Regenerative grazing management
Five keys to regenerative grazing on grazing lands
By Jeff Goodwin
Let’s begin with a question, what is “regenerative grazing”? On the surface, regenerative grazing refers to grazing management strategy that aims to regenerate ecosystem processes. These processes would include the water cycle, the nutrient cycle, energy flow, etc. The overall goal is to develop a grazing strategy within a particular environmental context (i.e. region of the country) that works with nature rather than against it.
Below the surface is where things get exciting, complex and honestly confusing to some. Regenerative management focuses on outcomes, and because the natural environment is continuously changing and complex, regenerative management strategies must be adaptive. Thus, there are no prescriptive designs to follow, no check lists or recipes. Regenerative management is a philosophy based on principle-based management rather than implementing a set of standardized prescriptive practices.
What are these principles? They are largely based on the soil health building principles: 1) Know your context, 2) Keep the ground covered, 3) Optimize disturbance, 4) Maximize diversity, 5) Keep live roots in the ground year-round, and 6) Properly integrate livestock. That last principle is where regenerative grazing comes from. So, what does “properly integrate livestock” mean?
It’s important to note, the regenerative movement largely spurred from a reasonably recent focus on soil health and most of the early attention was on cropland. Most cropland wasn’t (and still isn’t) grazed. So, the focus was placed on mimicking functional ecosystems like prairies that had healthy functioning soils where livestock grazing was integrated in a manner that would facilitate the other soil health principles. For instance, grazing a cover crop with enough stock density to distribute urine and manure and lay down approximately half of the crop to cover the soil and limit bare ground. Over time this principle-based management has been shown to improve soil health in many regions of the country.
The complexity begins when regenerative principles are applied based on one environmental context, then the same prescription is assumed to work everywhere. When management becomes prescriptive rather than principle-based, it often fails to provide the same outcomes, particularly when those prescriptive approaches are applied to grazinglands. Remember regenerative grazing is defined by adaptation and flexibility and it can come in many forms. Below I’ve outlined a few keys I’ve learned about regenerative grazing on grazing lands.
1) Daily livestock moves are not a requirement.All too often when we hear the term “regenerative grazing” and what most are referring to is some form of adaptive multi-paddock grazing strategy. As a term, it checks all the boxes. However, as with most things in life, people try to simplify it. Rightly so, everything should be simplified if it can be.
The trouble comes when the adaptation and flexibility of a strategy gets removed and replaced with a singular prescriptive focus. So, the tendency is to focus on the actions rather than the outcomes. The action of implementing adaptive multi-paddock grazing often comes in the form of rotating cattle in smaller paddocks at a frequent pace with a goal of providing long recovery periods. Over time, that gets translated into “you have to move your cows every day” to be regenerative. This action by itself does not achieve the purpose.
Managers do not have to move cows every day to regenerate soil. The necessity to move cattle daily stems from increasing stock density to a level in a given paddock that increases forage utilization and maximizes urine and manure distribution before they are moved to the next paddock. Typically, to get that level of impact stock densities have to be relatively high, which necessitates the grazing duration to be a single day or less.
Can that action provide positive ecological outcomes? Absolutely. Can that action also be prescriptively applied when it shouldn’t be? Yes. There are times when the goal should be to only graze the top third of the forage such as in early spring when most forages are highest in forage quality and fast growing. This necessitated faster rotations. There are also times when rotations should slow down, such as when your forage base slows its recovery.
The objective should be to implement a grazing strategy that optimizes the timing, intensity, frequency and duration of the grazing event to ensure paddocks are recovered before they are grazed again. This is why grazing management is an art and a science, founded on chasing a moving target while balancing grazing intensity with adequate rest coupled with climatic variability and extremes. Rest and recovery of a paddock is well more important that how fast paddocks are rotated.
2) Stocking rate is more important than stock density. This statement usually comes with some confrontation. However, the terms are really apples and oranges. The two terms are applied at different scales. Stocking rate refers to the number of livestock in a given area for a given amount of time, usually a full year and at the ranch scale. Stocking rate is often described as the number of acres per animal unit or head. It’s a reflection of the overall animal demand placed on the carrying capacity of the ranch. Meaning if your stocking rate is higher than your carrying capacity, at some point in the year, you will be out of forage.
Stock density is rather a pasture or paddock level metric and refers to the amount of live animal weight per unit area at any instant of time. Stock density is generally expressed as the pounds of live weight per acre. For instance, if 80 one-thousand-pound cows were to graze one acre, that paddock would have been grazed with 80,000 pounds of live weight per acre, or a stock density of 80,000 lbs. Stock density is a tool grazing managers use to meet specific objectives. As with any tool, you don’t always need a hammer. Focusing only on stock density and ignoring the overall stocking rate can lead to having to rotate paddocks too fast at times and returning to paddocks before they have recovered from the previous graze.
Stock density is a great tool for meeting many ecological objectives, however, if you’re out of grass, it doesn’t really matter how close the livestock are standing to each other. Make sure the overall stocking rate is balanced with the ranches’ carrying capacity first, then use variable stock densities within paddocks to meet your objectives. Over time, as the carrying capacity of the ranch increases, only then should stocking rate increase.
3) No tools are off the table.In the grazing business we use terms like “practices,” which are actually the tools we use to address certain problems or meet certain objectives. Tools can be things like the cows that are used to implement grazing management, herbicide that is used to control a woody species, a fertilizer that is used to amend a fertility deficiency, and many more. These are the tools at the disposal of the grazing manager.
However, within the regenerative space some “practices” have become taboo. For example using synthetic fertility, herbicides, prescribed fire, haying, so on and so forth have all been in some variety labeled as a non-regenerative practice. Let me remind us that regeneration is about the outcome, not the action.
The question of if a tool is regenerative or not is the wrong question. These are tools and every tool can have an application. It’s the over utilization and dependency of a specific tool at the wrong time or frequency that poses the problem. If a pasture has excessively acidic soil and the nutrients are tied up, then addressing the pH with a soil amendment is a positive action that will provide positive ecological outcomes. There are many more examples, suffice to say it’s not the tool, it’s how they are used. Just like most things in life, everything in moderation.
4) Animal performance matters. One of the primary roles of farmers and ranchers is to steward the land and the animals that call it home. Many times, in the regenerative grazing arena so much focus is placed on meeting grazing objectives, like ensuring high stock densities are being applied, and on soil health outcomes that the performance of the livestock can get overlooked. Once declining performance is noticed, it’s often too late. Understanding how the nutritional requirements of your livestock vary over the year is critically important to balance with your grazing strategy.
For instance, when grazing a group of livestock that have increased nutrient requirements like lactating cows or growing animals, care should be taken to not force them to graze the least nutritious portions of the forage. Generally the portions of the plant that are highest in forage quality are the newest leaves and are usually in the uppermost portions of the plant.
Grazing in an area with high stock densities for too long can force livestock to consume portions of the plant (stems) that are significantly lower in quality ultimately negatively impacting animal performance. This can happen quite fast and performance metrics from average daily gain to conception rate can all be impacted. The point is to utilize the right class of livestock, on the right forage, at the right time.
5) Give it a chance.Managing land for regenerative outcomes is exciting and challenging to master all at the same time. It’s not a race, it’s a journey of direction over perfection. Unfortunately, many producers want immediate gratification. Impaired ecological processes take time to heal and implementing one practice one time will not fix the problem. Proactive and adaptive principle-based management over time can heal impaired ecological processes and fortunately, the better it gets, the faster it gets better. Stick with it – working through the pitfalls of the first three years is the hardest part.
Lastly, find some mentors. There are likely operators in your area that have been through and conquered the challenges you currently face. The great thing about these operators is they are usually more than willing to talk about their experiences. Success rarely comes alone.
Goodwin is director of the Texas A&M Center for Grazinglands and Ranch Management. Photos courtesy of Goodwin.
