Many people have written us asking for more information about rotational grazing and the smaller homestead.  If our own experience can be a model, we offer these thoughts:

Setting up your own rotational grazing system needs to be an act of imagination and patience in equal measure.  Unless one comes to farming with unlimited income, any farming venture takes time to establish; rotational grazing is just another variation and it does take time.

• Stand back and breathe deeply:  Try to see beyond everything in front of you, look beyond the garbage and imagine a clean slate.  Try to see the possibilities in your land but remember:  It is impossible to do everything at once and, if you try, the process will become overwhelming and very quickly move into the impossible.

• Boundary fencing defines your farm.  Boundary fencing is typically a disaster, overgrown with trees and weeds and comprised largely of fence types you cannot or should not use.  Clearing everything away and starting over is no one’s idea of fun and usually the one fence that new farmers prefer to leave “until later.”  Cynthia grew up with farms and has learned the hard way that replacing boundary fence is a major consideration in rotational grazing.  You will be moving your stock into small paddocks and asking that they remain in them until moved again.  Weak fencing at your boundaries offer your animals a potential avenue of escape that will only make your life (and neighbor relations) much more difficult than it needs to be.  Please put serious thought into this aspect of your farm before you skip along to the interior.

• Understand your possibilities:  Go to your county seat and get a proper (and well enlarged) plat map (surveyors also keep copies and may be a best source).  Get the largest, most accurately scaled plat map you can possible throw your income at.  Clear a wall and make this map your major artwork for months (or years, your reality is what you need to consider) to come.  You are now ready to begin planning.  Ask yourself and others many questions:  Can you plan the boundaries in sections and ultimately watch them merge at some future point?  Will your boundary neighbors help with any of the work or money at your common fence lines?  Are there government grants for any portion of the work that needs doing?

• Learn your land and plants.  We cannot recommend this highly enough:  The traditional Native American and popular Permaculture method of land utilization requires that you understand the land itself.  To this end, it is wise to give land 4 seasons to teach you its nature.  Walk your land on a regular basis for a full year and note all the plants, the way the sun and moisture, rain and runoff, heat of summer and cold of winter works on its varied scapes.  Test soil in each area that looks and behaves uniquely (talk to your county agents for resources).  By giving yourself a year to learn how your land is its own self, you will have a much clearer sense of what your money can wisely improve.  Every penny you spend on land management will be costly by comparison of, say, investing in stock or a new business.  Your farm investment comes back to you slowly and rarely in obvious ways.  Do not plan for your fantasy; plan for what can actually work.

• Plan for movement:  Rotational grazing is about movement of animals from set paddocks and one of its primary values is in letting your grasses recover.  Animals should not be passing back over or through paddocks until the grasses are ready for re-grazing.  Lanes are typically the method of movement.  While it is true that some farms work without them, they generally are also planning to have water and catch pens within each paddock and maintaining their stock on the land over the bulk of the pasture season.  Ask yourself how you envision your daily relationship to the animals and land.  Are you planning to bring stock to a shelter at night?  To a common water and mineral source?  Are you going to want access to your paddocks for work?  Lanes will be valuable if such movement is part of your plan.  Lanes can be permanent or moveable but they must be well-considered and planned in advance.

• Define obvious paddocks:  All land has areas that are essentially a working unit.  These areas share common grasses, nutrients, and water sources.  These areas often also have some obvious natural boundaries:  A slope, a stream or two, a windbreak of trees that you plan to keep and buildings are just a few examples.  Whenever possible plan your Primary divisions to make use of these common areas.  For instance, think of slope.  A northern exposure slope will green much later than a southern exposure.  The bottomland between them will often have some of the richest soils.  Is it possible for you to plan your first divisions to use these three areas?  Perhaps your southern exposure can be fenced as your Primary spring division; the bottom land as a rich second division for nursing ewes and the northern exposure as a third division when the grasses are more fully established by later spring suns.  This thinking gives you your fundamental land divisions and you are on your way toward rotational grazing.

• Understand stock numbers and forage capacity:  This aspect of rotational grazing seems to worry new farmers the most, yet it really is a very basic concept of supply and demand that just has numbers and silly formulas thrown into it.  Try to think of this portion of your plan as the most rewarding rather than the most complicated:  If you can see your land having rest periods as a good thing you are 75% of the way to successful rotational grazing.  Now throw some common sense into your thinking. Foraging livestock will always go to their favorite plants in any pasture, (think eating for fun rather than eating to live) passing over other plants that are just as nutritious but less pleasing.  Over the years this choice making will kill off your best grasses and encourage weeds thus reducing total potential pounds per acre yield of highly digestible forage (A).  Simply dividing sections of your whole pasture in such a way as to force the stock to eat everything you want to develop in that area to an ideal re-growth state does the opposite (now you teach your stock to eat to live rather than eat for fun).  Your pasture weeds begin to disappear and grasses are encouraged to increase pounds per acre yield of highly digestible forage (B).  Getting from A to B requires that your stock will get sufficient nutrients in a paddock by eating all plants to within 2-4 inches (depends on your particular forage) and then move to another paddock.  Grass farmers use a simple formula when planning grazing and we are going to get creative in our theoretical planning.  We are going to use twenty 100-pound ewes as our theoretical rotating stock.  We are going to continue using the 3 Primary Subdivisions we discussed in the Obvious Paddocks section above and say that each of these 3 subdivisions are 5 acres.  We will figure out how to further subdivide into better rotational paddocks:
  • For starters we will use slightly averaged numbers just to cover the mixed possibilities of a grazing year for a ewe:  A 100 lb ewe will need about 4% her total weight in forage (also called Forage Dry Matter or DM) per day or 4 pounds of DM forage.  So your initial formula is: Average animal weight x 4% = pounds of forage per animal per day (lb/DM/day).  The 20 ewes would produce these results:  100lbs x 4% = 4lbs x 20 ewes = 80lbs per day total Forage Demand.

  • Now we need to know how much our pasture can produce.  While it is always best to have your pasture evaluated, for this example we will pull our number from the Hay Yield scale published by NRCS FOTG.  This scale is available through your FSA office.  Lets say this is a very poor pasture and the yield is just 1 ton per acre per year or about 400 pounds grazing per acre per 30 days rotation. You now have a major bit of information about your land and a primary formula piece:  Forage Supply  (400 lbs/acre/rotation). Our Forage Supply on each 5 acre subdivision is 400 lbs x 5 acres = 2000 lbs total every 30 days.

  • Now we need to know how long you will keep your ewes in that acre.  This is called the Residency Period.  As you learn your land, this timing will become easier to see and predict.  For now, we are going to break a rule and simply say that we want our 20 ewes to stay in a given paddock for 3 days.

  • Now we need to figure out how our 5-acre division does with our 20 ewes.  We take our Forage Demand (80 lbs) and divide into our Forage Supply (2000 lbs).  We get 25 days for this one 5 acre primary division.  While it is possible to help our pasture with a 25-day grazing schedule, it really will not get us anywhere very fast and, ideally, we want to move our animals to meet the growth of the forage so we now have the logic for further paddock division.  We said that we wanted to move our 20 ewes every 3 days as a theoretical rotation to move sheep out to prevent over-grazing, so we would divide this 25-day cycle by a 3-day rotation and we find that we could further divide this 5-acre paddock into roughly 8 rotating paddocks.  Now is a good time to ask yourself some questions you may not have.  Do these 20 ewes have lambs at their side?  If so, will they follow their dams into the paddocks or are they weaned before rotating and kept on dry lot feeding?  Have you included everyone in your Forage Demand calculation?  If nothing changes in your formula numbers, it is possible that you are sorely under stocking your available land and you might do well to increase your ewe stock or plan to use some of your land for haying.  On the other hand, if this example holds true and you have the capacity to really sub-divide to frequently moving groups, your land may improve in huge leaps by doing so.

This is your basic evaluation of your land use and –as you can see- not terribly difficult.  To make it more realistic it would be wise for you to contact your local FSA or NRCS office to ask for very detailed help as they can bring our theoretical example into sharp focus for you.  This is a free service and we cannot emphasis enough how valuable this evaluation can be for you.  If your local office does not have the folks in hand to help, we recommend contacting your largest University with a agricultural department.  There is no state in the US that does not have someone available to help you get all this figured out.

·         Plan grassland improvement:  A large part of what you have learned about your various unique paddocks is the forage that is or -in most cases- is not available.  As you ready yourself for fencing these first paddocks, decide how you will improve the plants and soil.  Do you need nutrients added?  Which ones, how and when will you apply them?  This is entirely up to you; are you planning organic, biologic or traditional land treatment?  Should you add seed now or plan for it in another season?  Remember that fully disturbing soil by traditional tilling often is more than you will benefit from; no-till seeding is generally all most farms need.  If your land truly needs extensive reshaping and tilling, can you plan for it in sections or is it best to do it once and be done with it?

• Choose your fence material:  There is no such thing as the perfect fence, although there are many perfectly wrong ones.  In choosing fence materials consider first the livestock that you are planning to move through your pastures.  The fence must contain your stock -within your boundaries and then the individual paddocks- for periods specific to the needs of your forage.  Regardless of fence type, all fences are expensive and you will want your money to continually reward your efforts.  Spend the most you possibly can for the most durable and appropriate fencing along your boundary; you do not want to revisit this job again for some years to come.  Your interior divisions for paddocks are entirely personal.  We have found great success with the New Zealand type electric line and removable posts.  It is highly moveable, allows for addition and subtraction of lines as needed and permits us to easily sub-divide as the seasons change and land requires.  Do remember that there are many creative people out there rotationally grazing and we have seen hugely successful –and often fun- farms using an unlimited number of materials.  Cattle and pig panels are common as divisions. Many companies make moveable electric netting; a quite easy to use and adaptable fence for creating entire paddocks or quick sub-divisions.  One wildly successful chicken farm we visited uses recycled snow fencing acquired from their county highway service.  They replace it every couple of years and have nothing but good things to say about it. 

• Time is your ally in Rotational Grazing:  This bears repeating frequently; the best by-products of this form of grazing is the constant improvement of your land over time and the endlessly improving health of your stock.  Simply moving animals into smaller areas will give your forage time to improve its density and overall health while your animals benefit from movement and changing forage.  As you learn your soils and plants, you will begin to see the times when further sub-division will be helpful for land and animal.  Perhaps one 5-acre paddock suddenly seems better suited to two 1-½ acre paddocks:  Divide it!  Or maybe the grass type in that back corner of 3 acres just isn’t producing:  Mob stock the paddock until it is eaten short and then reseed that area with another grass or mixture that is better suited to that area.  Each year that you graze your stock in rotation, your land will teach and give in ways that the older whole-pasture grazing style could not.

We hope that our experience and the above suggestions answer some of the myriad questions we have received.  Feel free to contact us with questions about what you are doing.  If we have not encountered your particular situation, we may have several options for contact that are better suited to your needs.  Beyond everything else remember to trust yourself and do not despair.  This is not rocket science and you are not reinventing the wheel.  This is a relationship to land and living animals:  You can do it!