It’s called mob grazing and can create a flurry of activity on both sides of an electric fence.
Bruce Downey has been mob grazing his cattle in east-central Alberta since 2004, and is starting to see significant improvement in his pastures. But the sight of a thousand or more cattle in a small confined area tends to draw a crowd of concerned locals.
“The good and bad about that is that you’ve got a lot of people monitoring a situation,” said Downey. “Nothing goes bad for very long before you’ve got calls. The bad news is that a lot of them are sitting on the road with binoculars watching for wrecks.”
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Mob grazing can produce major benefits on pasture land, said Downey. Its effect is based on two principles – stock density and herd effect – advocated by Allan Savory, an internationally renowned proponent of holistic grazing management. When cattle are moving, agitated and restless, their hooves effectively till the soil and push down some of the grass to form a big layer of thatch. Thatch helps to capture moisture and keep it in the soil, while the vegetative matter combined with urine and droppings increase the fertility of the pasture.
Downey, who has a forage-based cattle operation and custom grazes, began cautiously with a group of about 750 steers, moving them around quarter sections of land.
Downey’s land is in a semi-arid area with medium production. Half of his land is native rough fescue and the other half is tame grass. He owns about 3,500 acres and rents another 3,000 acres. His initial experiment with 750 head went well, but didn’t change the landscape as he had hoped.
“The grass utilization rate was a lot better, and we didn’t really have selective grazing,” he said.
The next year, Downey used 1,400 yearlings. The cattle were initially placed in a five-acre pen surrounded by electric fencing for a 24-hour period, which acclimatized them to the electric fence. To start mob grazing, he split his quarter sections into 80-acre parcels, depending on the topography, in order to tightly bunch the cattle. Water was hauled using a 10,000-gallon tanker.
Areas containing wetlands are dropped out of the rotation until later in the fall while those with noxious weeds are heavily grazed, so that the weeds are consumed and the soil disturbed.
“Yearlings seem to work best for us,” said Downey. “We tried cow-calf pairs and it was just too cumbersome and labour intensive to make cows move every day, for us.”
The cow-calf program has merit, but wasn’t a good fit for his operation, he said.
During the summer, Downey keeps the cattle on the tame grass.
“Once it starts freezing a little at night and things are starting to brown off, we move out to the native grass,” he said.
Critical mass
But the key factor is creating conditions for a mob mentality to take hold, he said.
“In our area, we’ve determined that the herd effect is a lot more important than stock density,” Downey said. “That’s why we can get away with a bigger field, but we run a bigger group of cattle. It’s a critical mass.
“When we ran a herd of under 1,000 or 1,100, the cattle are just a big herd of cattle, calm and relaxed and tranquil in the pasture. As soon as you go to more than that, these steers get kind of agitated. I don’t know if they’re looking for their own space or trying to establish a pecking order.
The cattle behaviour as a collective becomes a mob.”
Mob grazing requires adequate pasture to work with, he said, and should not be done on a pasture recovering from a severe graze, or one that does not have adequate vegetation to support a large group of cattle. Downey also recommends producers stockpile some grass the year before, and allow that pasture to rest for the majority of the year.
“Those would be the pieces that you’d start hitting early, because you would have all the old growth from last year to knock down, beat up and push into the ground,” he said. “By the time you’re done with those pastures, the new grass is already well established and has a critical mass to support the group.”
Everything is grazed once a year, and gets the growing season and the winter to recover, he said.
“The problem in our area is that the growing season is usually about three months. This year, the growing season was 180 days.”
Downey tries to give his cattle fresh grass every day and surveys them while the water is pumping. Labour is not a concern once the fencing is set up.
Downey said mob grazing might not be the best option for someone who was looking to put high gains on their cattle.
“That’s where a cow-calf system would work, because a cow can gain some weight where a yearling wouldn’t,” he said.
Mob grazing also requires preparation and math. Downey calculates how many hours he can keep the group on a pasture, as some pastures only have enough grass to sustain the cattle for 10 to 12 hours.
“If you’re renting grass, you can’t rent it by the day if you’re only there for hours,” he said.
Downey has a lot of bare ground on his land. He’s addressing this by bale grazing on that bare ground in order to build up grass over a three-to four-year period. Another option is to bunch up cattle on the bare ground. He uses herding dogs to accomplish this and parks the large group of milling cattle on a spot for 10 to 15 minutes.
“It busts that top layer up and you see some seedlings,” he said. “Maybe my kids will see grass growing there. I’m not sure. It’s a pretty long process.”
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“Thegoodandbadaboutthatisthatyou’vegotalotofpeoplemonitoringasituation.Nothinggoesbadforverylongbeforeyou’vegotcalls.”
BRUCE DOWNEY
