How do you correct overgrazing?

Answer 1

The best thing for your pasture is to first drastically reduce your stocking rate, or pull off your livestock off the pasture that has been overgrazed altogether. You should decrease your livestock numbers to what your pasture would normally be able to accept in a fair to good (NOT excellent) grazing season.

The next thing to do is to make one of two choices:

1) Till the overgrazed pasture and reseed and fertilize

2) Harrow, fertilizer and no-till seed the pasture and keep grazing at a minimum to allow the grasses to establish a deep root system and increase soil and above-ground biomass.

The latter one will take longer as you will be dealing with weeds and will have to consistently fertilize your pasture to keep the grasses growing. You also MUST be VERY strict on how you graze your pastures (and I mean not just the one that has been overgrazed, but ALL of them) from now on, knowing when to pull them and when to put them on so that you don't kill your grass.

The former choice takes more machinery because you will need to repeatedly disk and harrow the pasture until the soil is fine enough to seed the grass seed and pack it down. And yes, you need to pack the soil down enough that the grass seed can establish itself. You may also want to let the field go fallow for a year to let it rest, before you reseed it again. With this option, once the grass has been seeded you CANNOT graze that pasture AT ALL because you need to let the grass establish its root system before you put your livestock out on pasture. If you cannot afford to do this, you must limit the amount of grazing that is done on this new pasture. DO NOT LET THEM GRAZE IT DOWN. Only let the animals graze enough so that they are only taking one bite-level down, not so that they graze the grass down to the ground. Then take them off right away and let the pasture rest for at least 30 to 60 days. When the grasses first start to grow, you will get lots of weeds. There's no need to purchase herbicide because this problem is easily fixed by simply mowing the weeds down; this encourages the new grasses to grow, outgrowing the weeds that may try to regain themselves.

Once you have established your stand, you must graze responsibly. Know the Stocking Rate for your pastures and let your pastures rest for at least 30 days between each grazing period. Use a principle of "Take-Half-Leave-Half" or graze until there is at least 3 to 6 inches of stubble left before you switch pastures. You need to move your livestock quicker during the growing season than you do when the grasses have started to reach maturity and are going into dormancy. Grasses during the growing season require less time to rest than those pastures that are in the dormant stage. Your risk of overgrazing increases much more when you're grazing pastures during the hot summer months (when cool-season grasses are in dormancy) than during the spring to early summer time.

But the biggest mistake that any novice livestock producer make is to overstock their farms and pastures. DO NOT fall into this trap, as this is the quickest way to kill your grass and increase risk of a train wreck waiting for a place to happen.