How can livestock damage soil

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Older stands in which the plants have grown together to form a sod or ones that simply have more surface residue present will help to mitigate this issue. There are numerous variables to consider when making decisions to protect soil and pasture health when grazing. These variables include:. With these variables in mind combined with a visual assessment of the degree of pugging occurring and soil moisture levels if available , the following guidelines can be used to make management decisions Table 2.

Table 2. Decision making using visual assessment of pugging and soil moisture levels. We have 6 regions. Learn more about us or about our partners.

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Little to no visible pugging, moisture levels below plastic limit for your soil s , no preciptation in the near-term forecast, and weather favors drying. Options include: Giving cattle double the amount of normal space to graze, moving to a pasture with coarser textured soil, moving more frequently, or moving to a sacrifice pasture. Cows find it easier to eat their pasture requirement and so are less likely to walk around the paddock searching for extra feed.

Regrowth will be faster from the taller pasture. Allocate a larger grazing area Usually not recommended as this speeds up the grazing rotation. This results in less grass being available at the next grazing. If used, should only be done for 1 to 2 days at a time Total pugging damage will be as bad if not worse than if a smaller area had been grazed, but is less noticeable because it is on a larger area.

Apply nitrogen fertiliser Nitrogen applied early will help build up a feed wedge for winter. Do not apply to waterlogged pasture, as response will be poor. Ensure other elements such as phosphorus and potassium are not limiting. Destock as a last resort If available, agistment or some other arrangement to get animals off the property is an attractive option — providing it's reasonably priced, fencing and watering are adequate and that the animals are regularly checked.

That was what brought him to Bluffton, Georgia, where recently he led ranchers and farmers on lecture walks through the fields of White Oak Pastures , the biggest organic farm in Georgia and one of the largest grassfed-beef operations in the United States.

White Oak belongs to Will Harris III, who is the fourth generation of his family to work the farm and the first to turn it away from commodity cow-calf production. Since the s, he has been turning the 3,acre property into a hub for innovation, rejecting hormones, antibiotics, artificial insemination, and chemical fertilizers.

Over the years, he has added four other four-footed species and five types of poultry that move through the fields in a carefully planned rotation. But, he tells me as we bump over the lush pastures of his oldest fields, there is always more you can do. Most of what I do, I figured out on my own—and when you do that, you also figure out there is a hell of a lot more to learn. On modern ranches where predators are excluded, clustering cattle into smaller pastures and moving them frequently simulates that natural movement.

As he has described it in several books and many interviews, Savory came to these realizations through his observations as a game warden in Africa—and also, perhaps, as penance. In an interview that followed his TED Talk, which has racked up more than 3 million views, he describes burning grasslands and causing the Zambian government to kill thousands of elephants, decisions he deeply regrets.

The night before his Bluffton pasture walk, Savory took a packed auditorium at Andrew College, a small independent school in tiny Cuthbert, Georgia, through the evolution of his thinking, showing slides of land parcels that were put aside for conservation but turned to desert.

It was a message the audience seemed ready to hear. The couple run beef cattle, sheep hens and a few hogs on an 1,acre family farm, and operate a grassfed dairy. We move the cattle and sheep twice a day. On a ride through the White Oak property, he told Harris to stop casting seed over his pastures, recommending instead that he trust the effect of grazing to bring diversity back.

Harris, who has invested heavily in restoring the biodiversity of his pastures, visibly bristled.