Hey Kate,

The premise is that unless you have exclusively ryegrass and clover paddocks, the stock won’t graze it down to a nice even hight, they’ll graze the best and leave the rest, so grazing it to a certain hight is kind of a mute point. They’ll also eat the leaves first and leave the stems. This can mean inadequate fibre intake at…

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Doesn’t the selective grazing really only happen when the stock density is too low? Be great to see a pic of what your paddock looks like when you are ready to move the stock off ..

So are you saying that to leave 5 to 7 cm of fodder behind is too much, better to graze it hard then not come back for 90 days(Eric) or until the bottom leaves are…

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Hi Eric,

Cheers for your input. I couldn’t agree more that the “don’t graze it down too much theory” leads to selective grazing. I’ve done the total grazing course with Jamie Elizondo and got a lot out of it. I’m seeing great benefits from putting the principles into practice in terms of soil health, diversity of species, generation of biomass…

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Interesting discussion. I believe grazing management is the most important consideration for any livestock system. Our livestock are our employees – they work for us to improve soil function. I agree with your definition of overgrazing.

Essentially grazing management is all about managing time. I have applied the RCS and probably most…

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That’s a great point Kate and I’ve done much deliberating on that matter :-/

What I’ve come to is that, yes, we can use grazing to prolong vegetative growth of annual species to some degree but it all happens pretty quickly in spring and we can only apply this strategy for a limited period of time.

The bottom line is that we want our plants to…

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The trick in our short growing season with annuals is to try to keep the pasture in a vegetative state- that can be a challenge if you don’t have enough livestock.

What do you think about leaving some paddocks to ‘stockpile’ for summer standing feed and focus on the remaining paddocks for quality. By that I mean moving slow enough to ensure…

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