Rotational Grazing – Creating A Herd Migration In Your Pastures

I need to change how you consider cattle fencing. 

The fences in your rotational grazing program achieve this way more than simply ration out the grass in your pastures and include animals to cease them from working away. With the appropriate fence structure and the appropriate grazing technique, your fences can help you form the grazing conduct of your cattle and management the impression that your cattle have in your land. 

This has large implications in your pasture yields, livestock well being, and cattle weight beneficial properties.

So I need to problem your notion {that a} fence is merely a containment system. Your electrical fences are the mixed steering wheel, brake, and accelerator that you just use to regulate your strongest farm device – your grazing herd! 

This text will provide you with a peek at a number of the large energy you could unleash once you harness your cattle herd as a administration device. I am going to present you the grazing administration technique that permits you to flip your pasture rotation into a real herd migration. And I am going to clarify the electrical fence structure on the coronary heart of this grazing technique – the “good electrical fence grid.”

Harnessing the facility of the herd migration:

The success of all wild grazing herds, from the wildebeest migrating throughout Africa’s Serengeti to the wild American bison that after numbered within the many tens of thousands and thousands within the Nice Plains of North America, all have two issues in frequent. These two traits are the key behind their wonderful success as grazing species.

• They’re continuously migrating to contemporary pasture.

• And predators preserve them bunched collectively as a single massive herd, forcing them to graze as a cohesive unit.

These two easy causes allowed their populations to soar to such seemingly unattainable massive herd numbers. And the impression that these herds had on the land beneath their ft is immediately answerable for the extremely wealthy soils which might be present in these areas at the moment.

A living proof – migrating bison and the fertile soils of the Nice Plains.

The fertile soils of the Nice Plains area produce an extremely wealthy harvest, 12 months after 12 months, that feeds not solely your entire continental United States and Canada, however produce such huge agricultural surpluses that it the biggest agricultural exporting area on the planet.

Whereas fashionable farming applied sciences, fertilizers, human ingenuity, and a free market all play a significant position in producing such huge harvests and motivating all of the arduous work that goes into producing these monumental crops, they didn’t create the wealthy soils underpinning these bountiful crops.

That credit score goes to the good herd migrations of American bison who grazed these plains for the final 10,000 years, from the top of the final Ice Age till they have been practically hunted to extinction within the nineteenth century. 

This an essential level as a result of it signifies that once you use the proper grazing strategies to handle your pasture rotation, your cattle herd has the identical energy to enhance your pastures, enhance productiveness, and add vitamins to your soils simply by imitating the conduct of the bison herds that got here earlier than them.

And electrical fences are the important thing to recreating the facility of these nice herd migrations in your farm pastures.

Turning cattle into a robust administration device

Electrical fences can help you bunch your cattle collectively, forcing them to graze as a bunch. The chunk of the electrical fence wire replaces the ravenous urge for food of the lion or wolf to maintain the herd from scattering into the 4 instructions of the winds.

However electrical fences achieve this way more than simply preserve cattle contained. Additionally they can help you artificially manipulate the grazing conduct of your cattle.

Used appropriately, electrical fences power cattle to graze as a cohesive herd. Each day pasture strikes re-create a herd migration, thereby unleashing the facility that comes from bunching grazing animals collectively in a migration. And in contrast to a wild grazing herd migration that makes up its personal thoughts the place to graze and the way rapidly to maneuver to the following patch of contemporary grass, with a sensible electrical fence grid you management the herd migration.

That management means you possibly can change the pace of the migration and thereby change the depth of the herd’s impression on the land to realize all kinds of administration targets. Electrical fences flip your cattle herd into probably the most highly effective device at your disposal.

And it is a device that may give you the results you want free of charge. So long as you retain offering entry to contemporary grass, your migrating cattle herd will proceed to enhance your soils, stamp out weeds, and enhance pasture yields with out charging you a dime.

You’ll be able to study extra in regards to the grazing ideas that can help you harness the facility of your pasture rotation in my article collection in regards to the seven core rules of successful grazing management.

The good electrical fence grid.

Not all fences are equal.

The overwhelming majority of fences lock you into everlasting pasture sizes. The extra pasture divisions you attempt to create, the costlier it will get, and the extra congested your land turns into with a maze of wires and gates. Re-creating a efficient herd migration on this congested combine is sort of unattainable

However there’s one fencing system that breaks this mould. This technique provides practically infinite flexibility to your farm, prices a fraction of some other fencing system, and retains your land nearly totally freed from wires even whereas making it doable to create so many particular person grazing slices in your pasture rotation that it turns into nearly easy to maneuver your herd day by day.

I name this the Sensible Electrical Fence Grid as a strategy to distinguish it from different electrical fences. It is not simply an electrical fence. It’s a complete grazing administration technique that depends on a really specific configuration of electrical fences. And it permits you to actually mimic the facility of the wild grazing rotations with your individual cattle herd, irrespective of how huge or how small your herd is.

The Sensible Electrical Fence grid depends on a mix of everlasting and moveable electrical fencing. Here is a simplified diagram of the way it works:

When constructing a sensible electrical fence grid, you divide your land right into a collection of broad corridors utilizing everlasting electrical fences. These corridors are constructed utilizing everlasting posts and high-tensile wire. Consider these because the ‘beams’ or ‘aspect rails’ of a ladder.

Regardless of how strong this sounds, these “beams” are typically constructed utilizing only a single wire on all inside fences. In spite of everything, electrical fences aren’t meant to be bodily obstacles – they’re merely psychological barriers that use cow psychology to their benefit.

These broad corridors are then briefly subdivided by moveable electrical cross-fences. These are just like the ‘rungs’ or ‘steps’ of a ladder. And you solely ever want three brief cross-fences to handle your whole herd migration! 

As soon as your cattle transfer to the following pasture slice, you’re taking down the outdated again fence and reset it because the entrance fence for the next rotational grazing slice. Pasture strikes merely require you to roll up a single stretch of moveable wire to maneuver it over to its subsequent place. It is a day by day routine that may take as little at 10-Quarter-hour per day to maneuver the herd, transfer the again fence, and arrange contemporary water entry. (This course of, together with water entry, is roofed intimately in my Smart Electric Fence Grid article collection.)

Primarily, this implies you could create a grazing slice of any measurement, anyplace you need within the ladder, just by shifting the steps up and down the corridors.

No two slices ever must be the identical measurement or be set in the identical location. No two full loops round the entire pasture rotation ever wants to make use of the identical pasture subdivisions. And you’ll pace up or decelerate your herd migration at a second’s discover.

You’ll be able to even simply keep away from grazing sure areas by merely skipping previous them through the pasture rotation or hammer the daylights out of a person pasture slice the place you need to apply better trampling impression, akin to a tall weed patch that’s shading out the grass beneath.

And but regardless of this large flexibility, it takes far much less capital funding to construct a sensible electrical fence grid than to construct some other fence infrastructure, together with all different electrical fence programs. 

From principle to hands-on development…

The articles in my Sensible Electrical Fence Grid collection clarify how to plan and build your electric fence grid, learn how to incorporate your livestock water system into your electrical fence design, and learn how to create an electric fence grid that continues to function effectively during the winter grazing season.

Understanding the big selection of features that this extremely versatile device is ready to carry out is step one in creating your grazing administration technique. It’s the key to turning your cattle herd into a robust farm administration device. 

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Thanks for taking the time to learn my article. I hope you’ve got loved it. If you would like to be notified after I launch future cattle farming articles, join my email notifications or comply with me on Facebook or Twitter.

Associated Articles: The smart electric fence grid – get out your farm map, pen, and paper; I’ll present you learn how to plan your electrical fence grid and rotational grazing technique, step-by-step. (Disclosure: I get commissions for purchases made utilizing Amazon hyperlinks in my publish.) And once you’re prepared to begin planning your cattle farm, try my e book: Grass-Fed Cattle: Methods to Produce and Market Pure Beef. Use the hyperlinks under to discover my e book and skim critiques on Amazon:

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