Search Results for: mob grazing

On Pasture’s New Year’s Resolution is to help you develop a business vision and goals that ensure a happy, healthy life, and a grazing operation that gets you there. Creating a vision and goals, isn’t something that’s natural for most of us. So to make the process easier, we’ll be providing lots of examples. With […]

We began using MG way back in the early 90′s during the winter with stockpiled fescue on rented farms. Each year we came to trust more and more what we were doing until we eventually sold all of our hay equipment – one of the best decision we’ve ever made. It was the key to […]

Charlie and Tanya Totten rent 4,000 acres of flat, fertile pasture land and rocky river breaks near Chamberlain, South Dakota. In this video he talks about how he manages his cattle and his land to improve productivity and natural resources. Charlie says, “I’m not doing it for my grand kids. I’m doing it for me […]

Jay and Krista Reiser share their experience adapting mob grazing to their 2700 acre ranch in North Dakota.

At the American Forage and Grassland Council’s annual meeting in Roanoke, Virginia, this past January, I was asked to summarize and present the scientific literature on mob grazing. This article provides a distilled version of that research summary. Introduction and Terminology Rotational grazing (RG) has been promoted by many land-grant universities and USDA-NRCS (Natural Resources […]

Take a pasture walk with Charlie and Tanya Totten to see how mob grazing is working for them.

Are you tired of hanging around the house this winter? Are you dreaming of spring and the new grazing season? In that case, you’ll enjoy this 9 minute video visit to Richard Smith’s place to see mob grazing set up for his cattle. Richard is a rancher in Hayti, South Dakota. He mob grazes his […]

In this video, Pat Guptill of Quinn, South Dakota shares his experience with his change from a rotational grazing plan to mob grazing saying, “What we’ve done here, it’s just baffling to me, the number of cattle we can graze.”  After doing things the same old way for years, Pat said he was never happy […]

Dairy farmers wanted to know how to implement this practice on their farms the authors took on the task of checking out how it works for farmers using it in Pennsylvania and New York.

Maybe you don’t have enough land to raise cattle, sheep or pigs.  Maybe you’re thinking about diversifying your operation.  In either case you’ll want to check out Forrest Pritchard’s latest blog post.  In it he describes how to use electric netting to create long narrow stretches of pasture that chickens can graze and trample as […]

Jay and Krista Reiser were considering taking over a 2700 acre North Dakota ranch they knew they were facing some problems. First, their financial adviser told them to expect a $38,000 annual loss if they continued to operate the ranch as it had always been run. Second, their pastures were depleted, with lots of bare […]

Three weeks ago, I got a lesson in context when I helped my dad into an ambulance because a sudden stomach bug left him so weak, he could barely function. I reluctantly left my mom at the hospital, like so many others these past 2 years who were not allowed to enter, and drove away […]

Why bale graze? To save money. One of the ranchers interviewed here says it costs him 14¢ per head per day to haul hay to his herd, but only a penny a day to feed bales in pasture. Not only that, each of the ranchers interviewed found that bale grazing improved their hay fields thanks […]

Grazing in the Sweet Spot is a phrase I have been using for over a decade. Until the last few years I have only used that term when talking to myself. I didn’t have a good handle on how to explain it to others. Now that I have thought about it for a number of […]

There are so many different names for different kinds of grazing management that sometimes it gets a little confusing. So, to help you pick what’s right for you, here are some names and definitions. Each of these styles of grazing could fall under “Management-intensive Grazing” meaning that management of the animals is the focus, with […]