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Over the past few decades, patch burning has become a recommended practice in the Southern Plains of the USA rather than burning an entire pasture at one time. Patch burn plans follow a burn sequence where several patches with different times-since-last-burn occur within the pastures, whereas for the broadcast burn plans entire pastures are burned at one time every several years so that each year the time-since-last burned is uniform across the pastures. The objective of our study was to determine whether animal performance, per hectare or per head, differed between the two treatments. In our long-term experiment, in three replicate blocks, the blocks were divided into two pastures that were randomly assigned the patch-burn treatment, where ¼ of the pasture was burned in a 4-yr rotation, or the broadcast burn treatment, where the entire pasture was burned every 4 years. The pastures were grazed each year with weaned growing cattle (BW = 242±16 kg) to harvest a targeted 25% of the expected annual forage production over an approximately 180 d period (4 5% of the use was in the dormant, DS, and 55% of the use was in the growing season, GS). Cattle received a range cube protein supplement during the dormant season. The annual gains per hectare were 60.0 kg/ha for both the broadcast and patch burn treatments. The effect of grazing season on gain per hectare and average daily gain was significant with GS gain of 49.4 kg/ha and DS gain of 10.6 kg/ha. Average daily gains were more than three times greater in the GS (0.78 kg/d) than in the DS (0.21 kg/d). These data show that whatever benefits exist for patch burning over broadcast burning, animal performance cannot be counted among them, nor can animal performance be used to justify one over the other.