Cattle management systems

Cattle management systems

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Wet soils on highly concentrated cattle grazing lands can mean impacts to forage, not to mention damage to soils themselves. Colorado State University extension expert Joe Brummer among colleagues studying cattle management systems, reducing soil compaction and plant damage, says producers need to consider factors such as soil type and soil moisture and grazing duration.

We've been working on an irrigated pasture system and planted to perennial forages. The issue is this particular pasture is dominated by a clay type soil and that's when we get into real issues with the potential soil compaction and plugging in those types of things where we can actually damage plants. Then its root growth down into the soil. Some of the things that we've come up with, instead of concentrating the animals into a really small area, we can spread them out over a larger area so you don't have as many hooves traveling across a certain piece of the area. We've also got a sandy area move them into a paddock that tends to have more of a sandy, coarser, textured soil in it so that water infiltrates and you don't get the soil compaction like you do in a clay soil. And if it gets extremely bad, either you have to sacrifice an area just to put him in a paddock and maybe feed him some hay and just plan on going back and reseeding at some point. The most extreme is where you would actually just totally remove them from that pasture, put them into a dry lot, feed them some hay until the soils dry out enough that you can put them back out to graze.

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