I realized the benefits of grazing early on in my livestock career. Most everybody that I knew had animals on grass; it was the confinement operations that seemed so farfetched to me.
It wasn’t until I heard someone talking about a form of rotational grazing called “Management Intensive Grazing” or “MIG” that I started to think about grazing in a whole new way. Instead of just turning animals into a pasture and letting them eat all that was there, even though most of the time that wasn’t much, you would just give the animals a small portion of the pasture to graze at a time. This should allow the grass in the rest of the pasture to grow and produce a better forage for the animals to consume later. Those that were doing this kept going on and on about how much more grass they were now growing using MIG grazing and how much less hay they were feeding in the winter months.
I already knew that feeding hay was my biggest overall expense per year so I thought that I would give MIG a try, and I failed miserably. I didn’t have the proper tools or the proper knowledge to be very good at it and I gave it up after a few months of trying. This was 1996, the internet wasn’t widely available and I had no network of graziers to talk with. So, I continued to graze the way we had always grazed animals on this farm. You turned cattle into the first pasture and when that was all gone you turned them into the second pasture and later the third pasture. Then you started over again in the first pasture, but the grass would be very short because it had been overgrazed previously so cattle only stayed there a short time before being moved and before long, we were out of grass and it was time to start feeding hay. This would usually happen mid-August.
Once our farm was able to get the internet, along with our very first bulky and oh so slow computer, I stumbled upon a video by Joel Salatin where he was talking about “Salad Bar Beef.” He was moving cows every day to a fresh paddock of grass, but he was using different tools than what I had started with. I searched for every video I could find of him talking about his grazing and in the spring of 2012, I had a new plan and a renewed interest in management intensive grazing.
I made lots of mistakes in the beginning, and still make some today. The difference is now I try to learn what went wrong and then try something different using the knowledge that I just gained from my failure.
I now think about the grass while I am planning my daily moves. Has the grass had time to fully recover? Has the root system had a chance to fully recover? If I let this field mature, a field that has marginal clovers or birdsfoot trefoil in it, can I reseed it naturally by letting those plants go to seed before bringing animals into it? How much forage can I take off and still get a good recovery before I need to come back to this paddock? In the case of sheep, have I given it enough rest to assume that the parasite load has been lessened due to time itself? These are daily questions that I am asking myself. But all of this is just the theory part of grazing. The grazing itself is what trips most people up. How do I do it?
I started out using electric netting. We had to learn how to use netting simply because we didn’t have fencing that would hold sheep. It can be a pain to use, but over time we found little tricks here and there to make it a lot easier to handle. The biggest one was “Don’t be in a hurry”. If you are, it will get stuck on everything and become a tangled mess. The second was “You really need a path”. This allows for less grass to touch the nets that will cause shorts in our netting. We used a small tractor to make a path and set the netting in the wheel tracks. I didn’t want to mow a path because it would stress the grass and because the sheep could then graze the short grass and be in that parasite zone.
To use netting for rotations you really need a minimum of seven nets. Use the first four to make a square and the other three to add an adjacent square with one common side. You simply open one corner of the nets on the common side and let the sheep through into the second square and then you close it behind them.
Now you can take down the three nets that are no longer holding sheep and move them forward to make the next square. From here you just continue the process and suddenly you are rotationally grazing!
Later we stopped trying to electrify our nets and just added a hot wire on the inside of each net, about a foot off the ground and about 6 inches inside the net. This was only because we had a few ewes that learned they could lift the net from the bottom and simply walk under them. Adding this inside wire taught our ewes to respect poly wire and I soon found that I could subdivide my net squares with poly wire and my sheep stayed in. This meant no more squares!! Now we could just use the netting as a perimeter fence and poly wire to divide up paddocks. This was so much less work.
After seven years of using netting, we got an EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and set permanent interior fences to make grazing a whole lot easier. By this time, we knew how we wanted to move through our pastures and felt confident we wouldn’t regret where we put new fencing.
There are no gates in my system; I use poly wire if I need a gate. All my “gate” openings are 30’ wide. This allows me to get any equipment that I might need into my pastures, including a combine, if and when I want to reestablish a pasture. All my interior fences are 160’ apart. This allows me to use my nets for subdividing if I should ever need to.
Our interior fencing is 5-strand high tensile fence with wires spaced from the bottom up 6”,6”,6”,6” and then 9”. This makes my interior fence 33” tall. I can easily step over this as opposed to having to go all the way around to get in a pasture quickly. Only the top four wires are electrified. The fence uses wooden H braces on the ends and Timeless T posts spaced at 25’.
My exterior fence was originally a 5-wire high tensile fence with only the middle wire hot. This worked fine for cattle but sheep would just walk through it. I then lowered the bottom wire to 6” and added two more hot wires between the lowered bottom and the old second wire. This 7-wire fence has worked without fail and I feel confident pasturing sheep up against the outside perimeter fence.
Most of the time I just use five step-in posts and a single reel with poly wire and connect from fence to fence. I always have three subdivisions up at a time; two that are holding sheep in (a back fence and a front fence) and one for where the sheep are going next. I simply unhook the wire and let sheep walk through and hook it back up. Then I take down the old back fence wire and move it ahead to become tomorrow’s front fence.
How we graze:
I honestly don’t know how people don’t have parasite issues when leaving sheep in a pasture any longer than a few days. My first Katahdins were not very parasite resistant and I didn’t help matters any when the first several rams that I chose to sire my lambs also lacked parasite resistance. I quickly realized that I was having issues with parasites in my sheep and that I needed to bring in rams that could pass their genetics for resistance to parasites to my new lambs. In the meantime, I had to figure out how to graze sheep in a manner that would keep them from becoming infected. After learning that the bulk of the parasites were only in the bottom 4” of grass I knew that I would need to move the sheep to a new paddock before they grazed the grass shorter than four inches. This meant that my grass had to be tall enough to let them eat just the tops and no lower. Luckily sheep love the tops of grass and really aren’t big fans of the stems on the bottom of the plants. I also learned the bulk of the parasites will die off with time, so I started looking at a minimum of 60-day rest periods before regrazing a paddock. Suddenly my pastures responded to the longer rest periods with beautiful, lush grass and nice big clover plants as well as birds foot trefoil. It was amazing!!
I also found that with grass that got way too big and had headed out my sheep would pick off the heads and the lower leaves on these plants and would trample down about a third of what was there simply because they moved around so much searching for the best tidbits. This created a mulch that kept the soil cool and held in moisture and once again the pastures responded with a quick regrowth and lush grasses. An added bonus was how fat the sheep were. Here I was doing what was best for the grass and the sheep got the benefit.
Water is fairly easy for sheep as they don’t drink near as much as cattle. I made a sled that carries two 40-gallon tubs and also holds my minerals. I use an old 200-gallon field sprayer that has a PTO driven pump and simply fill the tubs every day when I move sheep. On very hot days I may need to fill these twice with 150 ewes. In the winter I only need one tub and I use a 35-gallon tank that sits on my side-by-side and gravity flow water into the tub.
For shade in summer, I have a few old flatbed hay wagons that sheep love to lounge under. I like to park these wherever I want to add extra manure. Sheep also like to scratch themselves on the wagons. Last summer I put an IBC portable water tote on one of the wagons and gravity flowed water to a small trough with a float. For the most part it worked well but I did have issues with the float sticking several times and arrived to the pasture with very thirsty sheep. Good thing that I move sheep every day.
The size of the paddock for each day will depend on a lot of variables: the weight of the sheep and if the sheep are open, bred or nursing. Do these lambs need to grow quickly or do they have all summer to reach market weight? How many sheep will be grazing and most importantly how much grass is there? NRCS has grazing sticks that can be used to measure forage height and density to estimate how much forage is available. They’re a big help if you don’t mind doing a bit of math. Starting out, I would just check on the pasture several times a day to see if there would be enough grass or if there would be too much grass left over. Either way I would make an adjustment for the next day. This let me develop an eye for what I was seeing and before long I could make a fairly accurate guess.
Before you say that you can’t possibly let your grass rest 60 days, I want you to do a little math. Take each pasture that you have and divide it by the number of days that you would typically graze there. So, let’s say you have a pasture and you would leave sheep to graze there for 10 days in this pasture before moving them to the next pasture. If you were to divide that pasture into 10 equal paddocks, by the time you finish paddock 10, paddock 1 will have already had nine days rest. If you have five more pastures or even hay fields and do the same thing with each, by the time you get back to paddock 1 you will have 59 rest days. So, now imagine that you are on your typical last day of grazing for the summer, you still have 60 days of grass behind you that can still be grazed! It won’t all be as nice as the first paddock but you won’t need to feed hay for a while yet. With not needing as much hay, this will give you some new places to graze and extend your grazing season even farther.
I want you to remember that just because I move sheep every day certainly doesn’t mean that you have to as well, but I would like you to consider the possibilities of doing so. It has been a great improvement on my farm and allows me to more closely observe both my pastures and my sheep on a daily basis.
I hope this will give you some useful information and perhaps inspire you to give Management Intensive Grazing a try. Happy Grazing!
By: Big Tom Perkins, Con-O-Creek Farm, Fombell, PA
