🇺🇸 Webinar: Getting More Green From Your Grazing

Rotational grazing is essential to maximising forage, especially in a dry climate. Join our panel of American ranchers and grazing experts as they walk through the science and the art of rotational grazing and what impact it can have on your operation.

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[Coby Buck]

I want to welcome everyone. Today, we’re going to be discussing livestock grazing and how to capitalize on better management of our grass when it comes to livestock and ranching operations. This panel is a great group of people who have decades of experience in the industry in various geographies. First and foremost, I will hand it over to Rob Cook. Then we’ll pass it around for introductions. 

[Rob Cook]

Thanks Colby. On behalf of AgriWebb, I’d like to welcome everyone to the, Getting More Green from Grazing webinar. I’m Rob Cook and I will serve as the moderator for this panel discussion. I’ve served as the vice chairman for the National Grazing Lands Coalition. On behalf of AgriWebb, I know that everyone is excited to have this group of panelists together. These are thought leaders in the regenerative agriculture space and I know they hope these these webinars will give a set of tools and resources to our farmers and ranchers to ensure that there’s knowledge passed along so their legacies continue for generations. 

So we’re going to have the panelists introduce themselves; where they’re from, who they represent and a little bit about themselves. So, Coby, if you’d like to start?

[Coby Buck]

Thanks, Rob. My name is Coby Buck. I grew up on a ranch in eastern Colorado. Our family has been out there for five generations, raising commercial black Angus. We primarily raised calves and we’re looking to diversify into stockers. Overall, we deploy a rotational grazing design. Our typical rotation is 7 to 10 days. I also serve as the US accounts manager for AgriWebb.

[Rob Cook]

Thanks Coby. Jen, we’ll go to you next.

[Jen Livsey]

Thank you. My name is Jen Livsey and I come from a very similar family as Coby. Our great, great grandfather started ranching in eastern Colorado in 1907, so I’m a fifth generation rancher. We have employed rotational grazing For about 30 years on the ranch. I’m very involved in that. We run a commercial cow / calf yearling and seedstock operation. It’s 100% family owned. I will talk a little about how the family works together and divides up duties. 

[Rob Cook]

Great, Jen. Thank you. And now you, Jeff.

[Jeff Goodwin]

Good afternoon, Rob. My name is Jeff Goodwin. I’m a senior range and pasture consultant at Noble Research Institute in Ardmore, OK. We work with ranchers across the southern Great Plains. We own and operate about 14,000 acres in southern Oklahoma around about 600 mother cows and we’re trying to work with producers to help them regenerate their own grazing lands.

[Rob Cook]

Yes, it’s great to have you, Jeff, thanks for being here. I don’t think Mr. Bob McCann has been able to get on yet. Maybe a little bit of technical difficulties there. I’ll go ahead and let you know Bob is the owner of McFaddin Enterprises, a ranching operation in south Texas. He also currently serves as the president for the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. It’s great to have Bob on and we look forward to seeing his presentation. So without further ado we’ll go ahead and start.

[Coby Buck]

When we talk about grazing, there is a common vocabulary that goes through it and not a lot of people consider sustainability the same thing, and the verbiage can get a little confusing. I decided to create a five minute presentation to walk through how we really define grazing. As Bob and Jennifer come in and talk about what they deploy on their operation, hopefully this allows you to better understand it and understand of the different vocabulary. So what is grazing management? This is my personal definition of it, but it’s a protocol designed to efficiently manage livestock on grasslands. By making tangible improvements to the underlying ecosystem, you can improve forage and livestock. When it comes to the different types of rotations and the different types of grazing management plans, it’s really a skew. You have continuous on one side and then intensive grazing on the other side. So the figure below is continuous, typically one to four moves per year. Rotational grazing steps up a notch when it comes to movements. That is defined as rotating animals through multiple paddocks every month, every couple of months or one to four moves a month. Intenseive grazing is a lot shorter in duration.  How are long the animals are in any given paddock? They’re typically smaller pastures. You graze each location fairly intensively and then look to provide adequate rest. In the basic continuous rotation you have around 180 days rest between rotational movements. You can have upwards of 250 days rest on any given pasture depending on how frequently you graze those. For intentive grazing, you can get 360 days of rest if not more on any pasture.

Now we can talk about grass. You’ll hear the word ‘forage’ used a lot, and that is basically the amount of digestible feed on the ground that each pasture has. If you look to the right and you see these different curves depending on if it’s warm season or cool season. Is it a legume or redline or bluestem, each one of these different varieties of grass have different growth curves. During the early spring, you’ll see the cool season pick up and then as the heat index rises their growth will fall off. Depending on your location, you might get a second growth. The warm season grasses really kick off their growth pretty rapidly as that heat index rises. 

Overall, what does this mean? Well, depending on where you’re located, if you’re on native or improved grass, and depending on these growth curves, you have to manage that grass to last your entire grazing reason. We can’t take too much off in the summer because you need to stockpile it through the following winter. Each operation will have a different growth curve and they need to align their grazing according to that. In forage amounts you hear about ‘dry matter’ per acre which is oftentimes the traditional way of measuring grass. More modern grazing units use ‘animal gaze per acre’ if they’re focusing on livestock. We can touch on that in the next slide. Utilization is just the total forage allocated toward consumption for those livestock. The forage growth calendar is exemplified on the right in this chart that we drew up. 

Now looking at your livestock, when it comes to units of measurement, the traditional units of measurement is animal units and then animal units strictly in a 1,000 pound animal, with or without a calf nursing by it’s side. She consumes about 2.6% of its body weight, or 26 pounds of dry matter per day. Of course, no animal really weighs exactly 1,000 lbs. You will have stockers, calves, yearlings, bulls and we then normalize each animal based off of their weight group. It correlates with their weight, but it’s not a one to one (just divide by 1,000). If you look on the diagram on the left, this is typically an annual unit equivalent counter designed by North Dakota State University. You can see a weaned animal is .75 a yearling is .85. That big bull which is 2,000 pounds is 2.0. Each animal has a scheme and it kind of normalizes how productive each pasture is, if each animal is 1,000 pounds. animal and then an animal unit day. It sounds complex but really it’s just a daily serving for an animal unit on any given pasture. The equivalent 26 pounds for 1,000 pound animal. 

Other lingo that you might hear today would be density. The number of animals in the herd in relation to the size of the pasture. So that could be 10 head across 100 acres or 100 head across 100 acres. That’s a different density calculation. Duration is the average length of time you’re grazing that paddock and number of times that you graze that paddock over the course of the year. 

Utilization is the percent of the forage consumed by animals.

Recovery is the number of days that a pasture has to grow before you revisit and graze it. 

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For the full transcript please watch the video on our website with captions on. Alternatively you can learn more about rotational grazing via our webpage on rotational grazing strategy or our blog on if it pays off?