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If you want to build soil, increase animal health and increase your stocking rate, combine herds and move them frequently.

R. P. 'Doc' Cooke, Blogger

October 22, 2019

2 Min Read
A single herd on a southern Oklahoma ranch
Author says it is a tactical error from the standpoint of ultimate profitability to run multiple herds.Alan Newport

Recently I was reviewing the European theater of World War II. It is almost hard to understand how Germany failed to win the whole show. In something like nine months Hitler’s war machine had taken most all of Western Europe including a large French armed force and most everything Great Britain had to fight with. The escape of 338,000 English troops from Dunkirk back to their home island was a German gift and a mistake Hitler never overcame.

But his really big blunder came in splitting his forces and breaking the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union and the invasion of Russia in late June of 1941. He ended up losing 300,000 men and a tremendous amount of equipment for this effort. Splitting his armies made it possible for the allies to destroy the German program in the following 46 months.

As beef producers it is common for many of us to make a similar mistake to that of Hitler. We split our herds and run cattle in multiple locations. The cost in profitability and stress are high, but the loss of forage and soil growth are likely even more important.

An extremely important natural model are these six facts:

  1. It takes grass to grow grass.

  2. Forage doesn’t grow with cattle standing on it.

  3. Successful planned grazing requires complete forage growth recovery.

  4. Complete pasture recovery leads to and yields plant diversity. Diversity increases system stability and health.

  5. Regenerating soils increases profitability.

  6. Multiple herds come at a high cost.

The principle of “use it or lose it” is very important. But the system (pasture) must be completely recovered before use if we are to generate the results we need. High animal impact, animal health, soil increasers, and profits per acre are most closely at maximum when the herd is all together. Yes, there are individual animals that will drop out and require culling but I never see multiple herds operate at the efficiency level of one herd.

Multiple high-density moves on a daily basis can be executed while your neighbor is driving up and down the road from herd to herd to herd. You'll be gaining ground. He'll be losing. Plan to keep your cattle together. Remember that no one grows grass with cattle standing on top.

About the Author(s)

R. P. 'Doc' Cooke

Blogger

R. P. "Doc" Cooke, DVM, is a mostly retired veterinarian from Sparta, Tennessee. Doc has been in the cattle business since the late 1970s and figures he's driven 800,000 miles, mostly at night, while practicing food animal medicine and surgery in five counties in the Upper Cumberland area of middle Tennessee. He says all those miles schooled him well in "man-made mistakes" and that his age and experiences have allowed him to be mentored by the area’s most fruitful and unfruitful "old timers." Doc believes these relationships provided him unfair advantages in thought and the opportunity to steal others’ ideas and tweak them to fit his operations. Today most of his veterinary work is telephone consultation with graziers in five or six states. He also writes and hosts ranching schools. He is a big believer in having fun while ranching but is serious about business and other producers’ questions. Doc’s operation, 499 Cattle Company, now has an annual stocking rate of about 500 pounds beef per acre of pasture and he grazes 12 months each year with no hay or farm equipment and less than two pounds of daily supplement. You can reach him by cell phone at (931) 256-0928 or at [email protected].

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