Mob Grazing
A tool to improve pasture and increase stocking rate.
Short-duration, high-intensity grazing — many cattle on a small area of pasture, moved at least once a day or several times a day to a new section of pasture — is often called mob grazing. There are several interpretations of what mob grazing means.
Ian Mitchell-Innes is an educator certified in holistic management in South Africa who has been practicing these principles on his own ranch for 15 years. He presents talks and courses on the subject around the world. He defines mob grazing as getting animals to move through a pasture at high stock density to emulate the predator-prey relationship, which was the major factor influencing grazing behavior of herds before humans imposed their own management systems on domesticated ruminants.
In discussing the predator-prey relationship, he says it’s difficult for predators — other than man — to kill wild animals if they are tightly bunched (high stock density). To protect themselves, herd animals grazed in tight groups and kept moving.
“As a result, only the tops of grasses were eaten, and that’s where all the plant energy is. The rest of the plant was trodden onto the ground, to serve as protection for the soil — protection from sun, wind or rain (erosion),” explains Mitchell-Innes. Plant litter provides food for microbes in soil and adds organic matter.
“But because of the way we’ve managed our land, we graze pastures too continuously and too short, leaving plants with inadequate leaf surface to optimize the benefit from the sun’s energy. Energy is what makes animals fat, and enables them to be healthy and reproduce,” he says. You have to monitor animal performance, as well as plants. Without acceptable animal performance, stockmen will go broke.
“Energy from the sun is free, if we harness it properly by letting grass keep most of its leaves, having cattle eat just the tops,” says Mitchell-Innes.
He learned the principles of mob grazing by trial and error on his own farm, funding his own experiments and working through problems, using the holistic-management decision-making process. Commercial companies aren’t interested in this type of grazing system, however, because people doing it correctly don’t need to buy anything.
“If you don’t need balers, tractors, fertilizers, suddenly ranching can become profitable,” he says. “My learning (through trial and error) cost me a lot of money until I figured it out.”
Now Mitchell-Innes travels around the world, teaching other stockmen the basics of mob grazing to help save them the high costs of trying to stay in business using traditional methods of grazing and haying.
