I help one of my buddies design and implement grazing systems. He is promiscuously entrepreneurial in that he will sell material and services of many varieties as well as buy materials and services for subsequent resale. He'll sell you machinery and cattle or buy them from you. He'll sell you a production system and buy your production. He'll sell you some extra labor and hire you to do some work. If there's a way for him to make something from a deal he'll do it, and sometimes he'll do it even if there's no profit in hopes of later benefit. I wrote this for him for use with one of his more astute clients who is getting into the pastured beef business. It's just opinion.

If there were no constraints so that I could design and implement the grazing system of my dreams what would it be like? For my entertainment, and perhaps yours too, this is it.

I pay a lot of attention to animal behavior and have observed that they are not perfectly regular. We tend to be very clock and calendar driven but they are not. They don't eat the same amounts at the same times every day when allowed to establish their own rhythms of life. But they do respond to external stimuli, following the lead of other animals or even trusted humans, so long as that leadership is not oppressive.

For example, an animal will resume grazing after loafing if the lead steer goes back to work. This doesn't happen immediately, but the delay won't be long. In a managed grazing system where the grazier is in effect the lead steer this provides a management tool. In practice this can be seen as inducing the animals to eat more than they would eat if left to their own choices. They eat more because I want them to eat more.

This only works when done at the right time. You can get them up to eat again a little sooner than they would otherwise get up, but you can't interrupt a necessary loafing period before they have had time to digest. If you do they will be cranky and listless, trampling more forage than they eat, and more likely to get into scuffles with their mates, all of which is counter productive.

It works best when your management interventions are done at the right time of day. They like gray light. If you move them to fresh pasture at the very crack of dawn they will eat enthusiastically and get a belly full before sun up. If you move them to fresh pasture after sun down the same happens. At all other times they are less enthusiastic, though if they are hungry they will graze at every opportunity.

This doesn't mean that they won't top themselves up during the day, it just means that they eat less and are more picky. This is the time when they nibble, finding something tasty in a corner or near a rock. They clean up forage overlooked during the hard grazing period when they were trying to eat as much as possible as fast as possible. It's bovine snacking. Younger animals seem to do this more than mature ones, but they are also the first to get a belly full and begin loafing when big meals are served.

Grass has its own rhythms. It makes sugars in sunlight and consumes them after dark. They breathe carbon dioxide, do photosynthesis and emit oxygen in daylight; but breathe oxygen, do respiration and emit carbon dioxide in the dark. This alternating metabolic behavior has grazing implications.

In the morning after a night of respiration grass will have more protein. It makes it at night which increases protein but reduces sugars. The ratio of protein to sugar is markedly different. The reverse is true in the evening. And so the meal at dusk can be the best of the day for fattening cattle. If you only move them once a day then do it at dusk rather than dawn.

Still, they aren't machines that do things perfectly regularly day after day. The cattle have "weeks" too, but they aren't seven days long. They seem to have a 4 day week. After 3 days of eating industriously they are happy to eat less on the 4th, spending much of the day loafing and playing if there are any toys available. Anything can be a toy, especially if it is new to them. A stick or a rock can be an object of interest. They'll mess around with a branch that fell from a tree, rolling it around entertaining themselves, or so it appears from my perspective. Leave a tool or a machine in the paddock and they will be fascinated. I've wondered if leaving them toys to play with might even be a good management practice. Cow toys might be good for their health and happiness just as pig toys are used in piggeries. A chain hanging from a tree provides hours of entertainment. A forty pound irregularly shaped chunk of wood is a cow ball that they'll roll around all night, even at times seeming to play catch by rolling it back and forth between them.

And so, given all of this, my perfect pasture would have enough paddocks so that I could move the cattle as often as they'd like plus a little more that I'd like, and that would also allow the grass to have the rhythms that it likes.

I'd want 7 paddocks every 4 days, a 7:4 ratio, to feed the cattle well. Grass regrows in 21 days, more or less as the seasons change. In spring it grows faster, in summer it grows slower. In fall it grows fast again, and in winter it grows much more slowly. This rhythm is complicated by the succession of grass species during the year, but it generally describes the situation for high level planning purposes. So, to allow 21 days of rest I need about 35 paddocks. That's 5 weeks in 4 day cow weeks, and they need 7 paddocks per cow week.

Things never go perfectly. There will be cow weeks when they have to make do with only 4 paddocks rather than 7, and there will be cow weeks when they don't get their day off, when they get 8 paddocks rather than 7, perhaps more. I've moved them 3 times a day in spring when the grass was threatening to get out of control, and they will eat more than they truly want if I ask them to eat more, especially if I stay in the paddock with them doing paddock maintenance chores. They work when I work. I'm the boss and they aim to please, at least while I'm watching.

The size of each paddock and the stocking rate are determined by the amount of land available for the pasture. The system is the same for a 35 acre pasture as for a 350 acre pasture, but the size of the paddocks vary. If there were only 20 acres available the paddocks would be about a half acre each.

In this system a paddock is sized to be one meal rather than one day's total forage needs. When done this way grazing efficiency goes up. More of the forage gets eaten rather than trampled or fouled. After a meal they lay down to loaf on already grazed grass. After loafing they urinate and defecate right where such inputs are now needed. The grazier should be aware of this pattern and enable it. Don't be in a hurry to move them to a new paddock after loafing. Walk among them for a few minutes letting them wake up fully and they will drop their loads there rather than in the fresh paddock where you will lead them, so they eat more of the fresh, unfouled paddock.

This is a location specific system. It assumes a benign climate and irrigation water. In dryland areas that have harsh winters the system would be different. Many of the principles still would apply, but the solutions would be different. This will be apparent in the following.

The time to service a paddock is immediately after it is grazed. That's when the "refusal" such as bitter weeds and fouled grass should be clipped. If you don't do this then over time you will have more and more weeds, and by clipping weeds as well as refused grass you accelerate the cycling of nutrients. The sooner it is on the ground for bacteria and worm food, the sooner it comes back as more forage. Clipping is an expense that you don't want to do more than necessary. It takes labor, machine time and fuel. You don't need to do it after every grazing unless you have a bad weed problem.

There are fine points to paddock maintenance. A careful grazier will always have a few grass seeds with him. If a bare spot is found he might scrape the dung off of his boots onto the spot and drop a few seeds. Bare spots happen due to burrowing rodents and hoof damage. If you don't plant your seeds then there's no telling what will use that spot. This is an opportunity for invasive species to get a start, so it is wise to be proactive and do preemptive seeding.

This is also the time to fertilize. Like clipping, this isn't an every time activity. It needs to be done when it is most effective, and this requires knowledge of the life cycles of grasses and forbs. One useful time to fertilize is just prior to species succession. When a C4 summer grass that has been dormant all winter is nearing its season it uses lots of nutrients to emerge. You can't see the C4 grass yet, but you must know that it is coming. A light fertilization at this time gets used immediately so that there is no waste, and pays you back handsomely with a vigorous stand. There are similar opportunities in spring and fall when C3 perennials and C3 annuals are gearing up to grow.

The exact timing depends on the form of fertilizer used. If you are using manure then you need to allow more time for soil microorganism to mineralize the manure in order to match the availability of fertility to plant needs. It is similar for urea since it is, in a sense, also an organic fertilizer, the same as urine from the cattle but synthesized elsewhere. A ready to eat fertilizer such as ammonium nitrate takes less time to be useful. The nitrate part is immediately available and the ammonium part will be nitrified by soil bacteria fairly quickly, becoming available bit by bit over as little as 2 weeks depending on soil temperatures and bacterial activity rates. This 2 step availability of ammonium nitrate is sometimes referred to as a split application since there is an immediate effect followed by a delayed second effect. The other shoe drops. There are also mixed fertilizers such as manure fortified by ammonium sulfate, urea-ammonium-nitrate (UAN) and even polymer coated time released fertilizers which become available as the polymer coatings dissolve over time.

Lastly, this is the very best time to irrigate the paddock. It washes in nutrients and perks up grass that has been bleeding from broken leaves. The animals won't be back for a while so it is the best time for the sward to be softened by water without the danger of pugging by heavy hooves.

There are additional caveats. This system is more for beef than dairy animals, and it is definitely not for dry cows or bulls who are already mature. It's mainly for finishing steers. It's a finishing school, a charm school as I've jokingly called it. It still works, though not as well, if you skip irrigation, fertilizer and clipping to save the cost of inputs or adhere to an ideology such as avoidance of "unnatural" amendments.