I’ve been grazing cattle for a long time, in lots of different climates and lots of different systems. Management of grazing has been around since biblical times, and even from different climates from brittle arid desert to wet jungle or irrigated pastures. 

Being able to control time of grazing, impact of grazing, and rest/recovery of roots and stem and leaf amount for faster recovery is what we are trying to achieve with a managed grazing program or system. 

Controlling movement of the animals is the main focus with grazing to achieve this. If you are using a machine to harvest it’s easy to control these things if the terrain allows it. 

Some topography doesn’t allow for the use of machines, and there is always expense involved with mechanical harvesting. 

With animals we can control movement with fencing, tethering animals or herding, usually at less expense. 

Labor can become a big expense.  An example is herding sheep. Most large sheep operations have herders in rough country that is to difficult to fence.  A band of sheep is usually around 1000 ewes. That’s 250 animal units.  It requires a herder that lives with the sheep full time and a camp tender to keep the herder in supply’s and moving camp to new feed. It is very nigh labor cost to animal units.  There are two things that are needed, herding animals for grazing management and predation control. A good herder creates their value by achieving high gains with content animals on good forage and low death loss from sickness and predators.  I’ve seen first hand on the same range, same sheep and same management and how the skills of the herder creating much better total weight of lambs weaned from one band to the next. 

As a grazing manager Stockmanship plays a crucial role. Gentle animals that are content in the environment, and not wanting to be somewhere else, that spend there time taking bites and feeding gut bugs, ruminating in a comfortable place and have good water availability will preform to the best of their genetic potential. 

This is so important to understand. If you break things down in the simplest forms of what an animal needs, it makes it easier to understand how important the stockmanship component is. 

To put is simple, gentle animals that are content get fat if they have appropriate nutrition. 

My young years were spent with cattle that always were wanting to be moved. My grandfather’s cattle were fat, but we didn’t get the most use of pasture because when the cows told my grandfather they wanted to move they got moved. They were content because they always got what they wanted. 

It was such a great thing for me to learn from, and helped me to have the desire to control the mind of animals to get the most from them, and give them the best quality of life.