What can be done to prevent erosion associated with grazing animals?

Answer 1

The best thing is to begin proper grazing practices with grazing animals. While it's more difficult with wildlife, it's easier with livestock like cattle, sheep and goats.

Proper grazing starts with removing livestock from loitering around and in sensitive riparian areas and wetlands including ponds, creek and river banks, sloughs, lakes etc. This can be done by Fencing off the sensitive areas to exclude livestock for long periods of time using simply a couple of strands of high-tensile electric fence (low enough that wildlife can jump over), and provide sources of water away from these sensitive areas by building gravity-fed water systems, solar-powered pumping systems, or any other system that works and fits the budget.

Proper grazing also means looking at the lay of the land more carefully and planning out a managed-intensive grazing system that takes advantage of the lay of the land and gets livestock out of the valleys where the wetlands are, and up in the hills more.

In order to perform proper grazing, you need to look at the stocking rate for your area. You may have too many animals, or too few. Either way you can invite overgrazing--which invites erosion--by not allowing enough rest to the land. (In some sensitive areas, too much rest can also be a problem.)

Preventing erosion, or rather mitigating erosion and encouraging more plant growth, means also giving the land more rest to recuperate after grazing. Selective grazing as encouraged by allowing the animals free access to a lot of acreage over several months does not allow plants significant rest, and can select for less desirable plant species. Grouping animals together and moving them as a unit to different paddocks, and allowing the area just grazed to rest for a significant amount of time (how much depends on the vegetation and the time needed for vegetation to grow back to the optimum stage for grazing, which tends to be at the 3rd or 4th-leave stage) before being grazed again is the best means to mitigate erosion and allow plants to grow back and take over the bare spots that would otherwise invite erosion.

Trees would not be a wise solution. However, if the area is such where trees once grew, then a shelter belt or a small grove can be created as new habitat for forest-dwelling wildlife. Livestock must be excluded from this area, though, for an extensive period of time to allow the saplings to grow. Cattle in particular are very good at killing trees, especially if they are allowed free-access to the forest for extended periods of time. Note though, that trees are not going to be covering the ground as quickly as grass and forbs are, thus will not be covering the soil as quickly.