How Rotationally Grazed Grass Fed Beef Heals the Soil
When we first bought this farm, huge portions of it were over run by huge thorn patches. For quite a while, I don’t know the exact time, our property had been on the market untended. Our neighbor across the street had let his cows graze it and go wherever they wanted during those years. For all I know the overgrowth of previously productive land started long before he put cows on it.
Either way, other than the hay fields which had been mowed every year, more than half of the other grazing land was overgrown. Having the cows on it was better than nothing most likely, but with my current knowledge, I’m not sure.
What they did was overgraze the portions that they liked and leave the rougher areas to allow the weeds and thorns to take over more and more land.
So what is the problem with cows keeping grass extremely short? This brings us to the soil micro-biome and how important it is for all life on the planet. Healthy soil is more complex than we can comprehend. It is a mix of bacteria, fungi, plant root systems, insects of all different sizes, and the organic and non-organic matter that makes up the raw materials they all use for life. It is estimated that less than 1% of the bacteria in soil have been identified and named.
So if we want to maintain soil health and use it sustainably for our maximum advantage what do we do? We believe here at Next Level Ranch that whether it’s the human body, our animals lifestyle, or soil health the best practice we have at our current state of knowledge is to mimic the natural environment as much as possible. We know much less than we think we know about nature as a whole. We implement this principle in our lives in tons of ways here but for soil specifically this means 2 main things.
1. We need to maintain the litter bank. In nature a healthy grassland is completely covered by grasses and weeds. As these grasses mature each year the old shoots die and are trampled or decay and form a deep covering on the ground. We call this the litter bank. The litter bank is usually intact in nature except when exceedingly violent events happen, like a buffalo herd during a particularly heavy rain or something like that.
We have some context from things like Lewis and Clark’s expedition and early frontiersman’s accounts but it’s hard to know how often this happened. It’s safe to assume that the litter bank in areas with as much precipitation as our farm was virtually always in tact. Buffalo herds were always on the move and it is reasonable to assume that all they would do is trample more grass on the ground and add to the litter bank rather than deplete it.
The litter bank does a few things, The build up of dead grass, weeds, and other plants that lay on the ground are constantly breaking down. I imagine it as an “in-between zone” where the oldest plant matter is becoming soil and becoming available to bacteria, fungi, and insects to start being decomposed at an accelerated rate. This area is niether soil or the plant under story above it is the area of change from one stage to the next. The majority of this dead plant matter is carbon. So when mature grasses die or are trampled and eventually decompose we are adding carbon to the top layer of the soil, creating new soil on top and removing that carbon from the atmosphere.
The other most important thing that it does is protect the soil from direct sunlight. We can assume a few things about bacteria that thrive in the soil based on simple observations about the conditions that cause them to thrive. They do not like UV light for multiple reasons. In a healthy soil ecosystem they are never exposed to direct UV radiation.
Furthermore, direct sunlight dried out bare soil very fast. Water is necessary for every aspect of the soil food web to thrive. Dry soil is dead soil.
Soils that are protected by a combination of living plants and dead plant matter have been observed to stay moist for much longer during droughts and have higher levels of organic matter. The more organic matter there is in soil the more the water carrying capacity of the soil increases.
2. We need to allow the plants to rest after being grazed. As we can see in grazing animals all over the planet, and in North America specifically by buffalo herds as recently as 150 years ago, they are constantly moving to new pastures. It is estimated that many times buffalo herds would not return to the same area for at least a year and sometimes longer. There would be smaller grazing animals impacting these areas off and on but the buffalo herds were the real force when it came to trampling and consuming forage.
There is a saying I picked up from a Stockman Grass Farmer article that goes, “1 cow grazing 100 acres for 100 days will kill many plants, while 100 cows grazing 1 acre for 1 day won’t kill any.” This is very true and the reason is that cows always go for dessert first. That one cow will leave many plants on that 100 acres completely untouched, but he will go around to his favorite species and hit them over and over again until they run out of energy reserves and die. Meanwhile if you move those 100 cows every day to a new pasture an element of competition is introduced and they will impact almost every plant in that 1 acre paddock relatively evenly.
Now imagine that the 1 acre paddock that has been pretty heavily trampled and eaten rests for at least a month, maybe more depending on the amount of precipitation. Those grasses will use the manure that the cows spread and the new rain to grow back to maturity. Once grasses mature they begin to take the excess energy and store it in their roots making their roots deeper. Deeper roots have access to more nutrients and more moisture since during dry periods the soil will dry at the top first and move deeper over time. The root system lengthening also increases the amount of carbon stored in the plant and not the atmosphere.
This also allows many more plant species to thrive in pastures that have adequate rest periods. Properly rested and managed pastures are much more biodiverse and attract all sorts of migratory birds and animal life not to mention plant species and insects. Every species you can make a home for in your pastures supports 6 other species on average.
This brings us to rotational grazing. Rotational grazing basically means we move the cows to new pastures. The more often we do this the better the results. Generally on our farm we move them once a day all summer with a few exceptions based on the size of the paddock and busy schedules. The main things we think about when it comes to how big the paddocks are and how often we move the cows are the two main principles above.
If we leave the cows too long on one area they will graze too much grass which doesn’t leave enough plant matter to continue adding to and maintaining the litter bank. Even if we make the paddock much bigger we will run into what we talked about before with the cows preferring certain areas and creating less healthy spots and more overgrown spots, so we try to keep them moving once a day to correctly sized pastures.
The rest period is based on how long it takes for us to get back to the first paddock on the farm. If we have too many cows per acre this will force us to get back before the grass is fully rested and we will sacrifice the health of our root systems and also most likely deplete the litter bank over time.
Now if you are thinking, “why does this matter to me as a customer?” I seriously doubt you read all that but maybe some people made it down here.
This massively effects the health and happiness of our animals and the quality and taste of our meat!
When you put cows in a big field and let them sit there for sometimes 6 months or more on the same pasture a lot of bad things happen. The soil takes all the hits we talked about earlier but the cows suffer as well.
They graze much closer to the soil and get exposed to more pathogens from the dirt. This means more cows need to be treated for infections and more vaccines are required, all stressful and unhealthy things for the cows.
They are constantly exposed to their own manure all year long. If you leave a cow in the same field all year, there is almost always poop near them all the time. Again, this increases the need for vaccinations and antibiotics.
They are eating clean grass every day and the grass they are eating is closer to maturity and has much more energy. Not only is the grass more mature and takes less time grazing to fill them up, but if the soil is taken care of, the grass will have much higher amounts of important vitamins and minerals that keep the cows healthy. These increased micronutirents make their way into the meat and make a difference in how much nutrition the meat has.
The cows also enjoy their lives much more. Every afternoon when we come down to move our eletric line and let them into the next pasture and call them over they gather at the line. They get genuinely excited to go to explore the next area and compete to find the tastiest feed. It keeps them much more entertained than sitting in a field they have spent all year in next to their own manure. Needless to say it is massively better than a feedlot.
Our cows calve in the pastures in the spring and are moving from day one. We have seen calves less than 12 hours old experiment with nibbling different types of plants (after they get some milk of course.) Think about how much different of a childhood that is from a calf born in very early spring in a winter sacrifice lot surrounded by mud and manure with barely any clean grass in sight. Sadly that is the norm for a lot of ranches.
The end product is a fattier piece of meat without ever touching a bite of grain. The meat has more nutrients as a result of eating vibrant grass grown from thriving soil. The animals have experienced less stress than almost any cow on the planet earth and honestly, we think you can taste that to.