What is Holistic Planned Grazing?
Holistic grazing management is the foundation of our soil & water conservation practices. If the the livestock aren’t managed properly the vegetation and soil will respond negatively. The current conventional models of livestock management do not provide ecosystem services or benefit human health.
Holistic planned grazing has been proven effective throughout the world by grazing leaders including Allan Savory, Ian Mitchell Innes and so many more. It works in virtually every environment from Canada, to the American Southwest, to the tropics of Costa Rica.
There are five primary advantages of high stock density grazing:
Dung, urine and grazing distribution is evenly spread throughout the paddock.
Animals tend to graze a greater portion of the available plants and graze the paddock more evenly.
Animals move frequently into fresh paddocks, which stimulates the vegetation and soil giving it a more consistent level of nutrition.
Stronger plant communities are developed, providing better nutrition to the animals.
Animal performance is greatly improved.
Our typical stock density varies based on our animal performance and ecological goals. Depending on which pasture and the type of vegetation that it consists of we utilize a rotational schedule of multiple moves per day to once every 3 days. The multiple daily rotations are in our grass pastures and the longer, three day rotations are in the heavily forested, brushy areas. The trick though isn’t how often you are rotating the livestock, it’s how long of a rest period are you giving your pastures. We aim for a 90 to 120 day rest period at Pajarito, but that can also vary greatly depending on the vegetation community, temperature and rainfall patterns of your ranch. Holistic grazing is science and an art that takes many years of experience with livestock and the land to fine tune.
To achieve good grazing management we use two primary tools: 1) portable electric fencing and 2) portable watering system. To move cattle or other animals where you want them to be they need to be controlled and they need water. These are the two major upfront costs to this system, but once they are in place it really pays off. We have basically increased the stocking rate on our ranches by over 60% using this management system. This means more profit per acre! No rancher is going to complain about that.
The plants and soil are what ultimately benefit from this management system. When we graze these pastures we strive to leave half of the plant and no less than 1/3. By doing so we are giving the plants a chance to rapidly recover once grazed. Most of the vegetation is trampled onto the soil surface by hoof action. Remember we are talking high density grazing when you put 100 head of cattle on 4 acres for one day. That’s a lot of urine, dung and hoof action on every square foot of that ground. Our soil and vegetation tests from ranches where we implemented holistic planned grazing over a decade ago show that the organic matter and soil nutrients have increased substantially, the soil biology is improving, our pastures are thriving and the overall ecology is benefiting.
For more information regarding Holistic Management check out these two great books Holistic Management Handbook: Healthy Lands, Healthy Profits by Jody Butterfield, Sam Bingham and Allan Savory and Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment by Allan Savory.
- Travis Krause, CEO & Founder of Grazing Lands
