Cow_RotationalGrazing_Sechrist_Richard_FredericksburgTX_19April2002_Reel2205.wav

Richard Sechrist [00:00:00] One of the things we've done through holistic management is we've gone through a pasture rotational grazing system that we're not where we want to be right now.

Richard Sechrist [00:00:10] We we took our ranch from six pastures. We have eleven hundred acres. And for 50 years that we operated, we operated as six pastures. Ninety five percent of the time, all the gates were open. Cows could go wherever they wanted to go.

Richard Sechrist [00:00:22] We had some places that were radically overgrazed and some places that were radically undergrazed. And therefore we got some mesquite, not a lot. Lots of cedar, primarily from areas that were under grazed and the areas around the water systems and all where the cows kind of hung out were radically overgrown. So we lost a lot about diversity.

Richard Sechrist [00:00:47] In the rotational grazing system, we've gotten now 22 pastures. We would like to have 45 pastures, but we have 22 pastures that we can move these animals through. You have, what we're trying to do is to get very high animal density and animal impact on the soil, to break up what we call capping. The soil caps over, and rain hits it, and it hits it and runs off instead of going into the soil because it's capped over. It's like, it's like a sheet of plastic basically over it. The water can't penetrate that. And if you see black areas in soil, for instance, on you, we've all got them on our ranches. If you see that, that's capping and you can go and pick that off with your knife. And sometimes that capping will be half an inch to even an inch thick. So when water hits it, it runs up just like it would run off my hand. So it can't go down to this root system. Or can't go down to the seeds that are there. There's seeds there. You don't have to replant anything. What we've got to do is break that capping up.

Richard Sechrist [00:01:47] So what we're trying to do is to do this rotational system. So we get high animal density for short periods of time and then the animals are off of there until that grass can fully recover.

Richard Sechrist [00:01:59] We do transects and where we actually look at in a one square foot area how many diverse plants we found. When we started this, we had about six or seven different varieties of plants in that one square foot area. And now we have 25 and 35 varieties of plants in that one square foot area.

Richard Sechrist [00:02:16] And that's what we're managing to.