Rotational grazing is critical to maintaining the health of a herd and the overall stewardship of land and natural resources. Successfully managing a grazing plan year after year, balancing stable elements with shifting factors like weather, forage, rainfall and labor can be a juggling act that, when done correctly, could yield enhanced profitability, stewardship and legacy.
Despite the benefits, an overwhelming majority of ranchers and farmers who raise beef still do not maintain yearly rotational grazing plans in a written or digital form, opting for a free-for-all flow of grazing information or, most commonly, a grazing plan honed over years that exists only in the minds of the operators who manage it.
Bought In
For Steve Wooten, owner and operator of Beatty Canyon Ranch, a cow-calf operation in southeast Colorado, tackling a growing season or even a single day managing his overall operation without consultation of their digital grazing plan is unthinkable.
“Could you do the budget of a multi-million-dollar business in your head?” he says. “If you did, could you tell which parts of the business are helping you and which are hurting you?”
Wooten knows that managing the daily operational needs and the overall operational goals of Beatty Canyon Ranch are exactly what it takes to keep his business running. Every single day, the multi-generational family analyzes the environmental resources available on their 27,000-acre home ranch, the additional 25,000-acre state land lease contracts they manage and the health of their 600-head herd. All of this is on top of managing their overall business, actively led by two generations of Wootens, and keeping their additional wildlife enterprises afloat.
“Writing down the plan helps you remember it and gets everybody engaged with it,” he says. “Everybody has a say in it and you’re more apt to hold those trigger points.”
On the Fence
In South Texas at Running V Ranch, Suzanne Schuchart hasn’t needed a formal, written plan to tell her what she knows about her land, her herd and her resources.
Schuchart is the fourth generation in her family to manage this land, taking over from her grandparents.
“We have 5,200 acres of mixed South Texas brush land and 500 acres of open coastal Bermuda fields where we run our cow-calf herd of 175 head,” she says.
The land is broken into 30 different tracts where she and husband, Pat, can graze their herd. Like Wooten, Running V Ranch also manages a wildlife enterprise, capturing opportunity for seasonal hunters to hunt deer, turkey, hogs, quail and dove.
“Running a balance between cattle and wildlife is important to us,” she says. “We make sure we aren’t overgrazing to get a mix of open land and native grassland for wildlife.”
This past year Schuchart finally put pen to paper, working working with a consultant to establish a formal written grazing management plan for Running V. She combined all of the information she knew from daily management and the conservation projects they had done over her three-decade career.
“The biggest thing for us was to get it down on paper so it’s visual,” she says. “I didn’t have a visual grazing chart or plan because I just know my rotation in my mind. Now I have a nice grazing chart where I pencil in whenever the cows have been in one pasture or another.”
Adversity Sharpens the Pencil
Both Wooten and Schuchart learned the art of stewardship at the knee of their grandmothers and mothers, but the challenges that their modern-day ranches face are far from the ones their matriarchs saw.
Wooten and his wife, Joy, started rotational grazing when they took over Beatty Canyon Ranch.
“We experimented with trying to come around to pastures twice a year and realized, in our low rainfall, semi-arid climate, our best expectation for resiliency is to go through pastures one time a year and try to have pastures that don’t get grazed at all in in the growing season,” he says.
But then tragedy struck.
And in that tragedy, Wooten says he saw a new philosophy as their only path forward.
“In 2000 we had a six-year drought, and we completely destocked this ranch and leased a place in Kansas for a few years,” he recalls. “We came back with the decision that we were going to stop feeding hay to mature cows.”
Even with their average yearly rainfall hovering around 11 inches, they were able to cut hay by 70% and supplemental cake by 50% and made a five-year transition of the cows starting to live with forage.
This new philosophy required that Wooten ramp up his grazing management, moving from a paper copy to spreadsheets to record movements.
“Ultimately we began to use pasture map and Agriwebb as our web-based data storage and now we use Enriched Ag high-resolution cameras that we drive through pastures, catching a picture of our route every six seconds,” he says. “Now we are working with Noble Research Institute to do soil probes to get a baseline of what our carbon level is in our soils.”
All of the data that Wooten collects adds up to an enhanced ability to manage the resources on his land, which can help Beatty Canyon mitigate weather stressors.
On Running V Ranch, Schuchart also knows a thing or two about dwindling rainfall averages.
“Water is a big deal with us not having a lot of rainfall here or very irregular rainfall,” she says.
Back in 1988, she says they had grass but no water, so they began running water lines to help ensure that they could keep their inventory consistent.
Running V has 30 ponds and 30 water troughs across the ranch. From their seven water wells, they pipe water across the whole ranch.
Their freshly completed grazing management plan takes that water into account.
“By mapping out all the water sources, we could see where additional water would diversify grazing or shorten travel distance to water for cattle and wildlife,” she says. “That was helpful.”
Wooten believes that his intensive rotational grazing is building resilience on Beatty Canyon Ranch, helping him to ensure that another prolonged drought won’t lead to tragedy. They can see the evidence of this when they ride their pastureland and gather data on its health and vitality. He says they have noticed more moisture has made a difference this year already.
“What will happen is the quick, rapid response of healthy plants with deep roots,” he says. “When they do get moisture, they grow rapidly. That alone means that we’re quicker to be able to get cattle back on the ranch and using pastures and get our stock back up again to numbers that are better in our budget.”
Managing the Future
Schuchart is entering her first season armed with the grazing management plan binder and rotational analysis chart at her disposal. She has been penciling in with colored pencils where her cattle have been grazing, using the data to plan their next move.
She has high hopes for the plan and its benefits to Running V.
“It will help with grazing rotation and setting goals of getting water to some other areas that aren’t as well-watered,” she says.
While the planning process revealed that her stocking rate is on-point, she’s hoping that by combining data around grazing, water and brush management, she will be able to increase her herd size.
“Hopefully the plan will help me with forage cover and better land management overall,” she says.
Meanwhile, Wooten, Joy and his children are taking a hard look at their plan for the season.
“We may not make an adjustment this year at all, but we’ve already been talking about it, about which pastures we think we want to try to leave rested this year and that, and then our target dates are still going to stay the same for liquidation or management numbers,” he says.
The plan and the daily management of it are one way in which Wooten says he’s helping to secure the legacy of Beatty Canyon Ranch, which now is under ownership of his daughter and son-in-law.
“You can’t believe how rewarding it is when you hand it over to these young people that you raised, taught and trained,” he says. “We have confidence in them, and they’re going to take care of it because they love it as much as we do.”
“They might have ideas that they’re willing to take a risk on that maybe at my age, I’m not willing to take,” he says. “They see things different, and they’ve got foresight that comes from their years of experience.”
This article is part of an ongoing State of Grazing Management series brought to you by Trust In Food and U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. You can learn more by visiting www.trustinfood.com or www.usrsb.org.
