Grazing Management

Grazing management is the care and stewardship of rangelands and pastures to provide a sustainable and renewable source of forage for livestock while supporting all the other ecological goods and services grazing lands provide. Healthy pastures and rangelands provide other benefits to producers including reduced feed costs, increased flexibility around season of use, reduced weeds, and reduced fertilizer costs.

Ecological Goods and Services

Balancing the goals of the grazing operations with the health of the grazing land requires adaptive management for the best outcomes, because what works one year may not work the next, and what works in one pasture may not work in the one beside it. Grazing management is dependent on the producer knowing and understanding the grazing resources, experience with animal behaviour and husbandry, and an understanding of how to apply the four principles of range management to best manage grazing and range and riparian productivity.

Principles of Range Management

You can’t always follow all these principles all the time, but a grazing system can help you incorporate them across your grazing lands where they are operationally feasible. Grazing systems are plans or schedules for managing when and where livestock graze. A grazing system manipulates livestock grazing to provide adequate periods of rest and recovery so that grazed plants regain vigour, set seed, and store food reserves in their roots. There are many different approaches and there is no silver bullet that will meet every need. Detailed information on grazing systems is available here.

Principle 1: Matching Forage Supply and Demand

Figure 1. Root growth vs. grazing intensity

Matching forage supply and demand doesn’t just consider the amount of forage that may be grazed, but also the ungrazed portion left as carryover and litter. Carryover is a very important consideration of managing forage supply and acts as the land manager’s best form of insurance by ensuring the health and vigour of future growth of the plants, conserving moisture, reducing erosion, and maintaining soil health, building organic matter, and supporting healthy productive soils.

Understocking is bad economics, but overstocking reduces productivity of your pastures and leads to poor forage yields, leading to poor economic returns. The Beef Cattle Research Council’s Carrying Capacity Calculator can help you determine the correct stocking rates for your pastures.

“If you keep down the shoot you kill the root."
John Weaver

Beneficial Management Practices to Balance Supply and Demand:

Use Sustainable Stocking Rates for Individual Pastures

Account for Animal Size When Calculating Stocking Rates

Be Flexible with Stocking Rates

Principle 2: Avoid Grazing During Vulnerable Periods

Certain plants and plant communities are more vulnerable to grazing impacts during particular growth phases or seasons than others. Vulnerable periods change with the type of plant (native or tame, grass or shrub). Range grasses are particularly vulnerable to grazing disturbance during their spring growth period when they are using stored reserves to grow and reproduce, and if grazing occurs during that vulnerable period plants are forced to use more of their stored reserves, resulting in smaller plants that are less resilient to disturbance. Grazing during vulnerable periods every year can have negative impacts on plant health and resiliency.

Major Physiological Stages of a Typical Range Grass Species

Native grasses have adapted to the climate and evolutionary history of use in their area, while introduced and non-native species are less well adapted. In the case of introduced forages they have largely been bred to allocate more resources to shoot growth vs. root growth for maximum productivity. These different communities have different attributes that must be considered to maximize sustainable forage productivity and livestock production.

Native Grasses

High curability (retain more crude protein and nutrients when dormant)
Lower weathering losses
Deeper rooting
Better drought adaptation
Plant communities are diverse
Relatively slow growing
More adaptive to changing climate and disturbance

Non-Native Grasses

Low curability (lose majority of nutrients when dormant)
High weathering loss
Shallow rooting
Depend on current moisture
Plant communities are simpler
Faster growing / Quicker response
Less adaptive to changing climate and disturbance

Grazing during the dormant period (after plant growth is completed for the year) has less impacts on plant health and is a good strategy to maintain health and vigour, however care must still be taken to ensure that overuse does not result in bare soil or plants ripped up by the roots.

Vulnerable periods are different each year with weather variations, and an understanding of these vulnerabilities in combination with incorporating flexibility into timing of use helps to maintain healthy grazing lands.

Practices to Avoid Grazing During Vulnerable Periods:

Manage Grazing

Consider Forage Seasons

Monitor Closely

Principle 3: Distribution of Livestock

Distribution is one of the biggest challenges, and can require significant time, effort, infrastructure, labour, and knowledge to address. Livestock distribution is affected by variation in topography, forage, and water resources, leading to selective grazing habits and patterns. Cattle prefer to remain in flat areas close to water. Distribution tools can be used to change these behaviours and allow for more even use of rangeland resources.

Different management practices and tools can be used to address livestock distribution. Season of use, distance from water, slope, aspect, and plant community, can all impact distribution.

Beneficial Management Practices to Distribute Livestock Evenly:

Salt or Mineral Blocks

Fencing

Water Developments

Riding or Herding

Access and Trail Development

Stock Density

Changes of Class or Kind of Livestock

Principle 4: Rest After Grazing

Rest is key to allow plants to regrow, store energy, and set seed. Rest is only effective when temperatures and moisture conditions allow plants to grow. Effective rest allows plants to recover following a disturbance event (eg. grazing), replenishing energy reserves and supporting higher forage productivity. If effective rest is not provided plants can’t recover and both the above and below ground biomass of plants is reduced, negatively impacting plant health and available forage resources.

The length of rest a plant requires depends on several different factors, such as the level of use, plant vigour, type of forage species, and time of year/climatic conditions following the grazing event. When plants are growing quickly, such as in spring or under favourable summer moisture conditions, the recovery period is quicker than when plants are growing slowly (eg. in late summer, or under drought-stressed conditions).

Figure 2. Rest period for recovering forages, the recovery period is longer when plants are growing slowly.

This makes it difficult to calculate and prescribe the amount of rest needed as it is so dependent on the characteristics of the specific growing season. However, in general terms providing rest by deferring grazing during the growing season is beneficial to any plant, and it’s important to be flexible with rest periods and remember that frequent or repeated grazing of any plant does not allow recovery without an effective rest period.

Beneficial Management Practices to Provide Effect Rest:

Ensure Adequate Grazing Rest

Amount of Rest Varies

Use Grazing Systems

Rotate Grazing Systems

Monitoring

Monitoring assessments act as a ‘measuring stick’, providing structure to observations, and allowing us to evaluate health and condition to see if practices are supporting healthy productive grazing lands. But how can a busy producer fit monitoring in when there are so many other life or death tasks involved with running a livestock operation? It’s easy to understand why monitoring seems to fall to the end of the to-do list; however, monitoring even in the simplest form can return value to an operation when it is doable and designed to collect useful information.

Reasons to monitor:

Early warning: Rangeland health deteriorates before livestock condition deteriorates. Changes in rangeland health occur gradually and human memory cannot detect changes until reminded by old data. Monitoring can tell us if we are heading in the wrong direction.
Goal setting: Will prove if you are truly meeting your management objectives and if new strategies are changing the trajectory of your range in the right direction.
Have data to back up your decisions: Having hard data around the results from your management practices can help you receive funding or encourage others to implement the same techniques.

A preferred method of monitoring in the TNRD comes from the BC Grazing Management Guide. Its purpose is to provide an assessment checklist and guidelines for managing grazing to support economically and environmentally sustainable grazing opportunities.

If you have native grasslands another excellent monitoring resource is the Grassland Conservation Council’s Grassland Monitoring Manual for British Columbia: A Tool For Ranchers.

Stewardship as Insurance

Remember that good stewardship is the best form of insurance for your operation. Stewarding the resource through adaptive management helps maintain health and productivity, and a healthy resource equals healthy returns.

"The man who has a short pasture needs a rain much worse than his neighbour who has ample forage on the range. But when rain comes, it does the least good for the fellow who needs it most."
E.J. Dyksterhuis

Looking for More Information?

Learn more at AgriService BC or contact your local Environmental Farm Plan Advisor, and visit Farmland-Riparian Interface Stewardship Program.