More on rotational grazing

Rotational grazing isn’t a new concept. In fact, nomadic tribes have been moving their herds regularly for centuries—some, like those in many other countries, still do. In harsh climates, moving animals frequently is crucial for survival. Nomads understand that animals need to be moved to avoid overgrazing and to allow the land to regenerate and to ensure their animals are getting healthy forage. Wild animals too, naturally move to new grazing areas, often driven by the need to avoid predators.

Recently, experts like Alan Savory and Joel Salatin have popularized the benefits of daily rotational grazing. While they acknowledge they didn’t invent this method, they’ve educated others on its power to manage parasites, regenerate soil, and create sustainable land use. Unfortunately, some have only rediscovered this approach in the past few decades.

Modern farming often involves little more than occasional moves to fresh pasture—maybe just a few times a year. And in large-scale industrial operations, animals are kept in confined spaces with limited or no access to the outdoors. While big farms can still be effective, how they’re managed, is critical. Rotational grazing is more labor-intensive, but offers significant benefits, especially for small farms like ours. By carefully managing where our animals graze, we can create balanced, healthy pastures for all our animals. This model could also help larger farms become more profitable and sustainable.

Here’s how it works: We start with our sheep, who graze the “best” grass first. After them, the pigs come in. and they are followed by the chickens. Pigs are fantastic for a number of reasons, including their ability to dig up seed banks buried in the soil. These seed banks, full of dormant seeds, need to be brought to the surface for optimal growing conditions. By rooting around in the soil, pigs expose these seeds, allowing them to germinate and improve the overall forage on our pasture. On top of all of this they also eat the fermented manure of the sheep which could have parasites that live in the sheep, but they die in the pigs due to their differing digestive systems. Then the chickens come behind and eat both types of manure and the same thing happens with any parasites. By only keeping them on a plot for a day at a time, we manage to break our pest cycle and thus we have our “pasture sanitation program”.

Because we rotate the pigs daily, they don’t damage the topsoil. They can only root so much in 24 hours, and since they rest and sleep much of the day, they don’t destroy the land. We even use them to help loosen the soil when we’re building new garden beds or attempting to break our hardpan ground.

Rotational grazing offers a holistic approach to traditional grazing practices. Many large-scale operations confine animals to concrete or feed them grain to achieve certain marbling in the meat. But ruminants aren’t naturally suited to grain and feeding them this way can lead to health problems. Through rotational grazing, we’ve found that our lamb has rich, dark red meat with excellent marbling, all while avoiding the need for dewormers, antibiotics, and vaccinations.

In our high-altitude desert climate, rotational grazing is an essential tool to restore our pasture, retain water, and eliminate the need for chemicals. It’s a key part of reversing desertification and ensuring the land remains healthy for future generations. In the few years we have been here, we have seen an incredible improvement in our forage for our animals, return of native grasses, and hardpan soil. We use electric fences that have to stake in the ground and when we first started, it was almost impossible to get the stakes into the ground and we had to use a picks many times to loosen the ground enough to get the stake into the ground. Now, we have little to no issue with the dirt as it has been broken up. We are confident in our method and have loved seeing the improvement over the years and we can’t wait to keep growing and improving and perfecting our techniques.