Regenerative Grazing


"If we had viewed Earth from space for thousands of years, we would describe humans as a desert-making species." - Prof Elisabet Sahtouris


What it Regenerative Grazing

Let's start with conventional grazing.  In large part conventional grazing is simply turning your animals out onto your grasslands, pastures or crop residues and letting them graze where they like and as frequently as they like in a camp. The animals are generally rotated through 3 or 4 camps, with the animals grazing in a camp for a month or so before being moved.  The result is that animals spend an enormous amount of time in certain parts of the camp and precious little in others, spending most at the water and supplemental feed troughs, to the degree of causing erosion.  They unevenly graze the available plants with the palatable species being overgrazed and the less palatable undergrazed.  Then there is an extremely uneven distribution of dung and urine spread across the soil across the camp.  

Regenerative grazing is managed grazing where the farmer decides where and for how long the animals graze a particular patch of grass.  Using this tool the farmer is able to manage the under/over grazing issue. The idea is to mimic nature whose grasslands evolved in a symbiotic relationship involving four players - ruminants, predators, grasses and the soil microbiome.  The result of this symbiotic interaction was that the grasslands became one of the dominant biomes of the world and the soils below the grasses became the most carbon rich soils on the planet.  Grasses were maintained by moving herds of grazers and the herd effect of the ruminants' hooves, mouths, dung and urine which stimulated and fertilized the soils which in turn fed the plants.  

Conventional grazing is highly selective grazing and high quality forages suffer under repeated grazing without sufficient time to recover.  Over time this results in the less palatable grasses dominating and the whole ecosystem declining.  By stopping selective overgrazing of palatable species and allowing grass appropriate rest periods it is possible to increase the cover of the grasses, the diversity of plants, the organic matter in the soil, the amount of photosynthesis and the biomass per square meter.

For years livestock have been blamed for desertification of landscapes but the evidence does not support this accusation. If you look at both conservation areas and plots of land that have been fenced off for research, desertification continues without the presence of any livestock.  Desertification is not about the presence of livestock or overstocking but about how those livestock are managed.  Indeed it is with livestock and planned grazing that land managers have been able to reverse desertification.

"The [South African] veld is overgrazed and understocked" John Acocks

Large grass eating ruminants, their predators and grasslands evolved side by side. The predators hunted the ruminants and as 'safety in numbers' was the best survival strategy they bunched together in tightly packed herds.  Because they were packed together they quickly ate, trampled and fouled the grass with their dung and urine, so they kept moving to get a new supply of fresh grass (actually a mix of grass, forbs and legumes). The end result - migrations and tightly packed herds that were constantly on the move.  They would head off to greener pastures, leaving their dung and urine to stimulate the soil microbiology and they would only return at some distant date having given the grass time to recover.  Together they created an ecosystem that covered 30% of the earth's land mass, maximised the photosynthetic capacity of that land and sequestrating carbon in the soil, creating in the process the world's most productive soils.  Many of these soils have been the breadbasket of the world for the last 100 years.

It is this situation that Regenerative Grazing is mimicking. Using the electric fence to create a tightly packed herd on a camp that is large enough to provide the forage the animals need for the period they are in it (generally a day but some farmers move their animals multiple times a day). The animals only return to the same camp when the grass has had sufficient time to recover.

"Non-selective grazing is simply Nature's method of grazing" John Acocks 

Another amazing benefit of this constant movement is that they always put space between their dung and themselves. So when parasites emerged from the ground to find a host animal there were none to be found, resulting in the parasite dying and the cycle being broken. The same applies to ticks that fell from animals to lay their eggs.

Each grazing plan is context specific but basic starting points are: 

1. animals should not be in a camp for more than 3 days (or they will start going back to new growth) 

2. best results are achieved with 30+ camps (this ensures sufficient rest and recovery time for the grass).  

As farmers get experienced they achieve better results with higher densities - with the animals packed tightly together - and some farmers change camps 4+ times a day.  The rest periods differ significantly depending on the distribution and quantity of rain - in areas with long dry seasons (brittle areas) each camp is only grazed once a year or year and a half

The results that have been achieved with Regenerative Grazing, in incredibly diverse environments, are remarkable, from lush paddocks in England to desertified woodlands in Zimbabwe and the arid regions of New Mexico and the Karoo in South Africa. The growth of the grass, the density of grass plants, the soil cover and the soil organic matter all improve, maximising photosynthetic potential and in many cases farmers have been able to more than double their stocking rates.

The boundary fence on Norman Kroon's Karoo farm is an iconic example of the potential power of Regenerative Grazing

Here is another boundary fence image this time from a farm in Padua Park Station in Australia


Video: Fat cows moving camps


Cows, Carbon Cycles and Carbon Emissions 

All of biology, all of life, is carbon cycles. Today as the heat around climate change rises cows are now being increasingly blamed for heating the world with their burps and manure. This reductive outlook, that views cattle as not being natural and focuses purely on emissions, does not take into account that herbivores eating grass are part of a biogenic cycle carbon rather than a dead end emission.  Cattle eating grass is an entirely natural process that evolved with its own carbon cycle, this process is not a net emitter of carbon into the atmosphere - thats not how nature designs things. Had ruminants up-cycling grass into protein not been part of a balanced carbon cycle that experiment, like many before it, would have crashed.  Evidence shows that if cattle are grazed in a regenerative manner they balance out the greenhouse gasses they emit with the CO2 that is captured during the photosynthesis of the grass that they eat. Carbon like all matter cannot be created of destroyed it can only be converted from one form to another.

Much is made of the methane that ruminants belch as they break down plant cellulose but that is part of the natural cycle. There have been 100s of millions of ruminants on the planet for millions of years and they never pushed up greenhouse gas concentrations. Interestingly atmospheric methane levels have only begun rising since industrial times, only since we started burning fossil fuels. Nature had evolved mechanisms for dealing with natural methane emissions, such as the hydroxyl radical (OH) in the atmosphere that breaks methane down rapidly into CO2 and H2O.  But unnatural emissions from fossil fuels have overwhelmed nature's ability to scrub all the atmospheric pollution.

Indeed the evidence shows that as these ruminants evolved with the grasslands of the world they sequestered loads of carbon into the soil below those grasslands.

Soil is about so much more than just producing food, we literally can't live on the planet without the other ecosystem services it delivers and the focus of our concerns around food production should be on production systems that build rather than deplete soil.  But dues to multiple vested interests the conversation is stuck on meat vs plant based, manufactured foods.  If we don't heal our soils we can't live on planet Earth, it's as simple as that.  And without appropriately managed livestock integrated with our crop production and being properly managed on grasslands we can't heal the billions of hectares of soil that need to be healed.

Regenerative grazing, by fixing the carbon cycle, also helps to fix the water cycle by improving the infiltration rates and water holding capacity of the soil.  Through fixing the carbon and water cycles photosynthesis potential is maximised and via transpiration this contributes to cooling the planet.

It is clear that the only conceivable safe and long-term solution for carbon drawdown is through global ecosystem restoration. This will include forests and wetlands, but particularly, also, grasslands, including prairies and savannas, where carbon is sequestered through the roots of perennial plants and bound in organic soil compounds.

If we look at the 5 principles of soil health how well does Regenerative Grazing stack up?

  1. no disturbance - tick , no ploughing or chemical disturbance of the soil and its biology
  2. diversity - tick, a well grazed grassland has a healthy mix of grasses, forbs and legumes
  3. living root - tick, grasslands have living roots in the soil at all times
  4. armour - tick, well managed grasslands cover the soil with plants and litter at all times
  5. integrate animals - tick

Aside from improving the grasslands, decreasing erosion, increasing carbon sequestration and increasing water infiltration Regenerative Grazing is also good for wildlife. The diversity of the grasses, the longer grasses, the productivity of the soil microbiology, the increased insects and the increased flowers for pollinators all combine to improve the environment for the local wildlife.

Other names for Regenerative Grazing:

  • Holistic Planned Grazing
  • AMP - Adaptive Multi-Paddock Grazing
  • High Stock Density Grazing
  • Management Intensive Grazing
  • Mob Grazing
  • High Intensity Grazing or Ultra High Intensity Grazing
  • Planned Rotational Grazing


Video:  Regenerative Grazing

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