Here's a historical note: the Spanish used goats to clear the fields when they arrived 500 years ago. Apparently they used the goats for a full year and then introduced cattle at a rate equal to the goat population to graze together. They did not have fences.
Here's what some folks are doing now. These folks are not as interested in getting rid of weeds as they are in growing great forage. From your standpoint the forage might be weeds, but here's what they do. First is get some animals roughly equal to the stocking rate the neighbors are using. So if the neighbors are stocking at 1 animal unit per 20 acres and you have 100 acres, then you get 5 animal units worth of animals. Turn them loose and start building fences. The idea with the fences is to plan and control exactly where the animals are at any point in time during the year. They build a minimum of 15 pastures (goal) of about equal size. Then they grab up all the animals and put them into the first paddock for about 2 weeks. At the end of the 2 weeks the ground should look much like the surface of the moon. Actually it should look like it was mowed, but not scalped. The animals will be anxious to move into the next pasture when you open the gate. Once you close the gate to pasture number 1, you will not let them back into that pasture until the grass is growing up great. If you go an average of 2 weeks per pasture, it will take 2 weeks per pasture x (15-1) pastures or 28 weeks before your animals return to the pasture. That's half a year to grow the grass back before they go in and eat it back down. If you are planning right, you might think ahead and scatter the next season grass seed in the pasture before you let the animals in there so they can plant the seed with their hooves and manure.
To carry my example through...if you had 100 acres, 5 animal units, and 15 pastures; then each pasture would be 100/15 = 7 (roughly) acres. So you will have 5 animal units on 7 acres for several days. That is very high density but when they leave, they're gone for half a year.
What this does is forces the animals to eat the grass, even some unpalatable grass. If they don't eat it down, the pasture will thin out and become undergrazed. Think about the bison for a minute. They moved in enormous herds that ate everything in sight as the MIGRATED from the south to the north in the summer and north to south later. It was a full 5 months to a year before they came back to graze again. Some grasses will grow back and some will not take that kind of grazing.
_________________ David Hall Moderator Dirt Doctor Lawns Forum
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