out with a tape measure to decide where the cows move to next. There are way too many variables. I agree with your admonition to observe things and use common sense. Watching what the cows eat (and what they don’t eat) and how much milk goes into the milk bucket goes a long way toward deciding what works and what doesn’t.
Jim V