What is Rotational Grazing?
Before I go over why I rotationally graze my animals, or even how I do it, let’s go over what it is.
The fundamental ideas about rotational grazing come from observing Nature (capital N) and understanding how things work. Once we understand how they work, we can ask whether there is a different or better way to do it.
Vast herds of millions of buffalo used to roam the North American Great Plains. We do not know how so many buffalo survived some of the harshest climate on planet Earth, but we do know some of the patterns that they followed.
Notably, they were constantly moving. The herds were never in one spot. If you wanted to hunt them, you had to follow them. They could move large distances in a day. It is distinctly unnatural to keep cows in one spot expecting good things to happen.
Why did the buffalo move? Because of predator pressure and also because they would graze the grass to ruin. They had to move to keep fed and to keep away from the wolves.
When we look deeper into this, we realize that the grass grew not in spite of the buffalo, but because of them. The buffalo did something that made the Great Plains famous for their vast grasslands. Grass that was so deep you could get lost in it, stretching on for miles and miles in every direction.
This is the fundamental idea behind rotational grazing: By moving ruminants around the grasslands, we can encourage grass to grow.
How Grass Grows
In order to understand what rotational grazing really is, we need to start with the grass. Every good cattle rancher knows that without cattle or cash, he can still save the ranch. He can always go and borrow what he needs and make that money back quick. But without grass, he cannot succeed. If there is nothing for the cattle to eat, there will be no cattle for long!
Grass grows like much any other plant, except that they are seemingly designed to be grazed. You can think of a symbiotic relationship between ruminants and grass, because it really is. Without ruminants, grass can’t grow easily, and without grass, the ruminants can’t survive.
Grass can last a long time in a dormant stage, or even as a seed buried in the top layers of soil. This is how grass survives the worst droughts, floods, and fires. Grass is resilient because you can kill it and it will eventually come back.
In the earliest growth stage, what you may all the “baby” stage, the grass is spending energy to send young leaves into the air. These leaves are intended to capture sunlight, convert it to sugars through the process of photosynthesis, and then convert those sugars to all of the things the grass needs to survive and grow. At this baby stage, the grass is spending lots of energy and not getting much in return. If the grass is in the baby stage after being an adult, then it will eat its roots in order to get the energy needed to send leaves into the air to collect solar energy.
At this baby stage, if a ruminant were to come along and nibble at it, the grass would die, or rather, go dormant, waiting until there is an ideal time for it to try again. This is a good way to kill your pasture — leave your ruminants on grass that is barely coming alive.
After the baby stage, the grass enters a growth stage, what you might consider the “teenage” years. Just like teenagers, they grow rapidly, transforming from young, tender plants into fully mature ones. During this process, the grass also sends down roots, sometimes tens of feet deep into the soil. Although you can’t see the roots without digging up the grass, you can get an idea of how deep the roots are based on how tall the grass is.
Deep roots are important. They access water that is buried deep underground. Deep roots means drought tolerance, even thriving grass during droughts as they tap into underground water.
Large, long leaves are also important. Bigger leaves means more photosynthesis, which means faster growth.
After the grass grows a certain amount, it changes from growing big and strong into developing seeds. We can think of this as the “adult” phase. The fabled “boot stage” is the stage at which the grass just starts to develop seeds. This represents a critical turning point. For some grasses, this is also the age at which the grass will start to die, naturally.
The ruminants that come along during the teenage stage will cut the grass back down to the late baby stage. The grass will go dormant for a few days, and then try to rebuild itself and grow again. If it had strong roots, it will consume some of those roots to send energy up into new fresh leaves. Eventually, the grass will go back into the growth stage, and quickly develop large leaves and deep roots. If we can optimize our grazing patterns, we can multiply the amount of forage we can get from the same grass plant, and make it stronger to boot!
It is vital at this point that the ruminants do not eat more of the grass until it is ready! Such a thing would be a disaster. This would surely stunt the grass, if not kill it. The grass will sacrifice its roots to try and send up more leaves, but with less root material, the grass is in a dangerous position. A mild drought, a few days of no rain, for instance, can easily kill it. Even a hot day can cause it to give up and wait for next year to try again.
If we graze too late, however, then we aren’t eating optimal forage. Dying grass, or grass that is going to seed, surely develops grains that the cows can eat, but it is not the same kind of energy you’d find in growing grass.
Fertilizers
We are told that grass needs nitrogen and some other fertilizers to grow. This is true. It is also true that grass needs a lot of various micronutrients! We are just now beginning to understand all of the resources that grasses need to grow. What is amazing is how the grass obtains these nutrients naturally. We have learned that the grass roots will spontaneously encourage different kinds of funguses and bacteria to grow, which will feed other microbes and even tiny insects. The end result in these cycles is that there will be more of the nutrients that the grass needs, available in the form that it needs it.
Fertilizers such as nitrogen does indeed cause the grass to grow quicker, but it does so unnaturally. On the one hand, it sends a signal to the grass to grow tall and fast, often at the cost of secondary biological processes that would strengthen the grass and protect it from dangers. Certainly, we are just now learning that by feeding nitrogen to grasses, we are starving it and the animals of vital micronutrients. Grasses grown without unnatural fertilizers, animals that eat that grass, and even humans that eat those animals all show higher levels of nutrient density. Who would’ve thought that the very thing we were using to boost crop yields was depleting vital nutrients from our own bodies?
Additionally, fertilizers are poison to the soil. They kill off the vital microbes that create an environment where grass can thrive. They throw off the balance of other vital chemicals and elements, and over time, can leave the soil dead and unarable.
Diseases, Insects and Drought
You might think, as I did, that diseases, insects, and death due to droughts are all causes, and not effects. This is wrong. The reason why plants and animals are susceptible to diseases and insects, and why even minor droughts can kill them off is not because these things are bad, but because the grass and animals are unhealthy.
Allowing animals and plants to exist in their natural environment is paramount to the health of these things. We can’t expect to poison the ground with fertilizers and not see deleterious effects across the board.
Manure
If you’ve ever been near a feed lot, you know how bad it smells. Manure, such as feces and urine, are waste products expelled from cattle. You may know that these are valuable fertilizers, which they are, if used in the proper proportions and fed to healthy, living soil. Too much manure creates health hazards where grasses can’t grow and the soil can’t digest the manure fast enough. By moving the cattle constantly, we can help distribute the manure so that it doesn’t pile up in one area creating dead spots in our fields.
General Happiness
People are often surprised to find out that animals such as cows prefer to live outdoors. Yes, shelters can provide a relief from rain, but really, the animals are well-equipped to deal with the environment, and indeed, enjoy doing so. Happy cows and sheep are happy because they are outdoors. Pen them up in a small building, and they are stressed. Rotational grazing keeps the animals outdoors in their natural element, surrounded by fresh grass and fresh ground.
So what is rotational grazing?
It is simply this:
- Move the animals through your pasture.
- Don’t allow the animals to graze on grass that is too young or just starting to recover.
- Don’t go back until the grass is regrown.
- Try to graze on grass that is in the late growth stage,
- Try to incorporate as many ideas from nature all the while to optimize soil, grass, and animal health.
Why do this?
There are so many reasons they are all hard to list. I’ll try to cover the most important ones.
- Economics. It is much cheaper to grow grass naturally without fertilizers than to try and deceive or trick nature into doing what is not natural.
- Health. The grass, the animals, and the humans who eat those animals will all have a greater nutrient density, leading to better health.
- Regeneration. We can turn “dead” fields back to living soil able to grow huge amounts of forage and meat.
- The farmer is with the animals often twice a day or more. The animals know the farmer, and the farmer knows the animals, and problems are identified earlier due to the close contact.
- Nature. Nature’s balance is restored and natural things such as insects, birds, native plants, etc… are all welcomed back.
- Exercise. There are no machines that can move the animals for us. We need to get out there, work in nature, and get our blood pumping twice a day as we do our chores.
- Mental health. There is nothing better than knowing you are creating a pure environment with healthy animals, that the animals depend on you each and every day, and that you have a purpose greater than yourself, a reason to get out of bed and get moving.