Shrub steppe vegetation with flowering balsamroot and lupin
Tip Hudson’s

Range Tips

Practical bits of wisdom to support grazing decisions.

Is Adaptive Management the Holy Grail of Grazing?

By Tip Hudson, CSANR Senior Extension Fellow

Reducing stocking rates during a dry spring or skipping a wet pasture are examples of adaptive grazing management. WSU’s Tip Hudson explains how these practical decisions fit into broader principles for livestock performance and rangeland health.

A few weeks ago, I was part of a panel discussion with ranchers, scientists, and other natural resource professionals talking about adaptive management. We (all of us) tend to use the term somewhat loosely, and the panelists’ answers to the question “What does adaptive management mean to you?” confirmed the vague-ness of the term. Yet adaptive management is consistently identified in lists of key grazing management principles as one of the top factors in long-term success in grazing, if long-term success is defined by stable or improving rangeland and pasture health.

A synthesis paper by Kevin Jablonski and a long list of range scientist co-authors listed these 7 principles as the big ones that apply in any context:

  1. Practice adaptive management
  2. Optimize stocking rate
  3. Use a grazing plan
  4. Prioritize ecological health
  5. Evaluate animal distribution
  6. Animal welfare begets performance
  7. Think beyond the range

That paper gave what I would call a maximalist view of adaptive management, defined as follows:

“Successful grazing management relies on adaptive management and flexibility. This begins with collaborative goal setting, including identification of challenges, opportunities, and tradeoffs in advance. Monitoring of outcomes along with the use of checkpoints and triggers enable timely adjustments of plans and strategies. Regular formal meetings with team members and appropriate stakeholders to share and integrate lessons learned further enhance the likelihood of success.”

For most people, that’s a “fur piece” from how they conceive of adaptive management. But what you actually do, in practice, fits inside of that definition. Adaptive management, to you, might mean skipping a fall pasture in your rotation if the soil got too wet too early and grazing it would tear up the ground, so you go to cornstalks earlier. It might mean turning out 250 pairs instead of 300 because it’s been a dry spring and you think you’ll be short on either forage or stockwater or both. It might mean you watch for when cattle starting eating willows along the river instead of basin wildrye and that’s when you move them to the next piece.

1. Provide sufficient forage for animals to select a diet of adequate quantity and quality;

2. Manage grazing so animals eat a wide variety of plants and decrease impacts on desirable plants;

3. Leave enough leaf biomass on defoliated plants to facilitate interception and infiltration of precipitation and to maintain sufficient photosynthetic capacity for rapid plant recovery;

4. Allow adequate post-grazing recovery to maintain plant vigor and desired plant composition; and 5. Plan and create the means to control grazing pressure in time and space to facilitate the previous 4 principles.

Another synthesis paper presenting grazing guidelines, authored by Richard Teague, Fred Provenza, Urs Kreuter, Matt Barnes, and Tim Steffens, was a level or two closer to the ground on the ladder of abstraction:

Directing grazing animals and their effects on the plant-soil interface according to these principles requires thinking about where animals go when and why and for how long and how all of that affects livestock. Implementing any version of this is adaptive management.

I like both sets of principles and use both regularly in advising ranchers and land agencies on directing the action of the verb “grazing” (Perryman, personal communication) to achieve a variety of ecological goals. We’ll discuss more adaptive management ideas next time and maybe get into thinking about stocking rate.

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References

Jablonski, Kevin E., Justin D. Derner, Derek W. Bailey, et al. 2024. “Principles for Successful Livestock Grazing Management on Western US Rangelands.” Rangelands 46 (2): 35–41.

Teague, Richard, Fred Provenza, Urs Kreuter, Tim Steffens, and Matt Barnes. 2013. “Multi-Paddock Grazing on Rangelands: Why the Perceptual Dichotomy between Research Results and Rancher Experience?” Journal of Environmental Management 128 (October): 699–717.