 I'm Crystal Reiser and this is my husband Jay and our SARE grant was about developing a mob grazing system to improve the sustainability and profitability of a cattle operation in North Dakota. And today we're just going to give you some tips and tricks on electric fencing, watching animal performance, what we learned on our rangeland and just we learned a lot from this project so we hope to share some of that with you. A little bit of information about us, we're located in Central North Dakota by Washburn and our ranch is just east of there and we run about 150 cow calf pairs and anywhere from 150 to 300 custom grazing cattle so that keeps us plenty busy. This is the layout of our ranch, there's not a lot of cross fences. You can see like right here is about a section to just kind of give you some scale. We got a gravel pit road that runs through, we have a creek, we have railroad tracks. So that's just the layout of our main ranch. During our project the weather was different every year. In 2011 it rained a lot, we had a lot of flooding going on and in 2012 it was really dry during our project so it gave us mixed results in our grass and production clippings. And then why did we even look into mob grazing? There was degraded rangeland everywhere we looked, we were just getting started on this ranch and it had been selectively grazed at a low stock density. So as starting out we had continuous economic and ecological deterioration and we knew we really needed to do something different if we were going to ranch on this property. A few things we learned before we started mob grazing, we learned that we needed to focus on our animals' performance and also we were told we needed to increase our density before our stocking rate. So mob grazing you hear that word thrown around a lot, it just kind of depends on your stock density which depends on your production. Also here's high stock density grazing, there's probably a few other terms out there. We just say mob grazing because it's easy for us to say. A few terms that we use, we do everything in cow days per acre when we're doing our grazing because we couldn't visually see how much it took a cow to eat in a month, you know, how much they needed and we were doing things on hours and it was just a lot easier to visualize what that cow needed in one day. The classes of cattle that we used in mob grazing, we did pairs with calves that were greater than a month old. We also did fall calving cows and we did no mob grazing while we were calving just because we didn't want to have those type of densities in case there might be mothering issues. Misconception when we talk to a lot of people, they always think that mob grazing is about eating everything and leaving nothing behind and that's not at all what we were trying to do. We're trying to get a certain trample to graze ratio in order to get our soil covered. Just a few more terms that were really important for us, the stocking rate versus stock density, so stocking rate is the number of acres needed to support one animal for the time you expect the herd to remain in the cell and it also depends on plant production and the size of the grazing animal. Where stock density was the concentration of the animals in that cell. So this is what the ranch was like before we started. It was low stock density, they were spread out everywhere. We had over grazing, under grazing and poor nutrient distribution. We could have thrown a few cells in there to get better even grazing and more manure and urine distribution but we knew we needed to take it one step further on our ranch. So we went to higher stock density so we have more even grazing, more competitiveness between the animals, hoof action by the animal impact and we hope to improve the soil health. This is a picture we took up in Canada, you know a lot of people think of mob grazing, you know of having this many cattle in an area and just due to our production we were not able to get to this point but this person was moving every half hour where we only were able to move four times a day except yours, we've got to switch. Excuse us we've got to switch the mic around. The two main conclusions while we were doing our project that became very apparent to us is that first of all that mob grazing in our area should be used more as a tool than as a whole ranch grazing system and it wasn't physically the grazing that gave us our results it was the rest that we were able to incorporate into our system that made us successful. We used many different tools as we were getting going on this, we found out we needed to make sure we had good equipment, we were doing things very intensively so we needed to make sure that things were working well for us. This is some of our temporary water tanks that we used with setting up so that we would have cows in a cell that would be broken down further, we didn't have them in there longer than seven days and so we needed to be moving water to there because we just didn't have enough naturally occurring water. But to move these we would drain them, pull them up on a flatbed trailer, move them on to the next area. One thing we did find out is that with our calves due to the water being drank down we didn't have as good of a recharge rate on our well as we would have needed. The calves got pushed out of the way they couldn't reach the water. We were able to get this creep water tank and that solved that problem so that the calves were able to drink and weren't shoved out of the way. We tried to use simple fencing materials since we were covering large, pretty large area of land, moving things quite often. As you can see on our four wheeler on the back we have geared rollers full of a quarter mile poly braid. We've got two different types of electric fence posts, both of them we used for the reason that they are easy to transport, easy to set up, easy to take down and very lightweight. We used some jump wires. We used a lot of just square bail twine and I'll show that coming up and then our bat latches which helped us move as often as we did. As you can notice on all these things we didn't use any T posts. They're heavy, they're bulky and for us we just didn't think they were going to work as well. Here's a picture since we didn't use T posts on any of our corners. This is how we built our corners into our temporary cells. We would use the twine string which I made a hoop up at this end and then ran that through the eyelet of the pigtail posts and down to another pigtail posts and it made kind of a modified H brace is where the idea kind of came from. Here's a little bit closer up you can see the hoop that I made in that end and then once again just running it down. This was a situation we needed to water out of one particular water point and we had two cells servicing it. You can get pretty ingenuative. The biggest drawback that we had as far as our fencing was our mind. These ones I all got through PowerFlex fence. I have gone now to getting things from Kenco fence. I believe was the last place we had got it because PowerFlex I don't think their materials are as high of quality as they used to be. This is how when we did our longer runs, this is how we'd end one geared reel and start another. We'd just do a double of the same thing on that and I'd try not to exaggerate when I say we use a lot of twine string but it's easy to carry, easy to transport. With everything we did it's all single wire electric fence once again from the portability standpoint and the ease of use. We used as you can probably see we had the four wheeler for a lot of different things but we also used it as to some extent a acting part of the fence because when we would get in areas where there was very tall forge where the forge would be physically higher than the wire of the fence, in visiting with some other people we found out we needed to make a way that the cows would know the fence is coming. I would drive around the inside of the polywire and effectively train the cows to when they'd see the tracks they would know that the fence was just on the other side of it. So with everything being temporary and portable we had to do the same thing with our energizers and also with using the poly braid wire or the temporary wire it tends to have a higher resistance level so we had to make sure our energizer was strong enough. I use a rule of thumb of half to one jewel per mile of electric fence that I put up when I use entirely temporary electric. Sometimes I go higher than that especially training cattle. Everything was battery powered we do have solar panels with certain energizers to recharge them and then also my ground rods I use a four foot ground rod with just a cable clamp on the top of it and then I'm able to just grab that pull it out of the ground throw it on the four wheeler and move to the next area. Here's a picture of the bat latch. This was one of the things that made things very made it capable for us to be able to move as often as we did more or less a bat latch the easiest way to explain it is it's a solar powered alarm clock and instead of and then when it you set the time that you want the gate to open there's a little finger in the bat latch that will move to allow this spring gate to shoot open. Here you can see a little bit better how the entire system is set up and then we used a fiberglass electric fence post to be able to support the weight of the pull on the poly wire going the opposite direction. Here's a picture of after the cows have moved through into the new cell how everything looks as it's open and we would move the cows four times a day using using three bat latches. Here's a picture you saw earlier the picture of our land base and the question was what happens with the gate handle after I do that and that the wire just the spring gate just lays on the ground there with a strong enough energizer it's not a problem I did after a certain amount of time the cows wouldn't even test the fence anymore so I didn't even electrify the gate at from that point in time so then I wasn't losing any voltage through the ground. And then like I on the earlier on where Krista showed the layout of the land this is what we ended up doing with our temporary electric fence we would make make cells and lanes something like this and I'm going to focus on those particular ones up there that was an area that we mob grazed as part of this project. Here's where the longer layout of the cells are and here's what happens when we mob grazed it we would put cells in to be able to move the cattle anywhere from once to four times a day in there depending on the production and what we needed to do. We found with our cell size how you lay out the cells can have a big impact on your trample to graze ratio and therefore affecting the goals that you have for a particular piece of land. Here's one way where you can have a long narrow cell where you open up the entire fence and have the cows move into the next cell when they do move in that way the cows are moving in kind of a wide line and they just they spend more time eating so you're going to have a higher graze and a lower trample and then you just continue on down there with us doing the bat latches and having a gate in there we effectively changed the direction of those cells and now they're long and narrow cells and now those cows move in there and they graze back and forth they're a little bit more competitive and they're going to trample more grass than they eat on a percentage basis so once again it comes back to your land management goals for a particular piece and on some of these cells those individual cells are one acre or less so we could change it as we went when we were training the cattle to mob grazing the first thing was training them to electric fence we did some of this with custom grazing cattle that had never seen electric fence the the electric fence training was was kind of the first part anyway and then training for the mob grazing it was it took about a week and the biggest thing was training them to go around the corner because you'd have a group of cows that would be heading in this direction and the other group of cows would be going this way to get to the gate and the tail enders would just be all kind of confused so that made things frustrating from time to time but really moving the cattle they would learn that they'd learn what the bat latch sounded like they'd learn that when I came out there it was time to move and they were ready to go the typical day while we were doing the mob grazing for setting up for four cells I'd go out there and first of all take down the previous days fences I would I would set up the first cell for the day I'd let the cows into that cell and then I'd go set up the rest of the other three moves for the day setting up the bat latches I'd come back double check my bat latches and then go about whatever else I needed to get done for the day as we were planning to set this up as you saw in the previous slide we had lots of fences going every which in different sort of direction we did use a lot of different types of situations to set up those fences and to plan for them the main thing was just a printed out map that I'd I'd sketch on and try and try and take a rough idea where I wanted I could come inside I used North Dakota Water Commission has a good GIS usable map that you can get and then I could actually figure out how many acres were on each particular paddock that I was doing then when I'd go out there I'd use the four wheeler odometer to measure the distance as I was setting up my fence and then I'd also use my own personal strides I'd need I'd say okay today I'm going to move four times I need a total of four acres for this group of cows each cell needs to be an acre wide I figured out that my my larger cell was so many feet wide and then I'd figure out number of strides to get to one acre when determining the right amount of forage for for the day and for each move for that instance that takes a it takes kind of a trained eye and I'm not going to stand in front of you and say that I have a trained eye yet it's it's not the easiest thing to do the biggest thing is just watch the animals are they content when you're out there are they bellaring do they do they look restless they'll tell you when they need to move if it's an actual nutritional issue with them then also as the animal impact goal that you have for a piece of ground met and all these of course definitely go back to the grass quality and the grass quantity when I would be out there I knew how many sell or how many moves I needed to do for the day or wanted to do for the day determining when I wanted to make my next move a lot of this was based off of bricks we know that the bricks are higher in the grass in the afternoon so I would try and do or we would try and do more moves in the afternoon and potentially larger cells and less moves in the morning we did find though with hot temperatures that kind of threw everything for a loop because the cows would instead of finding the bat latch at two in the afternoon and then four in the afternoon they might go stand by the water at noon and not go back out to graze till six so that kind of just shot everything that you work so hard for so when we had really hot weather we found that we had to change things up and start moving cattle in the morning and in the evening following when they would naturally graze we also paid attention to the manure composition to make sure that are to try and guess and make sure that our protein to great to energy ratio was correct and the biggest thing I used was gut fill and I'm going to use a couple of slides to explain this if you can see a little bit it doesn't show up the best on the screen here to find to look at gut fill on the cow you're going to be looking at the left side of the cow behind the ribbon in front of the hip and on this particular cow you can see she's sunk in right here that is very unsatisfactory gut fill the reason she looks like this is we had just worked those cows they've been standing in a corral for eight hours before they got turned out I did not ever want an animal to look like this while we were mob grazing this is what I wanted you can see right there that she is very full her room and is completely filled the capacity and she really is kind of at a point where she can't eat much anymore just due to the capacity to fill that this one's a little tougher to see again this is more what we'd be seeing on a daily basis that we were watching for the gut fill on her is is indicating to me that we need to move those animals on get them some new grass get that intake picked up here's a cow that's going to be the same cow in three pictures to kind of show a progression of gut fill with this one she could be moved on to a new cell she's a little sunk in you can tell her room and isn't as full this one is kind of is probably what we were seeing most of the time when we were grazing is about this and then this is what we wanted to see she's a lot fuller her room and is completely full up she's going to be she's going to be at her maximum intake which was a was a goal we also look at manure composition to make sure we have the protein to energy ratio correct we all have seen spring what manure and cattle look like off a spring washy grass one thing we have used is use a straw bale to get that to get that dry matter that they're ingesting balance that out a little bit one kind of trick that we did notice was that a way to a way to just look out at your grass and kind of know where you're setting a brown grass has more energy in it that's why it burns very well where very green lush grass has more protein in it as a comparison and that's why it doesn't necessarily burn as well here's a we we's kind of scoured to find some manure pictures we didn't find very many so I do apologize about this one but this would be a a manure patty that I would look at and say that animal is not getting enough protein in her diet the manure you can see is kind of stacking up a little bit the closest thing we found is the same thing that a feedbot looks for when they look at manure you want a pumpkin pie consistency manure pie when you're doing that you don't want it to runny but you don't need it you don't want it stacking up like this either now we gotta switch again yeah okay so we're just going to run through a few slides of the mob moving here the bat latch had just opened up and the cattle are going into the next cell and they all have their heads down and they're just grazing going for the new grass and they're very competitive you know searching out the best food and they're wondering what their neighbors eating so if you have any weed issues you don't really need to worry about it but are they clean everything up pretty well and oh sorry I thought we were going to different side but however the forge it tramples really differently we have a lot of Kentucky bluegrass on our place it trampled different than the smooth brome and the quack grass so whenever we were moving we had to pay attention to what species we were grazing on also we learn that wet forage versus dry forage trampled differently and then also even in the morning if there was a really heavy dew versus a drier afternoon our grass plants just the cattle won't trample them the same and then like I said that changes in topography it was you know you go up on a hill and then you're down in a low area and just the species really affected how the forage trampled so this was taken when the cows were right before the those cows were moving into the cell and this is what it looked like before the cattle came in there this is just some quack grass and after the cattle were in there you can see that forage is just trampled to the ground it's feeding the soil biology it's retaining moisture and this is what we were going for because we had a lot of bare ground on our pasture just a zoomed out version of what it looked like after the cattle got out of there this is a trample on a thin hill side it's kind of difficult to see but we had to move fairly quick across these areas because there's not a lot of forage there for the cattle and we just wanted to get even manure and urine distribution on these areas and then you go down the hill and here you'd be in Kentucky bluegrass flat and the Kentucky bluegrass was just really springy and it was hard to get it trampled into the ground this was I believe in like June and this was later in the year when it had dried out some and here you can see the cattle trampled it differently you can see that the Kentucky bluegrass act you know actually broke down turn brown and was in contact with the soil and a big thing in this grant for us was the rest that it was able to add to our system so this is a before our mob grazing and this is an after-pitcher and this is just one year later and so you can see that we have a lot more forage growing now this is another before-pitcher all we have is rocks and cow pies and an after-pitcher and you know it was really easy because we did nothing we just let it rest and rest really was like our number one advantage in this project even on a small scale moving our cattle every week every day and you can see on this slide the right side of the screen is greener than the left and the cows had just moved off the left side so in one week our plants were already starting to recover and put nutrients into their roots and just grow healthier so we were pretty excited about that even on a longer-term scale this was taken last spring and the right side was grazed in 2013 with 2014 regrowth and you can just see that line where we had our temporary fence and the west side was rested and you can just see the difference and you know coming out and grazing in the spring the cattle will have a better balanced diet on the left side because it won't be all washy grass and we wouldn't have to supply that straw and then here's another on the left side of the screen it was grazed for two years in a row in the middle it was rested for one year and grazed and then on the far right kind of by Jay's head it was rested for two years and you can just see the difference that resting makes also from being able to rest some areas we had areas that were completely 100% blue grama and now we have new western wheat grass coming in you know we can't say if this is directly from the mob grazing because we did run the mob across there but we think it's more the rest in the system it finally allowed these plants to express themselves okay the question was what did we see on the parts we rested for two years a lot more forage I mean it was previously it had never been rested so it just finally gave those plants time to fully recover and now when we do graze across them they come back a lot quicker they're just healthier because they're able to build some root reserves huh yeah more vigor in the plants so with the mob grazing we really had to know our production for every hour the cows were grazing so it was training the eyes for cow days per acre we started out by doing some clippings trying to figure out how much grass is out there and those were kind of inconclusive like from one year to the next but they helped us like during the year knowing how much grass is there and then also how many hours of grazing and like Jay talked about it's really difficult to train your eyes to learn this I don't know if you can tell but we have quite a bit of bare ground there's just like dandelions not a whole lot growing there so this was a big concern for us and why we looked at mob grazing and so I did some 10-point frame readings and what I did is I looked directly at the ground at this or at the base of the pin and before we mob grazed we had 18.8 percent to bare ground so that ground's not growing any forage for our cattle and then our litter was around 33 percent and we had this weird moss I'm not sure what it was it wasn't club moss but the cows weren't gonna eat it and then also then one year after we mob grazed we went down to 2 percent bare ground so we got that goal of getting the ground covered our litter went up to 50 percent the moss was also reduced and in that second year we had still a lot of dandelion and curly cup gumweed that was pretty much with grass the only forbs we had but by year three our forbs they had gone down but they were native forbs we were no longer having the curly cup gumweed also our bare ground you know we still had reduced the bare ground and so we were just we felt like we were moving in the right direction for our ranch we often get asked did the grass production increase well yes we're growing more grass but we're not grazing more cows yet because we're trying to make sure we're feeding the soil biology so we're not harvesting that grass for our cattle some frustrations and learning curves we had during during this and you can see it's a full slide cows not finding the bat latch when it opens I mean you spend a lot of time getting it all set up or the bat latch doesn't open it does occur every once in a while once we got a quarter mile from water the even with the mob grazing our utilization decreased with the cows the occasional time constraints and other emergencies pretty much life happens and then you're out there in a dark with a flashlight on your head trying to take down fence and it's just not a lot of fun and then like Jay said standing by water on hot days and not grazing you know we didn't realize that and it took us a while to figure out how to fix it determining the right amount of daily forage it is just such a headache you're like okay I think the cows need this much and you move them in there and you're like oh that was way too much and then you make it a little smaller you're like oh that wasn't enough and then it's just it's hard to get it just right so inconsistent stands of forage due to topography with us grazing on native rangeland and all the different types of soils it was never like give them so many acres this is exactly what they need where if we would have been grazing a brome field expired CRP I think the production would have been a lot more even and we could have been more consistent in our cell size dumb calves their their frustration when they don't find the gate either getting eaten by mosquitoes gnats and horseflies it's just the bugs bother you so too much rain caused by pugging of soils and this was mainly it would happen when we always watch the weather like as close as possible because we didn't want our cattle in a small area when there was gonna be a rainstorm because we knew they could do more damage than good and you know it's not much fun to come out in the morning and find you know that everything's just tilled up and so that that was frustrating when you get a random thunderstorm but with these areas we knew we just need to rest them for a long time and they do heal back okay the question was how do the areas compare from where it got they trampled it in the thunderstorm compared to like across the fence where they didn't they did they did recover we're still giving them some rest you can tell at this time because it's only been a few years and we got a but for the most part they're recovering just fine I I don't know if there's much more I could add was there another question okay the question was how we handle the mosquitoes in the flies with the cattle we will actually be getting to that in a couple slides so so these are the results that we concluded just based off of visual observations the rest that was incorporated with mob grazing allowed our plants to increase in vigor and production mob grazing allowed us to rest in area for an entire year the different types of grasses and forbs were able to better complement each other and form a fuller canopy so we were collecting more solar energy also the warm season plants were better able to express themselves since they were able to mature and go to seed on certain areas of our land base and we did significantly lengthen our grazing season which was a goal part of the goal in our grant so this is winter 2012 and we had this stockpiled forage because we were able to mob graze and let this grow and we were able to winter graze on this and that winter we saved between eight and ten thousand dollars in hay just because we were able to graze our cattle now we got to switch the microphone the question is what did we do with the dumb calves I guess on the dumb calves it ended up being a situation where usually they would end up knocking down like if mama's over here in the next paddock the calf wouldn't go around the fence it would go through it and so there was a couple times where my polybraid would be scattered over the entire cell which was the most annoying thing that happened usually they didn't break out the sides and actually be out but they just made a made a headache for me moving them the next time was usually what ended up happening and after they got to a certain about two months old two and a half months old and had been through the situation enough times they got a lot better at going around the gate but a lot of times they just went through it drug stuff around and some of the benefits that we saw from the cow side of things as we had an increased harvest harvest efficiency in those cattle because of how they were grazing at the high stock densities a lot of this was due to the competition that they had they were no longer incredibly selective they would go into a new cell and they would start eating because if they didn't eat it their neighbor might get it and well you know you got to keep up with the Joneses so you can't let your neighbor have it so that that was one of the things that came to be they were very it was very quick and easy to check the cows especially with moving them around the gate I could position myself when that whether there was a bat latch there or not and I could have every cow walk past me into the new cell and I was very easy for me to tell if anything was wrong I knew it instantly just because I was right there there was some very interesting things that came about with the fly control side of things because all the manure was concentrated in a particular area that manure would also dry out at that exact same amount of time so there was never fresh manure so we would have one spike in flies but then the the manure would dry out so the next generation of flies couldn't hatch they would lay their eggs but the eggs would dry out in the manure patty so once we got through that first spike in flies and then then they'd die off in their 28 day cycle we were doing pretty good on that it didn't make it did make the fly component on the cows go down we did have a lot of a lot of birds around our mob and when we'd move them into a new cell the birds would just come swooping down and follow the cows I'm assuming they were going after any bugs that might have been in that new area but they were just they followed all over the place we had a bunch of cow birds that followed us around one summer and they'd they'd be walking around on the cows back and I can only assume that they were some natural natural pest control so another benefit that we hadn't really thought that was going to happen but was a positive at the end some of our conclusions with the grant and I'm in a kind of triangle through these pretty quick but we had rode into our grant we wanted to graze 300 acres or more per year we realized that it shouldn't be an acreage goal it should be a tool used on certain areas that need that type of management that was one of the first things we had realized we're going to continue mob grazing but we're going to continue we're going to use it more as a prescription treatment rather than a goal of a number of acres to cover we tell other people to move into mob grazing slowly take a take some time to learn from others before you started it might save you some of the headaches of trying to reinvent the wheel so to speak the the mob grazing it took a lot of time it was nice though that we were able to it made us watch and learn from our cattle it's important to make cells the right size so that you can get the trample the graze ratio you're looking for don't expect this to come immediately it takes a lot of time and lastly mob grazing can or cannot work it all depends how it's used as a tool we did we wanted to get some hard data for comparisons over conventional grazing system but we think there needs to be a little more data collected to draw any conclusive results and that is also tied to the to the climate that we had those two years with them being so different we did take cattle weights soil samples production samples and ten point Frayden readings we weighed cattle and then we we also determined that these things that we had found were relatively inconclusive inconclusive on our two year grant project some of this was also connected to that we would move the cattle in a mob for a week and then something would come about in our lives where we had to take a week and move them into a cell where they weren't moved as a mob so we couldn't tie any of the cattle weights to exactly just that we were mob grazing grass production samples were pretty much the same but once again going back to the weather that played a difference in in what things we're doing with an incredibly high moisture year with the next one being followed with a very low moisture year the goals of getting our bare ground covered was achieved and a goal of lengthening our grazing system which were the two main things that we saw in this particular ranches we needed to get our bare ground covered and extend our grazing season and both of them were accomplished but I just want to come back and reiterate again that mob grazing should probably be used as a tool in your toolbox and not as a whole grant grazing system at least that's what we came to the conclusion and then the rest that we were able to incorporate into our grazing system was really what made things work well we we were of the conclusion that on our particular land and topography that it just there was certain areas that for us the amount of labor output didn't correspond to the increases in production that's why we'd like to say it should be used more as a as a tool we're still going to use it as that particular tool oh okay the areas that we are not going to continue mob grazing they'll go into a a more tight rotation where we're probably moving the animals anywhere from a daily to once a week is kind of what our standard is the question is what's the topography that we wouldn't use for mob grazing and I would say that comes back to kind of the production side of things more of our thin hill tops were there wasn't enough forage there to trample a one thing we did see was that we did have hoof impact on those areas and we did see some new plants coming about a once again like Krista said we aren't sure if that was due to the mob grazing or if it was just due to the rest we also don't mob graze are really wet areas we completely avoid mob grazing though it's just because we know it'll do more damage than good so you know where are we now what are we going to do so we still want to improve the range land we still want to have healthy plants that are nutrient dense and deep roots we want to continue to improve our water cycle and build drought resistance we would like to increase our production so we could graze more cattle someday continue feeding the soil biology and keeping that ground covered because we know that soil is really important if it's healthy we're gonna have healthy plants we're gonna have healthy animals and we're going to make more money and right now our grazing system at any given time 50% of the land is rested during the peak plant growth 6% you can find cattle on it then the 94% of it has no livestock so it's being rested and we're always changing our season of use so our grazing system can consist of right now getting the cows to the right place at the right time for the right reasons and this involves an intense rotational graze where we have daily moves or we move every three to six days depending on what our goal is for that ground also we do winter grazing quality of life grazing so if we know we're going to be gone on a vacation make sure we have cows in an area where the plants do need a longer grazing or it can be in there grazing longer already talked about rest and then now we do our mob grazing treatment where we move up to four times a day so how do we use mob grazing as a tool now so in 2014 we mob graze this area and the reason was it was a gravel pit and it's got a lot of wormwood in there and sweet clover in the year before we had planted it to native grasses and we just wanted those little native grasses to not get choked out and we decided that we need to demold the wormwood and there's just so much forage there was no way that a mower was going to go through this so now I will let Jay finish up so with this picture you can see down in the on the bottom of the screen there that we've got the roller and you really can't see the string headed over that direction this is a picture of before we put the cows in there and then they're going to be on the left side of the screen now they've been in there for approximately about an hour so I was moving them on this particular day I think I moved them eight times on this on this patch and then next slide you can see where they moved into the to the net to the other side of that picture they did do a very good job of knocking down most of the most of the sweet clover they did an okay job on knocking down the wormwood our goal with this was not to physically eat very much of the forage there I would say we ate probably 10 to 20 percent of the forage I wanted to get it down and get that soil surface covered here you can see it looks a whole lot different than that picture about five slides ago where you could actually see the rows of the of the seeding and so we got this accomplished and then we came back we still did mow everything so that those new plants those new seedlings could have a competitive advantage here's a couple more before and after pictures this was before we went through and while the cows are in there you can see that they are they didn't knock down the the wormwood as well as we'd like on this one here I'm standing on top of the spoil pile for the gravel pit and took a picture down and once again the same kind of thing they did knock a lot of forage down they didn't do as good of a job on the wormwood as I had hoped but that was okay because we were still planning on coming through and mowing it so with that I don't know if we have time for any questions if you'd we got time for one okay we got time for a question if you want to get in contact with us there's some of our contact info you can look on the North Dakota Grazing Lands Coalition website and then also on the bottom is our project number for our SARA grant if you want to have all of the stuff that we filed with that so the question was is on the when we did the did the gravel pit and we were moving them up to eight times a day could we have accomplished the same with say three to four times and I think it probably was very minimal the difference and I was to be completely honest I was playing I wanted to see what it would happen at really really high densities and I don't know if I saw much difference especially especially with the forage that we had there it was just sweet clover and some Kentucky bluegrass and we didn't want them eating the little plants and that's also part of the reason we were moving them so quickly because we didn't want them to camp out in one cell just in case because we don't own the land and we want to make sure it looks good so they tend and I guess we didn't explain at all that they were allowed to go back to the water but um they always want to go to the fresh grass so once they we never made them graze so much that they would go back to the previous cell like we always made sure they had really good stuff in front of them so they had always want to go to the next cell