The biggest mistake people make in grazing management is providing too short a recovery period for plants after grazing. Of course too much rest isn’t good either. In drier environments…
Read More
How do you know when it is time to move animals from one pasture to another? Most people figure that if they are out of feed in one pasture, it…
Read More
For decades we’ve been encouraged to evaluate the efficiency of production by focusing on weight weaned per cow. Now some are arguing that the critical measure should really be pounds…
Read More
Rotational grazing doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for at least two reasons. One reason it doesn’t work is that, rather than rotationally graze, most people rotationally overgraze. They get overstocking…
Read More
Take half - leave half. It is probably the most common advice you’ll hear regarding grazing utilization. In my opinion it is bad advice. It was probably the brainchild of…
Read More
I once heard Bud Williams say, “Ranchers love their cows and hate their grass.” Bud thought they had it backwards. They should love their grass and hate their cattle. I…
Read More
A Ranching For Profit School alumni sent me a paper published by the Society for Range Management on calculating the optimum stocking rate. The authors crunched 14 variables through 1o…
Read More
A lot of ranchers use some kind of grazing rotation. Very few do it in a way that has even a 50/50 chance of improving the health of the land,…
Read More
You can’t monitor the health of land from a windshield. You’ve got to have boots on the ground. Even then, we tend to look across the land rather than into…
Read More
Nearly 15 years ago I surveyed over 300 commercial cattle producers asking them questions about their grazing practices and their attitudes about change. One hundred twenty of them (40%) identified…
Read More
