Reply To: How to Avoid Overgrazing

  • Mark Tupman

    Member
    21/09/2023 at 4:44 pm

    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 be fully recovered by the time they start going to flower, if we are going to make hay or graze them! Up to this stage, fully recovered plants can still put on another decent flush of growth. We don’t want our plants to be setting seed when they haven’t fully recovered as this is somewhat akin to grazing unrecovered plants – reserves are exhausted, and regrowth and forage quality is poor. If we feel like the paddocks we are grazing in the green season are getting close to this point, it’s time to move on onto the stockpiled/sabbath paddocks. More on that another time.

    If we follow the principles of not overgrazing through the season, we can definitely prolong the vegetative growth of our pastures and we will be rewarded with much richer and faster regrowth. In spring, a stressed (unrecovered) plant is a bolting plant 🙁