 Thanks very much So today what I want to do is try to talk about mob grazing and I guess mob grazing's probably been around for you know maybe ten years and When you talk to people and about you know, what is it? No one can give you a real definition and there was an extension a Agent in Nebraska Terry Gomper to did a study a survey of producers and basically, you know try to get some information about what that is and basically there's You know probably it's a high stocking density from maybe 20 to 25,000 pounds of live weight of animals to to maybe somewhere up towards a million pounds and and so People are moving livestock Perhaps once a day to to several times a day when you start moving to higher stock densities and With that One of the targets could be you know high trampling and high consumption of forage and another component to this of course is there's There's more labor that's involved and so there's really no you cannot no one's made a definition of what it is There are people that said it's a it's a high stock density or it's an ultra high stock density and and perhaps people throw out things like well Yeah, you know 25,000 pounds of live weight per acre is really kind of a Supped up manage intensive grazing and so really you've got to be up towards that 200,000 300,000 things like that, but when there's really no standard definition and no No, no group has come up with that definition. So basically I just kind of Showcase it as is really shared characteristics Usually when you're talking to To people about mob grazing or you're listening to gurus talk about mob grazing they're really talking about probably two things and one is what they call a landscaping and Where you're trying to improve the probably the soil health and the vegetation of that land so the idea is kind of Reclamation so there may be land that had been beat up in the past and you're really looking at trying to use the livestock in an intensive way to try to Get more of that Litter and that biomass above ground biomass and try to Trample it with livestock and get it in contact with that soil surface so you can let all that soil biota Do its work and try to add organic matter to that to that soil surface and And it also in that process where we're hearing people are are making improvements with that livestock action adding diversity to their systems Another aspect of about what's happening with as you increase that stocking density What we're fine is that we're actually getting increased harvest efficiency. So That translates to a higher carrying capacity. So what I mean about Harvest efficiency is that it's that percentage of the forage that's produced how much of that goes down the throat of the animal So in range Systems rangeland people we talk about utilization and utilization is actually the disappearance of that Vegetation not that has part to do with consumption, but it's also disappearance that's lost through maybe destructive forces such as trampling and consumption by wildlife and insects and those kind of things and the natural weathering process and so we've in in more semi-arid and arid systems where Perhaps some people have been using more season-long continues grazing when you have very large Pastures we've talked about concepts of take-off leave-off so that we're aiming for a 50% utilization and that means We're leaving 50% of that biomass for plant vigor for that plant community to sustain itself And so what's actually happening if we leave 50% and take 50% Really only half of that half that we're taking is actually going down the throat. So in our very Conventional systems under season-long continues grazing moderate stocking. We're only getting about 25% harvest efficiency So when you have that assumption and you make your calculations We can set that stocking rate and so Societies like the Society for Range Management that works with Ranchers and range professionals We've developed these kind of safety valves where we know in our In the way in the rangeland ecology that we can sustain that rangeland With a season-long continuous grazing model or system with taking a 25% harvest efficiency results in actually 50% utilization and Because we were having some of that force that's disappearing by insects and wildlife and then we're we're we're maintaining that that plant community integrity with a 50% utilization and so what we're finding is actually that mob grazing is kind of Ignoring this take-off leave-off rule and just blowing past that and we're getting much higher Efficiencies of harvest and so I'm going to show that we're actually getting somewhere towards 35 maybe 40 50 60 percent harvest efficiency and and that is not in a season-long continuous system So I'll have to bring together these concepts of of youths and then rest periods. It happens with the mob grazing so this study was funded through a research and education seer grant and we had Several producers that were contacted and were interested in and developing this these producers were already doing mob grazing and What what I wanted to do is to kind of come alongside them and say, you know We're not going to ask you to do anything different than you're doing What we'd like to do is actually document what you're doing so that we can share that with with the public and kind of understand You know, what is mob grazing for some people in South Dakota and actually This also had some other additional funding with it was a with an NRCS CIG grant where we we partnered with some Some people in Nebraska, so there's actually five other locations in Nebraska where they were kind of following similar similar protocols So you can see we've got a nice Gradient across the state of South Dakota on the east side across the west and we had a few partners up in the in the north and kind of this region close to Aberdeen and If you go if you look across South Dakota on the on the I 29 quarter on the eastern part of South Dakota We're probably 23 inch rainfall and you get out towards Rapid City, and then we're around 15 to 17 So in the middle of the state, they're probably around between 17 and 20 and further out We so we've got a nice understanding of that rainfall and how that looks in terms of the vegetation and We're going to see that people are adapting to that and they're doing things differently because of that So this is a stocking density kind of characterizing what people are doing in terms of the Thousands of pounds of beef per acre. So we've got a couple of these sites The new Underwood site and the Quinn site are out west Quinn is by wall South Dakota and the new Underwood is just by Rapid City And so you can see their stocking densities are somewhere around 20 to 25,000 and as you Move towards the east then we're but are typically what we're finding is there's somewhere around 50,000 pounds Per acre is our stocking density and in 2012 there was a quite a severe drought And so that definitely dropped the stocking rate the one outlier is actually reliance and That's actually showing on this graph at 300,000 He was actually at a million and he was doing that just for fun to try to demonstrate what that would look like So I think he was moving somewhere to 12 or 15 times A day to be able to achieve that so the he had I want to I think it was somewhere in the 300 pair that were on a piece of ground for 45 minutes And he had set up ahead of time some bat latches so that they were going off on timers And that's so the cattle were actually moving themselves And so and I wanted and then we had a comparison There was a rotation that that it was just moving once a day or twice a day that at 50,000 So and so he kind of has this really extreme. So it's kind of fun to fun to look at All right, there's a lot of information in this particular slide So I've got to take you through it to kind of draw out some really important things here So first of all what we did is we went and picked Four locations with a graduate student where we did some pretty Intensive of clipping of vegetation so we would take a quarter meter square and Run several transects and we would clip all that vegetation Prior to the cattle turning out onto these areas and then we would we would get the staining biomass And we'd get the litter of the old litter that was on the ground and then after the cattle were into that spot And they moved on to another spot we come back and locate those same transects And then we had put down another quarter meter square paired that up with the previous one And then we collected and separated stuff that was newly trampled the old litter and the stuff that was left standing So what we could do by subtraction is kind of get an estimate of disappearance Appearance of consumption and how much is newly trampled and those kind of things so the first part that you see The the the darker green is basically the the staining biomass of the vegetation before the cattle were put into it then the the gray bar is the post vegetation and The the lighter green in the middle This is the pre litter that was already existing and then this is the post the post litter And so some of that and theoretically should be the same if the cattle aren't eating litter which you wouldn't expect So there's going to be a little sampling here or there But one of the things that I want to draw your attention to is this last bar which would be the trampling so that's that new litter and so what I want to show is is if you make the Subtraction so you're starting with your pre biomass and then with your end biomass if you if you pull out how much was trampled Then you can get how much was consumed by livestock and so what I've put down here is the harvest efficiency So these numbers are the percent of that was down the throat of The existing the pre biomass vegetation so you can see that there's a Wide variety, but you but it's more than our typical If we plan a season long continuous grazing at moderate levels that's at base 25 percent So why why these producers are doing this is because they're getting with this intensive Stocking densities up to that 25 to 50,000 to 200 or maybe a million is is they're getting higher harvest efficiencies so to put this in perspective if you think about in Western, South Dakota with our our stocking rates are about a half of AUM per acre and that Translates to probably a stocking density for a six-month grazing season that's less than 500 pounds of live weight per acre and If you come over to the east side of the state where we have stocking rates somewhere Maybe one and a half to maybe two AUM's per acre at a traditional rotation You might be at five, you know moving cattle once a week We might be at five thousand pounds per acre of live weight And so what we're seeing is even though when we go up to twenty five thousand pounds That doesn't seem like a lot, but it's you know It's probably five times more intensive than our typical rotations that we used to be doing You know when we're starting to move livestock once a day and so one of our producers that that's by hay tie You know, he was moving Cattle twice a day and his stocking densities were closer to that two hundred thousand the Chamberlain was around fifty thousand pounds per acre so part of it is going to be the vegetation so what we've been finding is that in As the vegetation is shorter and in a vegetative state They tend not to trample as much because it's sparser Then and what they're doing is they're consuming more and it's actually hard to get newly trampled so out at this Quinn site, you know, we've we've got about maybe 20% of that is getting trampled and and interestingly enough at the Chamberlain site You know, they're not trampling that much, but at hay tie They were getting a little bit more trampled and the hay tie site a little Was about or about the same as productivity of the Chamberlain, but it has to do with you know If that vegetation gets taller, you know, they're more apt to probably knock some of that down So from the land, there's a remember the two goals that why people are probably doing this There's a landscaping goal where you really want to trample that Vegetation to try to build soil health, you know get more land covered and then there's kind of maybe a stocking carrying capacity stocking rate You know a harvest efficiency goal where you're trying to get more consumption and maintaining animal performance And so in that same net standpoint Then what we're probably meeting, you know that those goals from that that increase harvest efficiency So this is where the economics play in that You're spending your time, you know, most of the producers Probably spend about a half an hour maybe an hour at most to move the livestock a day and It's it's paying off in terms of they're able to you know, increase that stocking density And in getting that higher harvest efficiency And so what we're finding is that how how do they do that if these harvest efficiencies and these Utilization rates remember utilization is basically the consumption plus trampling and so those are pretty high Notice if you just calculate Utilization that would be your pre vegetation Minus the post vegetation and that difference is really high. So a lot of times we're getting 80 percent utilization and of that 80 percent Maybe 40 or so of it is is down the throat the other 40 may be trampled or you know, there's some proportion of those and so from a as a trained person in the range science that is Stressful because we're thinking oh, we're blowing past take half leave half and and that can't be good for the plant community Is that actually a sustainable practice? So had to wrestle with with these concepts. So so here's what's happening You graze a piece of land for one day or for half a day and you're not coming back to it for a whole year So they're getting a long rest period. You've got a very intensive You know utilization very high, but a lot of rest. So what I like to do to translate What this means to me is let's for example, let's say you you're harvesting a hayfield Well, we harvest hay pretty much every at the same time every year. So let's say you have a hayfield It's July 1st You come in with your sycamore mower and you cut it down at you know a few inches off the ground you're probably getting 80 90 percent harvest harvest efficiency and We do that for 50 hundred years whatever and it comes back and you get the same productivity every single year Obviously, there's fluctuations based on you know rainfall, but that's a sustainable practice because it's always producing about the same amount So if we switch to these higher stocking density kind of systems where we're only on that piece of ground for half a day or for a day Essentially, we're kind of taking that same concept and and applying it to livestock. So the livestock are the mower Yeah, they're not getting 80 or 90 percent of it They're maybe getting 40 and knocking down 40 or they're getting 60 and knocking down 20 But you get the point that because we have such long rest periods up to a year It does not hurt the vegetation Now we know that Some of the rest periods some of that time period, you know, it's gonna be dormant season. So when we talk about resting for a entire year There are times when you can rest land in the winter. It does really no good It's gonna be key on what's the growth rate of these plants afterwards So if you graze these things in a stage where they're the grasses in a boot stage and you hit it hard every year You're probably gonna set it back because plants are most vulnerable in the boot stage If you wait till the plants are headed out and graze it that time of year, you're probably not gonna hurt the plants Because when plants have headed out, they've put down most of what they need from the root structure So when I think about simplistic way of grazing and what kind of impact am I gonna have below ground is just think about When the plant is tall, it's probably tall below ground when the plant is short It's by short below ground. So depending upon when you graze that's kind of reflective of the impact that you're gonna have below ground So when we graze when the plant is tall, we're not gonna hurt it because it's probably set a lot of You know root structure on a side note I had a grad student that at our vulgicite which was near Brookings to kind of play around with different stocking densities So we had our producers where we we let them do what they wanted to do and and the kind of vary between 25 up to maybe 200,000 pound stocking rate And so what we wanted to do was look at stocking rates from from 50,000 pounds up to 800,000 pounds So what we did is we just we would put the enough for one day or two days Or we would go towards, you know moving maybe Eight times a day or ten times a day those kind of things and so we buried that and then we did the same thing We went ahead Into the paddock before they came and clipped the samples separated into those standing vegetation litter and then we allowed the animals to graze those paddocks and then we pulled them off and then We went back to those same areas and put down a sample next to this area that we clipped before and then we had the new Trampled we had the old litter and we had the standing vegetation. So what I'm showing you is the utilization so the remember the utilization is what was Is the pre vegetation and you subtract off the post so utilization is consumption plus trampling and And in 2012 we had that we had that drought and so we had some issues, of course Didn't want to hurt the grass and and didn't have as much forage and then in 2013. It was a little bit wetter And so what you see is kind of is that? What are we achieving? You know how much of the cattle eating and knocking things down and what it kind of appears that? Is that how much it's at what stocking density is enough? Is a 50,000 pound stock density enough to achieve some of these things do you need a hundred do you need 200 you need 400 800 because we have producers Throughout North America that are going from anywhere from that 25 to 50 that maybe are going up to like Dennis Neil Dennis up in Canada that may be up towards a million And so is there kind of this law diminishing returns is like how much is enough? And so what we found is that you know in that that there's a You know an increase in utilization and it kind of levels off and the same kind of thing here Is that there's there's only so much you can do and so what we're finding out is that you know? Yeah, maybe You know at 50,000 pounds depending upon the the vegetation We're where we're at You know maybe 200,000 pounds isn't is enough in that and that may be moving twice a day in in higher rainfall environments, but at 200,000 pounds of stocking weight or live weight in Western environments with less vegetation you have to move several times a day So and then part of the other thing was just to kind of compare this to two folks that are doing mob grazing So at some of the sites they had a comparison that we could do with mob grazing and here This is just ocular estimates of the grass cover So it wasn't the veggie it wasn't clipping the vegetation But we would make these ocular estimates of before and after and and so what I'm showing you again Is the is the before you go into the paddock and then the after and then you can make those Subtractions to get at that utilization and and kind of consumption things and so what we're showing here is that yeah They're getting more they're getting more utilization Compared to the rotation with the mob grazing same thing So when you just look at mob versus rotation So so the bottom line is you know again just reiterate. Why are people wanting to do this? Why are they intensifying this? Rotational grazing with this mob grazing and it really comes comes down to it is that They're gaining a higher harvest efficiency. There's that Higher we're getting higher utilization, but it's a safe practice because we're only on that Piece of land for just one day and it gets to be rested the other parts of the year So here are some just some pictures of before and after So this is a 57,000 pounds stock density just you know Moving once a day. So that's what it looks like another graduate student looked at some some of the the weeds and so we looked at Western snowberry, which is a native shrub and we also looked at some of the the Thistles and as you increase that stocking density cattle then tended to to utilize some of those Broadleaf plants that they normally wouldn't do so that's part of it as well This is the one that was that Reliance a sandy soil where he grazed at that million pounds. They're only on that on a piece of land for I think it was a third of an acre 45 minutes with a 300 pair and so they really trampled it and really high distribution of Dung and then the there's where the the rotation for 12 hours on 55,000 so you get a much higher utilization So here's new preset new litter cover. This is again an ocular the the one that was Quinn and The new Underwood sites are really far west and so Only 5% maybe 10% new litter. These are areas that were receiving 15 inches of rainfall And it's just darn hard To get new litter. I mean when you're there, there's a lot of space in between plants So can mob grazing be used for landscaping in semi-arid arid environments? it's very challenging because there's not a lot of biomass to begin with and To and in order to maintain performance. There's not much to trample and This is dung density So we we looked at the paths per meter square and so that's one of the things is that the work were increasing Utilization and getting more evenly distribution of density of the excrement We had a couple tours for the researchers on the project in 20 in 2012 and 2013 and we also made some videos if you want to just Go to the South Dakota grassland coalition SD grass.org you can find these videos you can search you can Google them or go on to YouTube and you'll find them Pat Guptel is the one by Quinn Charlie Totten's by Chamberlain and then Rick Smith is by Watertown and those are available to look at So bottom line is producers are getting a higher harvest efficiency We've also taken soil samples to document carbon, but we haven't got all our soil samples Analyzed and so we're we're still waiting for those but what I would say is that I Don't expect soil carbon to probably increase. That's a slow process Especially you think about those Western environments where there's not a lot of new litter being added It's that's not the mechanism for it to happen when you're only getting 5% new litter on the ground It much makes a lot more sense that you probably can increase soil carbon as you move further east Or there's a lot of biomass and you can get it trampled on the ground. Does that make sense? So my guess is that we're going to see these benefits Return to us from the higher harvest efficiency to pay for the labor and make make these ranches more sustainable and These guys are only doing it for maybe 60 days It's not sustainable to kill yourself Working that hard either and so there's there's reason you know a time period which what's they're doing for so what we're gonna We're expecting a graduate student in the econ department to finish up his thesis here this semester And then we're gonna be able to put that economic analysis that he'll do When we write our final report So the question is how many how big are the paddocks? So they'll rain they're typically five acres of what and then it's just depending upon how many pair so the one by Chamberlain he would give four to five acres and he'd have 250 pair The one producer that's since by Selby. He's actually here today He's I think he's around four or five acres and that same kind of thing So they're at that 50,000 pound stocking density So the question was did the did the producers increase their overall stocking rate for the year and I would say for yes For that piece of ground they are increasing their stocking rate their carrying capacity So these typically are our older crop our cropland long time ago been planted back to to introduce species and They're purposely getting more bang for the buck on that spot There are some the one in reliance it was native or not reliance the one by Chamberlain was native and We think with with the system that he's doing He's probably a two and a half times higher than the typical nrcs recommended Take half leave half for season long. So we are getting higher stocking rates for those pieces of land Native most of them are these old cropland that was in the West. It's crested Yep crested week crested wheatgrass alfalfa out West intermediate wheatgrass wheatgrass Broomegrass kind of things Kentucky bluegrass and the central the one in hay tie by Watertown Rick Smith. It's a Planted back blue stem big blue stem kind of thing and and so What they're doing is they're intensifying on land That can handle that but remember it's getting rested for a essentially year So they're watching body condition we didn't have weights and most people don't take the weights But you can tell the producers that they're doing this for 30 days or 60 days And then they kind of go back to a rotation where they're getting moved You know once a month once a week twice a week kind of thing so they can cows can compensate There's compensatory gain. So even if they're challenged a little bit for through two days or 60 days You'll find that they will make that up in a later period It's mostly yep everybody that we're working with our cow calf pairs except Pat Guptel that he's got bread heifers and I should mention Gary that's some Cliff Milseps over by Gary. He's got steers. So he's around 17,000 pound stock density and he's actually moving through maybe two to three times a year So he wants to make sure he has good animal performance to put gain on steers So there's two people that have yearlings every else's cow calf pair