Tom’s Impact Grazing Experiment

Last year the five acres below our house looked like this:

The four foot tall sagebrush was a constant source of irritation to my husband, Tom, it was inhibiting the grass and forb growth — limiting the amount of graze available for our animals. We discussed it almost daily, how could we get rid of that brush? Burning wouldn’t work, there weren’t enough ladder fuels to carry a flame. We could rent a brush beater and a big horsepower tractor, but the locally available one always seemed to be broken down (and a little out of our price range). Drip torching or chain sawing each individual bush seemed ridiculous, then we came up with a wild idea.

I’m not sure who thought of it, because we’re constantly bouncing ideas off each other, but it came from a book we’d both read, “Beyond the Rangeland Conflict,” by Dan Dagget. We’d use cattle to clear the brush, or impact grazing, like Tony and Jerrie Tipton down in central Nevada. So, my husband made a proposal to my step-father/neighbor — if he would feed his replacement heifers on our land using round bale feeders, moving the feeders systematically around the field, we would watch and water the cows. Since our place borders his, it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience, and he agreed.

We started our experiment out with about 65 head of heifers and two bulls in early December. After a bull fight and some fence repair by the romantic light of pickup headlights, we ended up using about 65 heifers and one bull to conduct our brush removal project. After about three months, around March 1st, they moved the heifers out of our field. The transformation was incredible, hardly a sagebrush was left standing! The spring rains were just beginning to start, so my husband, the little chicks, and I immediately started hand broadcasting a grass seed mix off of the back of the Ranger.

We had an unusual spring. The rain and sunshine alternated for about three months, which my 80-something neighbor has never seen happen around here. It’s usually freezing winter, then 2 weeks of spring, then dry, arid summer. This spring brought the best circumstances we could have hoped for and this is what our field looked like two months after we took the cattle out:

Yeah, Tom! There are a few weeds, but everyone we’ve talked to says that’s normal…

© Sabrina M. Schaefer and Our Homestead, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sabrina M. Schaefer and Our Homestead with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.