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About Holistic Planned Grazing

It is based on a military planning procedure developed over hundreds of years to enable the human mind to handle many variables in a constantly changing, and often stressful, environment. The technique reduces incredible complexity step-by-step to absolute simplicity. It allows managers to focus on the necessary details, one at a time, without losing sight of the whole and what they hope to achieve. Traditional goals of producing meat, milk or fiber generally becomea by-product of more primary purposes–creating a landscape and harvesting sunlight.

July 24, 2015 | Source: Savory | by

What Is Holistic Planned Grazing?

Holistic Planned Grazing is a planning process for dealing simply with the great complexity livestock managers face daily in integrating livestock production with crop, wildlife and forest production while working to ensure continued land regeneration, animal health and welfare, and profitability.

Holistic Planned Grazing helps ensure that livestock are in the right place, at the right time, and with the right behavior.

It is based on a military planning procedure developed over hundreds of years to enable the human mind to handle many variables in a constantly changing, and often stressful, environment. The technique reduces incredible complexity step-by-step to absolute simplicity. It allows managers to focus on the necessary details, one at a time, without losing sight of the whole and what they hope to achieve. Traditional goals of producing meat, milk or fiber generally becomea by-product of more primary purposes–creating a landscape and harvesting sunlight.

In the process of creating a landscape, livestock managers also plan for the needs of wildlife, crops, and other uses, as well as the potential fire or drought. To harvest the maximum amount of sunlight, they strive through the planning to decrease the amount of
bare ground and increase the mass of plants. They time livestock production cycles to the cycles of nature, market demands, and their own abilities. If profit from livestock is important, they factor that in too. At times they may favor the needs of the livestock, at
other times the needs of wildlife or the needs of plants.

Because so many factors are involved, and because they are always changing it is easy to be swayed by those who say we can ignore all the variables: managers will do all right if they just watch the animals and the grass, or if they just keep their animals bunched and rotating.

Each of the factors influencing the grazing plan–when a farmer expects to breed and wean, when and where areas will be covered in snow or threatened by fire, when and where antelope are having their young, when and where ground-nesting birds are laying, when and where the farmerwill need to trample an eroding piece of ground or a harvested cropfield, etc.–are recorded on a chart.

This provides a clear picture of where livestock need to be and when, and this determines how the manager plans their moves. Holistic Planned Grazing has proven to be effective for over four decades on roughly 40 million acres on four continents.