Have you ever wondered why it's better to have small portable pens and move your animals frequently, rather than having a couple big pens and move them infrequently?
In this blog I will show why management-intensive grazing is worth the effort.
Animal health
Diseases are rare in animals that are frequently moved, they are always on new clean ground, and during the time when no animals are on the ground the sun can sanitize it.
When animals are in one pen for long time diseases can develop because they are constantly putting manure on it and not giving it time to properly decompose. Parasites are also much less of a problem when animals are frequently moved.
Pasture health
When animals are in the same pen for long periods of time they will keep coming back to the same areas, overfertilizing, wearing it out, and overgrazing it.
Grazing efficiency
Animals graze far more efficiently with management-intensive grazing. Why? Because by the time the animals get to eating all the grass in a large pen most of it has been trampled down, and probably has a bit of manure on it too.
So, it may look fine to you, but would you want to eat something that had been walked all over?
We have seen this ourselves, for a while we had our herd of goats in two rolls of electric fencing and moved them every other day. One day we put them in four rolls and left them there for four days. At the same time, we added three more goats to our
herd, so per goat, they had less grass per day then when they only had two rolls.
They grazed that pasture very unevenly, leaving some areas almost ungrazed.
That's when we realized what a difference pen size and moving frequency makes. We now have them in two rolls, move them almost every day and the pastures look great!
Grass Hight
It's generally best to graze pastures when the grass is about 6"- 8" tall. When animals
are moved infrequently the pasture in the resting pen will get overgrown. There are many reasons why you don't want that to happen, for one, overgrown grass has less nutritional value.
Animals also don't graze grass much taller than 8" as evenly.
Now, that's not saying if you have an overgrown area you shouldn't graze it, just that you should avoid letting the areas you regularly graze get overgrown.
So What's Ideal?
Ideally you have either a small enough pen or enough animals in the pen that they eat all the grass down to 3" - 4" in a day.
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