🐄 Grazing and Rangeland

Two words sound the same and mean completely different things. Getting them apart is the beginning of managing grazing.

Carrying capacity is what the land can support, on the grass and browse it grows by itself, without the land losing productive ability over time. Stocking rate is what you have actually put on it. Carrying capacity belongs to the land. Stocking rate belongs to you. You choose the second one every year, whether you think about it or not.

When stocking rate is above carrying capacity, something specific happens, and it is worth understanding rather than just fearing. Grass plants that are bitten off keep being bitten off before they can grow new leaf. A grass plant feeds itself with its leaves. Take the leaves away repeatedly and the plant has to spend its root reserves to push out new ones. Do that often enough and the roots shrink, the plant weakens, and eventually it dies and leaves bare soil where it stood.

Which plants die first? Not the ones you would want. The most palatable, most productive, most nutritious grasses are the ones cattle choose first and return to most often. So overgrazing does not thin the veld evenly - it picks off your best species and leaves the tough, unpalatable, low-value ones behind. Over years, the composition of the pasture changes. The land looks green from a distance and feeds fewer animals than it did.

This is why overstocking is not a mistake you can fix next year by selling a few animals. You are not just taking too much grass this season. You are reducing how much grass the land can grow in every season that follows. That is the meaning of the phrase "without the land itself degrading" in the definition of carrying capacity.

Now the hard part, and this course is going to be honest with you rather than give you a comfortable number. You want to know how many hectares one cow needs. This course does not give you that figure, and the reason is not laziness.

The South African rangeland source consulted for this course explicitly warns that regional benchmark figures for hectares per Large Stock Unit are unreliable and can mislead a farmer. Carrying capacity depends on the actual condition of your veld, on which grass species are growing there, on the rainfall in that particular year, and on how that specific piece of land has been grazed in the past. Two neighbouring farms in the same rainfall zone can have genuinely different carrying capacities because one was rested and one was hammered for twenty years. A single number for "savanna" or "semi-arid rangeland" flattens all of that and gives you false confidence.

So no hectares-per-LSU figure for any named African region or biome was retrieved for this course in a form worth teaching as a target. That gap is real and it is stated plainly here rather than filled with a plausible-sounding number that could cost you your grazing.

What you do instead is get the number from someone standing on your land. The right authority is your nearest agricultural extension office, a government rangeland or veld officer, or an agricultural college or research station in your district. What they should do is a veld or rangeland condition assessment - looking at what species are present, how much bare ground there is, how much litter covers the soil, and what the grazing history has been - and give you a stocking rate for your farm, not for your region.

That visit is free or cheap in most countries and it is the single highest-value piece of technical advice a cattle keeper can get. Ask for it before the rains, so you can plan the year, and ask them to write it down with the date, because you will want to compare it against the same assessment in five years.

One more thing to hold in your head. Carrying capacity is not fixed forever. It rises when veld condition improves and falls when it degrades. Your management is one of the things that decides which direction it moves. A farmer who improves veld condition has literally manufactured extra grazing, on the same hectares, without buying land.

A five-month-old calf and a mature bull both count as one animal in a head count. They do not eat the same amount of grass. Neither does a goat. If you plan grazing by head count, you are planning with a broken measuring stick.

The tool that fixes this is the Large Stock Unit, or LSU. The convention used in the South African system, and the one this course uses, defines one LSU as a 450 kg bovine animal, or the equivalent in another species based on how much it eats. Every animal on the land is then expressed as a fraction or multiple of that reference animal, and the fractions add up to a single number for the whole herd.

The worked examples from the source are these. A mature Bonsmara cow at 450 kg is exactly 1.0 LSU - she is the reference animal. A smaller-framed mature Nguni cow at roughly 320 kg counts as about 0.7 LSU. A mixed flock of small stock, sheep and goats, counts at roughly 0.12 to 0.14 LSU per animal.

Now do the arithmetic on a real mixed smallholding. Say you run 12 mature Nguni-type cows, and your neighbour's 30 goats come onto the same grazing.

1. Cows: 12 multiplied by 0.7 equals 8.4 LSU.
2. Goats: 30 multiplied by 0.13, taking the middle of the small stock range, equals 3.9 LSU.
3. Total load on the land: 8.4 plus 3.9 equals 12.3 LSU.

Read what that tells you. Your head count on that land is 42 animals. Your grazing load is 12.3 LSU. And roughly a third of your grazing load is goats you do not own and are not counting at all. A great many overgrazing problems on communal and shared land are exactly this: the load is real, but nobody is adding it up, because everyone is counting only their own animals and only by head.

Here is the consequence that connects straight back to breed choice. A herd of smaller-framed indigenous cows genuinely places a lighter load on the same hectare than the same number of larger-framed exotic or crossbred cows, because each animal represents a smaller fraction of an LSU. Twenty Nguni-type cows at 0.7 LSU each is 14 LSU. Twenty 450 kg composite cows is 20 LSU. That is a real, arithmetic difference of nearly a third in grazing demand, from the same head count, on the same land.

This is not an argument that small is always better. A bigger cow weans a heavier calf, and heavier calves are what you sell. It is an argument that the two must be compared honestly: if you upgrade your herd to larger-framed animals and do not reduce numbers, you have increased your stocking rate without adding a single head, and the land will show it before your record book does.

A few practical points about using LSU on a real farm.

• Young stock are not full LSU. A weaner is not a mature cow. The source consulted does not give a table of LSU values by age class for African cattle, so where you need a value for growing animals, ask your extension officer for the conversion table used in your country. Do not invent one.
• Weigh or estimate, do not guess. If you have no scale, a flexible tape around the heart girth, just behind the front legs, read against a conversion formula or chart, gives an estimate typically within about ten percent of true liveweight - good enough to place an animal in an LSU band.
• Count everything that grazes. Draught oxen, the bull, dry cows, replacement heifers, other people's stock, and any small stock. If it eats grass on that land, it is part of the load.
• Recount when the herd changes. Your LSU total changes every time you sell, buy, calve or wean, and the grazing does not know you have not updated your figure.

The LSU total is one of the few numbers a cattle keeper can calculate exactly, on their own, with no equipment. It is worth doing properly, because every grazing decision in the rest of this module and the next one is built on it.

You now know how many Large Stock Units your land carries. The next question is what each one takes out of the ground, because that is the figure that turns a grazing plan from a feeling into arithmetic.

First, the unit. Grass is mostly water, and the amount of water in it swings enormously between a green flush after rain and a dry standing stem in September. So feed is measured as dry matter - what would be left if you dried the grass completely. Ten kilograms of green grass and ten kilograms of dry grass are not the same amount of feed at all, and dry matter is how you compare them fairly.

The planning rule from the South African source is this: one Large Stock Unit needs approximately three percent of its body weight in dry matter per day.

For the 450 kg reference animal, that works out as follows.

1. Three percent of 450 kg is 0.03 multiplied by 450, which is 13.5 kg of dry matter per day.
2. Over a year: 13.5 multiplied by 365 gives approximately 4,900 kg of dry matter per year, which is close to five tonnes.

Say that out loud. One mature cow removes something like five tonnes of dry grass from your land every year. Not five tonnes of green grass - five tonnes of dry matter, which as growing green grass is a far larger heap.

Now scale it to the herd you counted in the last lesson. Twelve Nguni-type cows plus thirty goats came to 12.3 LSU.

1. Daily: 12.3 multiplied by 13.5 kg equals about 166 kg of dry matter every single day.
2. Annually: 12.3 multiplied by 4,900 kg equals about 60,000 kg, or roughly 60 tonnes of dry matter a year.

Sixty tonnes. That is what your land has to grow, every year, just to hold that herd steady. Write that number down, because it changes how the land looks when you walk it.

Now the caveats, and they matter. This three percent figure is a general estimation rule quoted by the source. It is not a measured African rangeland figure for any one grass species or region. It is an order-of-magnitude planning tool, not a precise calculation. It also says nothing about the quality of what the animal eats - protein, energy, minerals - which is the subject of the separate Feed Formulation course, not this one. A cow can fill her rumen with dry, stemmy winter grass, hit her three percent, and still lose condition, because quantity and quality are different problems.

What the figure is genuinely good for is three things.

First, seeing whether a plan is even physically possible. If you are told your land grows a certain tonnage, and your herd demands sixty tonnes, you can see the answer before the cattle do.

Second, planning conserved feed for the dry season, which is the next module. If you know a cow eats about 13.5 kg of dry matter a day, you can work out how many days a stack of hay or a field of standing grass will feed her, instead of hoping.

Third, understanding output per hectare. A South African trial measured weaner output per hectare of 115 kg for conventionally weaned calves and 91 kg for early-weaned calves on the same land - a direct measure of what the land actually produced in saleable calf. That is the number that matters commercially: not how many cattle you have, but how many kilograms of weaner each hectare gave you.

Hold those two ideas together. The land has a demand side, roughly 4,900 kg of dry matter per LSU per year, and a supply side, the kilograms of weaner it returns per hectare. Overstocking raises the demand and lowers the supply at the same time - more mouths taking from a pasture that grows less each year. That is why herd size alone is such a poor measure of a cattle business, and why a smaller herd on well-managed veld regularly beats a larger herd on damaged veld.

One last practical use. When you are deciding whether to keep an unproductive cow through another season, you now have a real cost to put against her. She will eat about five tonnes of dry matter, drink water every day, occupy a share of your carrying capacity, and cost you dipping and labour. If she is not going to wean a calf, that is what she costs, and it is not a small number.

Continuous grazing means the herd walks the whole farm every day, all season, for years. It feels efficient. It is the single most damaging grazing pattern there is, and understanding why comes down to one plant, not one paddock.

A grass plant rebuilds itself from two places: the leaf area still standing, which catches sunlight, and the root reserves stored underground. When an animal bites the plant, both go to work - the plant pulls on its reserves to push out new leaf. That takes time. If it is left alone, it regrows leaf, refills its roots, and ends up stronger than before. If it is bitten again while it is still spending reserves, it starts the cycle again from a weaker position. Bite it often enough, and it never gets ahead. The roots shrink, the plant thins, and eventually it dies.

That is the whole biological argument for rest, and it is why rotational grazing exists. The point of a rotation is not to move cattle around. The point is to give grass a period with no animals on it.

Now the second half of the argument, which is about which plants get bitten. Cattle are selective. They walk past tough, unpalatable grass to reach sweet, leafy, nutritious grass. Under continuous grazing your best species are grazed hardest and most often, and the worthless ones are grazed rarely or never. The competition is rigged against exactly the plants you want. Over years the pasture composition shifts toward unpalatable, low-productivity grasses, then toward bare ground and erosion. Rotation removes that rigging for part of the year, because during the rest period the good species get the same chance to recover as the bad ones.

There is a third benefit that is easy to overlook. Concentrating cattle on one area at a time also concentrates their dung and urine on that area, which fertilises it. Spread the same herd thinly over the whole farm every day and the manure is spread just as thinly, doing far less good anywhere.

Now the honest gap. You want to know how many days of rest and how many paddocks. This course does not give you those numbers, and the reason is the same as in Lesson 1: no specific recommended rest period in days, and no recommended number of paddocks, for African rangeland was retrieved for this course from a source of adequate quality. The correct interval depends heavily on rainfall, on the grass species present, and on the season - the same rest that is generous in a wet January is nowhere near enough in a dry August, because the plant is barely growing. A single number would be wrong most of the time.

What you can do without that number is a great deal.

First, split the land. Even two blocks are transformative compared with one. Two blocks means every piece of your land gets a period of the year with nothing on it. Three or four blocks is better. You do not need expensive fencing to start - herding, natural boundaries, thorn barriers, a river, a ridge, or an agreement with neighbours on a communal grazing area can all define a block.

Second, move on what the grass tells you, not on the calendar. Watch the grass, not the date. Move the herd off a block when the good grasses have been grazed down but before they are being bitten into their crowns and before bare ground appears between plants. Move them back on only when the good grasses have regrown real leaf, not just a green tinge. Write down the dates you moved and what the grass looked like. After two seasons, you have a rest period for your own land, in your own rainfall, that no book could have given you.

Third, rest the same block at a different time each year. A block always rested in the dry season never gets to set seed. Rotating which block gets the wet-season rest lets each part of the farm reseed itself over time.

Fourth, keep the plan simple enough to actually run. A written rotation of three blocks that your family follows every week beats an elaborate twelve-paddock plan on paper that nobody keeps to. The best grazing system is the one that gets used.

Some grazing is lost in a drought and everyone sees it. Some is lost a little at a time, over twenty years, while the farm looks greener every season. That second kind is bush encroachment, and it is one of the most widely documented rangeland degradation problems in southern Africa, particularly in Namibia.

Bush encroachment is the thickening of woody shrub and small-tree cover at the expense of the grass layer. The land does not turn to desert. It turns to thicket. From a distance, more green. On the ground, less grass, and eventually so much woody cover that cattle cannot move through it or find enough to eat in it.

The mechanism is the part worth understanding, because it explains why this is a management problem and not simply weather.

Healthy grass competes with woody seedlings. A dense grass sward takes water and light near the soil surface and makes it hard for tree and shrub seedlings to establish. Now overgraze that land. The grass thins, and bare gaps open between plants. Those gaps are exactly where woody seedlings can get established, because the competition that used to suppress them is gone. The shrubs grow. As they grow, they shade the ground and take water from deeper down, and the grass beneath them grows even less. Less grass means still less competition against the next generation of woody seedlings.

That is a spiral, and the literature describes it exactly that way: overgrazing is both a cause and a consequence of bush thickening. Each turn of the cycle makes the next turn easier. This is why encroachment tends to accelerate rather than level off, and why a farm can go from open grassland to unusable thicket within one person's working life.

So the honest framing this course gives you is this. Bush encroachment is frequently the visible, slow-motion consequence of a stocking rate that exceeded the land's carrying capacity for a sustained period. It is not bad luck and it is not an act of nature. It is the record of grazing decisions, written on the land in wood.

Can it be reversed? Yes, partly, through bush thinning or clearing. But the literature is clear about how to think about that: bush thinning is an investment in restoring lost carrying capacity, not a free fix. It costs labour, or machinery, or both, and the bush frequently regrows if the underlying overstocking is not corrected. Clearing land and then putting the same excessive herd back on it simply restarts the spiral with your money spent.

Now the gap. You want to know how much grazing capacity is lost to encroachment in your country, and whether clearing pays for itself. Specific quantitative figures on the scale of grazing-capacity loss to bush encroachment in any named country, and the costs and benefits of bush thinning as a restoration technique, were referenced in the literature searched for this course but were not independently retrieved and verified to a standard worth teaching as a number. That gap is stated here rather than filled with an invented figure that could justify a large investment you cannot recover.

What you can do without those numbers is measure your own encroachment, and it is genuinely easy.

Pick three fixed points on your land that you can find again - a corner post, a large rock, a particular tree, a borehole. Stand at each one, always facing the same way, and photograph or carefully describe what you see: how much of the view is grass, how much is bush, and how tall the bush is. Do it in the same month every year. Write the date on each record.

After five years you have something no book can give you: a record of whether the woody cover on your own farm is thickening, holding or opening up. That evidence is what turns an argument with yourself, or with a neighbour on communal land, into a fact.

One further practical point. If you decide to clear, clear where the return is greatest - near water, on the better soils, on ground you can actually rotate afterwards - and reduce your stocking rate at the same time. Clearing plus continued overstocking is money spent on a spiral you have not stopped turning.

Everything in this module has pointed to one conclusion: the number you need cannot be given to you in a book, because it depends on the land under your own feet. This lesson is about how to look at that land properly.

A veld condition assessment, which is what an extension or rangeland officer does, is built on things you can see without any equipment. Learn to see them yourself and you will understand the officer's advice instead of just receiving it.

What to look for, walking slowly across a block.

1. Which grasses are there. Learn the names of the four or five grasses on your own land that cattle eat eagerly, and the four or five they walk past. You do not need a botany book - ask an old herder, ask your extension officer, ask a neighbour who has farmed the place for decades. Then, every year, notice which group is spreading. A shift from the eaten group toward the walked-past group is the earliest warning of overgrazing, and it appears years before bare ground does.

2. How much bare ground there is. Look straight down at your boots and move across the block in a straight line, stopping every ten paces. Is there a plant, plant litter, or bare soil under your toe? Count fifty stops and you have a percentage of bare ground for that block. Repeat in the same month each year. Rising bare ground is the clearest single sign that stocking rate is above carrying capacity.

3. How much dead plant litter is lying on the soil. Litter protects soil from raindrop impact and from the sun, holds moisture, and feeds the soil. Land grazed to the bone has no litter. Litter cover is a good sign.

4. Signs of moving water. Small channels, pedestals of soil under grass tufts with the ground washed away around them, sheet erosion on slopes, silt fans at the bottom. These say your soil is leaving the farm.

5. Woody cover, using the fixed photo points from the last lesson.

There is a further reason to know your veld type, and it connects straight into the health module. Tick populations are not the same on all rangeland. A South African study across sampled rangelands found *Rhipicephalus appendiculatus*, the brown ear tick that carries East Coast fever, at a prevalence of 71.1 percent; *Rhipicephalus evertsi evertsi* at 40.2 percent; *Rhipicephalus decoloratus*, the blue tick, at 29.2 percent; and *Hyalomma* species at 19.0 percent, occurring exclusively on sour rangeland types.

Read that last part carefully. One whole tick genus turned up only on one veld type in that study. Those are rangeland and tick-population prevalence figures from specific South African rangelands, not per-animal tick counts and not a national picture. But the lesson generalises: the veld you graze partly determines the ticks your cattle meet, and therefore the diseases they are exposed to. When you plan a rotation, you are also, without meaning to, planning your herd's tick exposure. That is worth discussing with your veterinarian or animal-health technician alongside the dipping calendar.

Now the record that pulls this together. A grazing record is one page per block, per year, and it holds only a few things.

• The dates the herd entered and left the block, every time.
• The LSU total in the herd on those dates.
• What the grass looked like when they entered and when they left, in your own words.
• Bare ground percentage from your fifty-stop count, once a year in the same month.
• Rainfall, if you can measure it - even a plastic rain gauge or a marked tin gives you the single most important explanatory variable for why a year was good or bad.
• Anything unusual: fire, a neighbour's herd coming through, a borehole failure.

After three years this record answers questions no advisor can answer for you. How long does this particular block really take to recover in a normal year? What did my land do in a drought year at my stocking rate? Is my bare ground going up or down? Am I gaining or losing the grasses my cattle actually want?

That is what reading your own veld means. Not a single opinion on a single day, but a comparison across years that you own and nobody else has.