Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final story in a series on grazing management.

By Robert Waggener

Progressive ranchers familiar with thinking outside the box are dramatically reducing costs and improving rangeland resources at the same time by grazing year-round, without the use of supplemental feeds.

“Our crop is in the field 365 days a year, but many ranchers think that ‘grazing management’ only applies to that crop during the growing season,” said Jim Gerrish, who manages the grazing on a cattle operation in Idaho and leads Management-intensive Grazing workshops across the U.S. and Canada.

“Your crop isn’t out there 105 days a year. It’s out there 365 days a year, so you just can’t park grazing management in the shed during winter,” Gerrish told students attending a four-day MiG school last year in Wyoming.

“Grazing management should be about balancing ecosystem processes, not about manipulating inputs. If you build your ranching operation around buying and manipulating inputs, it will be very, very difficult to make a profit.”

Gerrish has visited hundreds of ranches during all four seasons, and among his observations is that some producers do a good job of intensively managing their grazing during the growing season, with such tools as movable fences and multiple grazing paddocks.

“But then winter arrives, and they open up the gates and let the cows out,” Gerrish said. He emphasized that many ranchers in the West don’t pay enough attention to winter grazing management. At the same time, he said, ranchers put up tons of hay during summer and fall and then feed that hay throughout winter — two very expensive propositions.

ADJUSTING WIRE: Jim Gerrish creates paddocks for winter strip grazing with permanent and temporary electric fence.

After spending the first half of his professional career in beef-forage systems research and outreach for the University of Missouri, Gerrish moved to Idaho, where he brought forward-thinking ideas to the region.

“Increasing management intensity in the winter is where we started in Missouri. It was not green growing-season management,” Gerrish said. “We learned that we needed to do a better job of summer grazing management in order to grow more winter grazing opportunities. This allowed us to grow more feed during the growing season and not feed expensive hay during winter.”

Building rangeland health

Gerrish referred to growing and stockpiling more feed on rangelands for use during winter, not focusing on growing grass and legumes in irrigated pastures and then pulling haying equipment out of the shed — a 180-degree switch from the norm.

“I’m an advocate of grazing irrigated pastures spring through fall and then grazing dry rangelands in winter. On private land, you can easily make that shift once you make the decision,” Gerrish said. “It is a much better match-up nutritionally to graze cow-calf pairs on high-quality irrigated pastures, and then use the dormant range for winter feed for your cows.”

Plus, he said, most range scientists agree that dormant-season grazing is one of the fastest ways to improve rangeland health.

“When we have cattle out during the entire growing season, biting off these plants as they are trying to grow, that’s hard to make progress in terms of plants maturing and producing seed,” he said. “If you want to accelerate rangeland improvements, consider doing the opposite.”

This means, for example, using strip grazing in the winter on dormant range and using protein supplements to support animal performance.

“We have had clients who switched from set stocking to strip grazing, where they allowed the animals to strip-graze for three to five days. They dramatically reduced — and, in some cases, completely eliminated — the protein supplementation requirement,” Gerrish said. “With strip grazing, we’re budgeting out a limited amount of protein that is available in that forage.”