Distribution is a critical tenet of livestock grazing management. Improvement of grazing distribution is often part of the rationale for implementing a grazing system. However, increasing stocking density by reducing pasture size or increasing herd size does not necessarily improve uniformity of grazing. Strategic placement of fences and reducing pasture size are useful tools to modify grazing distribution, but other techniques can be equally, and sometime more, effective. Water developments are powerful tools for improving distribution and they are often an overlooked benefit of implementation of rotational grazing systems. Unfortunately, development of water does not always resolve concerns with uneven grazing. One of the most powerful tools for modifying cattle distribution is to manipulate when the pasture is grazed. For example, grazing during late spring and early summer can reduce cattle use of riparian areas compared to grazing in mid to late summer. Use of adapted animals can increase of rugged terrain and areas that are far from water compared to na�ve and unadapted cattle. During periods when the forage is dormant, strategic supplement placement can be used to lure cattle to underutilized areas. Low-stress herding is a labor intensive but effective approach to reduce time cattle spend in riparian areas. When combined with strategic supplement placement, low stress stockmanship can be used to target cattle grazing. The key to successively modifying cattle grazing distribution is to consider and test one or more management tools that address site-specific distribution concerns and then evaluate their success and refine promising practices.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.