The Shepherd’s Summary of the Grazing at S.M.I.
Written by: Byron Palmer – S.M.I. Shepherd
The theme of this ecological treatment could be considered tranquility and ease. The importance of this first time event was to ensure that it went well for the cattle, the people and the land. It was important that all three of those participants felt good about the process and the results of the activity. I would say that through the efforts of the whole team at SMI we achieved just that.
An important element of the project going well was making sure that the majority of the rainy season had passed before we introduced the cattle to the property. We wanted to make sure we avoided unaesthetic mud pits around the property. As a result of that concern we introduced cattle onto the property April 1st which gave us 40 days or so of good grass. Due to the uneven distribution of rain in the 20012/13 rainy season with heavy rains in December and not much else following it seemed like SMI’s grass didn’t really get going until April 1st anyway. As I have not been here in previous years I can only guess at this, but I think that the uneven precipitation distribution had something to do with the late onset of rapid growth in the vegetative state of the annual and perennial grasses on the property. The uneven distribution may have also impacted the length of the growing season as well.
As was stated we introduced the cattle onto the property on April 1st. Nate Chisholm had gone down to the property the cattle had come from previous to this date to make sure the animals electric fence training was going well. Nate’s review was that the training was going to our satisfaction and when the animals arrived they seemed to have an understanding of the nature of an electric fence. Having the corrals to intake the animals into when they arrived at SMI and train them a bit more to the fence was key in having a peaceful transition into a completely temporary infrastructure system based off of a single strand of .7 mm poly-wire.
When we introduced the animals into management unit A, getting the animals used to regular handling and constant electric fence containment was our goal. As a result our paddocks were a little larger than they ended up being the majority of the grazing event here this season. Once we made it through management units A and part way into B we began working with the animals more to achieve higher densities.
There are many ways to achieve higher densities and I received a wonderful education from Nate this year on different ways to achieve that density. He began by explaining to me the variations within high density that happen in the natural world. I will not attempt to explain those here (not that I could), but it was an interesting contrast to many of the systems I have seen by people attempting to use solely infrastructure to achieve ultra high densities.
Some practitioners of planned grazing will spend 2-4 hours a day setting up and breaking down temporary fencing in order to move animals as many as ten times per day, achieving a relatively uniform impact, of at times 800,000 pounds of animals per acre. This is applying a linear system of a regular type of density to a given area, and seemed after further reflection, less natural then the types of density present in the natural world. What was interesting to me in Nate’s approach was that instead of taking 2 or 4 hours setting up and taking down a lot of fencing, he preferred spending that time using stockmanship to achieve those densities.
This has many benefits, including working the cattle to become more calm and responsive as well as developing our stockhandling skills. By walking the animals and placing them where we want them on the landscape we achieve the highest possible densities while also being able to target areas that might need it the most. We regularly set up our fencing so that they had enough grass in a given paddock for a day or so. We then both would come in once a day and work with them for a portion of time to achieve higher densities and impact high value target areas such as poison oak groves.
As we moved further into Management Unit B we stopped putting pink flagging on the poly-wire as they became used to the heard seeing the fencing. We also started working with the animals on a daily basis to achieve higher densities and impact areas that we wanted to target. Specifically, there were some grassland/woodland borders that had quite a bit of brush build up and we had a lot of fun marching the cattle back and forth through them to bust it up and open the transition area between the borders.
As we moved through the woodland I was interested to see what kind of forage availability we were going to get. After reviewing most of the heavily wooded management units it looks like the woodland areas produced on average 15 ADA’s (animal days per acre) or so. Better then what I expected. It will be interesting to see how they perform next year. In these wooded areas we still set up paddocks that had enough forage for a day or so, but it was much harder for me to estimate the forage needs in those areas compared with the grasslands. In some of the areas of Unit B we might have set up fencing that placed the cattle at a density where they needed to be moved 2-4 times per day. We ended up varying it up a bit through Management Units B & C, but a day’s worth of forage was usually the upper limit in size in these Units.
As we rounded the corner on the property and headed into Units D & E about May 1st or so the grass started really transitioning into the less nutritious reproductive phase of it’s life cycle. It was interesting to note that at this point in time and the later we got into May, the cattle’s behavior began changing. If they did not have vegetative grass available in a paddock for the day, they were much more vocal and their movements were much more agitated. They would often rather stand around and bawl then put there heads down and make something out of the mature grass. It started becoming more and more unpleasant to be around the cattle. It was at this point that Nate initiated the much needed discussion about balancing body condition and getting optimum impact on the ground.
What we came to was that in order to be in line with our goal of the whole operation going calmly and easily we needed to begin to move the cattle around on the property where there was still grass in a vegetative state. We needed to preserve body condition on the cattle to maintain a good relationship with the cattle owners. Nate has had plenty of experience attempting to force cattle to eat mature grass while sacrificing body condition and animal performance. Based on his experience we should avoid this situation at all costs. It never ends well. As a result of the changing life cycle of the grass, using stockmanship to trample down large amounts of grass that had gone into a reproductive phase became a focus of much of the time we spent with the animals. We would make sure that they had quality feed and they would impact those areas evenly. However any areas in proximity that were in reproductive phase that we wanted to impact we relied on walking them over those areas again and again.
We decided to start grazing insets of Management units F, G and I where grass was still in relatively good quality. In Management Unit M the woodland understory still had a good mix of nutritious grasses so less stockmanship was needed to achieve our desired impact. We eventually jumped back into new areas we hadn’t planned on grazing (Units N and O) as the grass was more nutritious and in a vegetative state which the cattle prefer. As we moved into unit N we got word that the cattle were going to be pulled off the property in the next few weeks. As a result we began moving the cattle through areas a bit faster hoping to get wider impact on the back of the property and trading off in some cases the more targeted and intense impact we were getting before. That being said we were still working with the animals daily, but the overall paddocks they were in day to day were bigger. At this point the velvet grass and harding grass in Unit D had recovered (30-33 day recovery) and were hoping to walk the cattle over to that area to graze and impact once more to see how it performed with two shearings. However we got word that all the cattle were needed back on their home property by June 10th.
Overall the data was encouraging. We averaged about 15 animal days per acre in the wooded areas and anywhere from 30-45 ADA’s on the grasslands during the vegetative stage of growth with the SMI grasses. It’s really difficult to estimate How many ADA’s we could get or were present on the taller reproductive phase annual grasses as we never truly pushed that type of diet on the cattle, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was 60 + ADA’s there in some areas. The grasslands performed in terms of forage as to be expected in this region. It will be exciting to see how they adjust over time with this renewed regenerative grazing regime. I think next year if we get better rain distribution we will see much more forage then we saw this year and it will be easy to forget the relationship between this years ADA’s and the poor rainfall. However I will do my best to remember and not get too excited, attributing the possible increase in forage solely to our treatment.
It was sad to see the animals go Monday morning June 10th, but overall I’m pretty satisfied with the execution of the entire grazing treatment. Any time you try something new you will always be readjusting on the fly and recalibrating your desired outcome. I think that we met our goals of having happy cattle, people and land. The cattle gained on average 2 pounds a day which is pretty respectable considering how quickly the quality of the grass changed once the cattle got here. The land was impacted well and we got some good baseline activity to work off of over the coming years. A good deal of the understory of the wooded areas was impacted with P.O. being hit hard in certain areas. We have a better understanding of the seasonal pattern of grass maturity on the property which will help us inform a more effective grazing plan next time around. We also obtained some valuable data on the amount of ADA’s we can expect off different parts of the property at different times of the year. I think overall the cattle owners and the team at SMI were all happy and satisfied with the outcome of the experiment and we look forward to getting it going again just as soon as makes sense for us!
S.M.I. Grazing Summary:
Total Acreage: 209.1
Average Animal Units = 41
Total Days at SMI = 104
Animal Days based on average of 44 AU = 4270
Average ADA on part of property grazed = 20.4