Is Intensive Grazing more effective than Continuous Grazing?

Answer 1

Answer

Yes. Intensive grazing makes better use of pastures since sections of a pasture are harvested at a time, giving the other sections a rest. This contributes to even grazing all around the pasture in all paddocks within that pasture. Continuous grazing encourages undergrazed areas and overgrazed areas, which could encouarge undesirable plant growth and "weed" out the desirable pasture plants.

Answer 2

Definitely. Intensive grazing is actually not the intensiveness in the grazing, but rather the intensiveness in the management that goes behind the grazing.

Thus, "intensive grazing" is a means to make better use of the forage resource by moving animals in a group, and keeping them in a group as a means to mimic the movements of wild herd-bound grazing herbivores (like bison) in response to predation. Only this time, the domestic animals (horses, sheep, cattle, goats, pigs) are the bison, and the electric fence/human is the "predator." Intensive grazing gets a group of animals to graze a small area for a short period of time, then moving them to a fresh piece of ground before they can take a "second bite" of the forage they were once on.

Doing this movement encourages more litter laying on the soil surface which encourages better water infiltration and weed suppression (somewhat, some "weeds" are still going to come up), and allows for more green leaf material left behind for plants to regrow and recover quickly before next grazing. It also encourages more even manure distribution, which encourages higher nutrient load in the soil.

When a large pasture is divided up into many smaller paddocks (the dividing can be done as the grazing season progresses, and paddock size will change from month to month, year to year), this allows the post-grazed areas to receive more rest to recover. Paddocks can be skipped over for certain reasons, from the ground being too wet to graze, or needing to allow plants to reseed themselves, or even wanting to set aside a certain area to graze come fall or winter as a stockpiled resource.

Intensive grazing encourages more competition between grazing animals so that they will eat what's there before the neighbour gets it. It also discourages selective grazing that is a big problem with continuous grazing.

Continuous grazing allows animals to select what plants they want to eat for the benefit of the animals, not for the plant resource. When animals are free to select what they want to eat, they will often go back to the same plant they ate a week ago that is just starting to recover and eat it again. This is what's called "overgrazing." Overgrazing will push grasses back to the point where their growth becomes stunted, or they die out because they do not have the energy reserves available to recover quick enough. Overgrazing, then, is actually timing issue.

Pastures become degraded when they are continuously grazed, or animals are allowed to overgraze. Compaction, runoff and erosion issues, poor quality stand, weed issues, and the need to spend money and time (and fuel) to rejuvenate that pasture once every 5 to 7 years raise up their ugly heads.

Continuous grazing can often mean that a pasture will run out of forage available for livestock, meaning that the farmer will have to supplement with hay sooner than if he were to manage his pastures with the forage and the soil in mind, with is animals as the tools to do just that. Dry spells make this very apparent. Rain, on the other hand, simply is a cover-up of the mistakes made in management.