I hope you enjoyed Troy Bishop’s EAPK monthly webinar on Grazing and Forage Planning. Don’t worry if you missed it, a recording is available at https://easternalliancekatahdins.com/monthly-webinars/

Troy discussed using grazing charts to track and manage your grazing throughout the year. If you are unfamiliar with it, it can be overwhelming imagining having all the information and predicting how your grazing will go when farming is such an unpredictable endeavor. 

Think of a grazing chart for your pastures like starting NSIP or farm record keeping. Remember how overwhelming that seemed when you first started out? You started measuring, reviewing EBVs, planning matings and after doing it for a while it seems second nature. It is hard to know if you are making progress with your pastures if you do not measure. You might think it looks better this year than last, but how well do you remember how things looked last year? You might think that tracking your animal performance is the way to do it, but if you are trying to improve your genetics as well as your pastures, how do you decide which one to ascribe the progress to?

The more seasoned you become as a grazier; the easier it gets to just eyeball things and get an idea of how long you can stay in a particular pasture. When you first start out grazing, or when you make the switch from set stocking to doing rotational grazing it can be daunting. Even for experienced graziers it can be hard to predict how your pastures will respond in years when rain is lacking. Having a reference point can help you plan ahead in drought years. You have more options if you can predict when you will run low/out of forage weeks ahead, instead of scrambling when you suddenly realize that you are out of pasture.

Remember pasture management and grazing is a marathon, not a sprint. You can quickly improve pastures by plowing everything up that is there, fertilizing, and planting highly productive forages, as long as the weather cooperates. This is expensive, and you still need to manage grazing so you do not degrade your investment. On the other hand, you can use grazing to improve poorer pastures. This is less expensive, but takes more time. Both approaches can benefit from planning and managing your grazing.

Why bother with doing a grazing chart? Farming takes time, why add one more thing to do? There is a lot of information that you can collect by doing a grazing chart (in whatever form you choose) and the big benefit comes in when you do it for a few years and start tracking progress.

Things a grazing chart will tell you:

How many days were you able to graze this year?

Once you have multiple years of data, you can see if you are making progress, or going backwards. Are certain parts of the farm not improving like the rest? What benefit would I get if I improved that pasture to get it as productive as the rest of the farm?

Forces you to keep track of temperature and rainfall.

Once you have multiple years of data, you can predict ahead when you are going to be running low on forage (if it keeps on not raining), so you have time to consider destocking, or having feed or other pastures available for grazing to allow for adequate rest of your pastures.

Gives you an idea of what your pastures can do.

Unless your pastures are all exactly the same, some will require more or less rest time. Once you have multiple years of data, you can see if your lower performing pastures are catching up. If not, you can better evaluate the return on investment for planting, or adding soil amendments to underperforming pastures.

Helps you plan out when to graze where. 

For example, we do pasture breeding in mid-October, so that pasture needs to be taken out of the rotation in September, but we want to graze it in late August. If we do not plan ahead we might not have enough forage there for breeding, or we might miss out on a rotation through the pasture, if we do not actively plan to graze there in August.

There is a lot of information on a grazing chart. It can easily feel overwhelming. Do you remember how it felt the first time that you looked at the NSIP percentile report, or an auction report? It seemed like gibberish to me, but now that I know what I am looking at and how to read it, it is just a very useful tool. Do not feel overwhelmed, we will work through this step by step. If you prefer, you can start out by using the grazing chart as a grazing diary for the first year(s) and just record where you grazed in order to get a baseline for planning in future years.

Let’s start with what we need:

• What do you have available to graze: Acreage and what is in it.
• Who will be consuming the forage, and how much do they need: Type of animal, weights of animals and production stages
• Weather information: Temperature, precipitation, frost dates, etc
• Contingency plans: If you run out of grazing what will you do? Decrease the number of animals vs feed them something else.

Don’t worry, you do not have to do it all right away. We will start slow. It is the end of the grazing season in my area, so we will leave the in-pasture parts until the spring. There are however a lot of other things we can do in the meantime to think and plan for grazing next year.

Let’s start by seeing what we have to work with. There are different grazing charts available depending on how many pastures you will be grazing, so we will start by deciding how many pastures we have and measuring their sizes. 

I am using google maps, and will start by dividing up my farm into different pastures. There are many tools and apps available to measure property areas. We will use Google maps, as it is free and easily accessible.

Go to maps.google.com and enter the street address of where your sheep will be grazing. Zoom in or out as far as necessary to enable you to see your whole farm on one screen. If you have permanent subdivisions of pastures, mark them out, if not try to divide your property into areas that have similar vegetation, and that are managed similarly. You might have just one or two pastures or many. Give each a name or number. (If your map does not look like mine, there is a box in the left lower corner that says “layers”, if you click on it you will switch to the satellite view).

You can see that we have 11 pastures for grazing. They are all different sizes and you can see that 2,4 and 11 have some trees and shrubs in them and are not as productive as the other pastures. Now we need to measure how big each pasture is. Don’t worry, you can do it right from your computer.

We will start by measuring pasture 1. Select one point at the edge of the pasture, right click to bring up the menu, select “measure distance” and click on each corner of the pasture to get the total area. Once you have measured the whole outline of the pasture (and return to the point you first selected) “Total area” will be displayed in square feet at the bottom of the page.  

Pasture 1 is 966,641.02 sq ft. We are used to measuring pasture sizes in acres, so we need to convert this measurement to acres. To convert this, google “convert 966 641.02 sq ft to acres”. So, pasture 1 is 22.19 acres. Be aware, in some search engines the converter does not like having commas in the number. If the answer does not make sense, remove the comma. (The converter that I used said the pasture was 0.02 acres when using 966,641.02 vs 22.19 when using 966 641.02). This way of measuring is not 100% accurate, but we do not have to be 100% accurate. We just want to get a baseline for how much pasture we have available for grazing. We will round down and just go with 22 acres for the size of pasture 1. When you are done, right click and select “Clear measurement”. Then you will be ready to start measuring the next pasture.

Not all pastures are nice and square, so if you have irregular shaped pastures, just add additional clicks to follow the outline of your pasture, as you can see below for pasture 5.

Below are the results of measuring all our pastures:

Now we have the information to decide what grazing template to use. Go to the grazing chart library  https://www.grazinglands.org/grazing-charts and select the right template for you. There are 10 month and 12 month templates. I do not graze year-round, and have 11 pastures, so the 10 month, 20 paddock template would work, but I decided to go with the 12 month, 15 paddock template, so I do not have so many empty paddock cells, to make it easier to take screenshots of the template. Pick the template that works for your situation.

There are printable as well as spreadsheet versions available. Use whatever works best for you. You are able to make more free form entries on the printed versions but I will stick to the spreadsheet, to make it easier to share online. Below you can see the information I collected in the grazing chart. You can give your pastures names instead of numbers, whatever is easiest for you to remember and work with. 

Remember to name and save your spreadsheet. If you number your pastures, remember to keep some kind of a record of which is which if you have a lot, otherwise, if you forget, you will have to do this over in the spring when we start grazing.

That’s it for part one, we will get to the “yield” portion of this area in a later article. In part two we will look at the demand side of the equation and focus on the animals that we anticipate to be grazing next year.

I hope that readers will consider starting their own grazing charts for the upcoming grazing season. There are sheep farmers in many different climates. I hope that you will share your experience with using grazing charts, or any other tools that you use to measure your pasture performance.

Comments and questions can be sent to blogs@easternalliancekatahdins.com  or join the conversation at https://www.facebook.com/easternalliancekatahdins

By: Isabel Richards, Gibraltar Farm