How do you prevent overgrazing?

Answer 1

Understand that overgrazing is a function of time, not number of animals. If you understand that, and change your grazing management practices for the grass, not the animals, you will prevent overgrazing, and actually find you will get much more grass than you thought you could have.

Timing is everything, and bunching your animals up to mimic the bunched herds of grazing herbivores always eating and moving in response to predators. Except you and the temporary electric fence are the predators.

The time spent to graze should be much shorter than the time allowed for the various paddocks to rest. Rest time will depend on the season and the forage, and you. You can have as little as 30 days to rest or as much as 12 months or more. But don't graze the same paddocks in the same order every year, remember to change things up because you can influence plant community dynamics in each paddock if you do that; encourage diversity by being diverse with your paddock moves.

You can make things a lot better by simply changing the way you see things and changing the way you manage the system.

Answer 2

The best way to prevent overgrazing is to NOT reduce animal numbers, but rather improve your grazing management practices to encompass the concept and context of TIME!

This starts by understanding that overgrazing is a function of time. Overgrazing is defoliating a plant before it has had a chance to restore its energy reserves. Overgrazing is allowing animals to go back to a plant that has previously been grazed just a few days before, and this is always an issue when allowing animals to selectively graze whatever they want to eat, always through a continuous-grazing system.

To fix this problem, start by tighten your animals up into a dense group using hot-wire and temporary electric posts that can be easily set up and taken down in a matter of minutes. Grouping up your animals mimics the dense herds of wild grazing animals that moved across the prairie, and kept grouped up and moving in response to predators. This time, the hot wire is the predator.

Your management is now understanding the timing of when to move your animals and how long to rest your paddocks. Basically the key is to not be afraid to waste grass. This part is more of an art than a science, because you need to be able to understand how much grass is utilized versus how much you think should be utilized (grazed, trampled, manured). When you need to come back depends on how much you leave behind. The more you leave behind, typically the sooner you need to return.

The timing aspect is also to know when grass is ready to graze. And this is always just before the seed-head has started to emerge and when it's still vegetative. Also, understand that timing throughout the season is not the same.

Learning all this is going to be experimental and learning from others that have already done this type of grazing.

Answer 3

It definitely can, but the key is understanding what overgrazing actually is, and how to change management practices so that overgrazing is prevented in the future.

Answer 4

Yes it can, and it can be reversed as well.