What is holistic planned grazing?
Published : January 24, 2020
Author: Travis P Krause
Holistic grazing management is the foundation of our soil & water conservation practices. If the the livestock aren’t managed properly the vegetation and soil will respond negatively. Our primary site, Parker Creek Ranch, is located South of D’Hanis, Texas. It’s a total of 629.3 leased acres. Some of the ranch is “improved” grasses, native grasses and South Texas brush country. Much of it is located in the floodplain of the Parker Creek with deep clay/loam soils. Bull mesquite trees and brush dominate the landscape.
Holistic planned grazing has been proven effective throughout the world by grazing leaders including Allan Savory, Ian Mitchell Innes, Greg Judy and so many more. It works in virtually every environment from Canada, to the American Southwest, to the tropics of Costa Rica.
There are three primary advantages of high stock density grazing:
Dung, urine and grazing distribution is evenly spread throughout the paddock.
Animals tend to graze a greater portion of the available plants and graze the paddock more evenly.
Animals move frequently into fresh paddocks, which stimulates the vegetation and soil giving it a more consistent level of nutrition.
Stronger plant communities are developed, providing better nutrition to the animals.
Animal performance is greatly improved.
Our herd typically stock density ranges from 3.05 to 4.5 cows per acre. The higher the stock density, the greater the animal impact. Our Animal-Days per Acre (ADA) is about 1.77 ADA. Our paddocks vary from in size from 4 to 43 acres. Depending on which pasture and the vegetation that it consists of we utilize a one to seven day rotation period. The one day rotations are in our grass pastures and the longer, three day rotations are in the heavily forested, brushy areas. The trick though isn’t how often you are rotating the livestock, it’s how long of a rest period are you giving your pastures. We aim for a 180 day rest period, but that is flexible depending on the vegetation community, temperature and rainfall patterns. Holistic grazing is an art that takes many years of experience with livestock and the land to fine tune.
To achieve good grazing management we use two primary tools: 1) portable electric fencing and 2) portable watering system. To move cattle or other animals where you want them to be they need to be controlled and they need water. These are the two major upfront costs to this system, but once they are in place it really pays off. We have basically increased the stocking rate on our ranches by 60% using this management system. This means more profit per acre! No rancher is going to complain about that.
The plants and soil are what ultimately benefit from this management system. When we graze these pastures we strive to leave half of the plant and no less than 1/3. By doing so we are giving the plants a chance to rapidly recover once grazed. Most of the vegetation is trampled onto the soil surface by hoof action. Remember we are talking high density grazing when you put 100 head of cattle on 4 acres for one day. That’s a lot of urine, dung and hoof action on every square foot of that ground. Our soil and vegetation tests show that the organic matter and soil nutrients have increased substantially, the soil biology is improving, our pastures are thriving and the overall ecology is benefiting.
For more information regarding Holistic Management check out these two great books Holistic Management Handbook: Healthy Lands, Healthy Profits by Jody Butterfield, Sam Bingham and Allan Savory and Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment by Allan Savory. Look for more articles in the coming months regarding holistic planned grazing. I will write about the details of how we designed and implemented our system, the details of fencing, watering systems, the financial benefits and more.