GRAZING RECOVERY PERIOD
One of the most important things that good regenerative grazers do is monitor and adjust their recovery time. We’re not talking about how long you need to rest after having a few beers; recovery time is the period of rest for a pasture between grazings. You will want to vary that rest period depending on how fast your forage is growing, if you don’t have at least 6-8” of regrowth, it’s too soon to bring the animals back in.
MATCHING YOUR BIRTHING SEASON
Do you have stories of lambing or calving during a snowstorm? Birthing during the “off-season” is not only hard on the newborns and the farmers who have those conditions, it can be hard on your pocketbook, too. Once an animal starts lactating and nursing, their nutritional needs go way up, and if you are outside of the growing season, that extra nutrition often comes in the form of expensive hay or other supplemental feed. If you match your birthing season with your grass-growing season, you can save lots of money on supplemental feed and eliminate the risk of frozen calves or lambs.
HIGH STOCK DENSITY
If asked to name the best technique for pasture improvement, the answer will often be to increase stock density. What is stock density? It is simply a measure of the pounds of live animal per acre. So if you had 15 cows that weighed an average of 1,200 pounds each, you would have (15×1,200) 18,000 pounds of live animal, and if they were in a 2 acre paddock you would have a stock density of (18,000/2) 9,000 pounds per acre. How does that measure up with recommendations?
To achieve positive herd effect, a general target to aim for is 40,000-80,000 pounds per acre, so for our example herd above to achieve a 50,000 lb/a density, they would require a paddock of only (18,000/50,000) 0.36 acres. So now that 2 acre paddock can be subdivided into 6 paddocks.
ROTATIONAL GRAZING
There are lots of different terms for methods of grazing ruminants, and it’s easy to get confused by what they mean. Continuous grazing is the most common method, and this means that animals have access to the entire property all the time. Even at low stocking rates, this almost always leads to overgrazing and degraded pastures. Rotational Grazing moves animals through defined paddocks, often on a set schedule. It’s better, but still has room for improvement. Adaptive Multi-Paddock grazing (AMP) looks at forage quality and quantity and matches that with the needs of the herd by adjusting paddock sizes throughout the season.
APPROPRIATE PADDOCK SIZE
You may now be wondering how to determine an appropriate paddock size on your farm – we have a tool for you! The OPN grazing calculator allows you to input information about your forage and the makeup of your herd, and it will calculate a daily paddock size for you. This calculator, and the associated poultry profitability calculators, were all made with the knowledge gained from attending the Ranching for Profit school. If you are ready to advance your operation in ways you never thought possible, Join us in Bend this October for the first time the RFP school has been offered in Oregon.
Grazing calculator – https://oregonpasturenetwork.org/2025/03/11/this-grazing-calculator-will-do-the-math-for-you/