Nebraskaland

March 2020 • Nebraskaland 27 T he top priority for our family prairie is to optimize habitat for wildlife, pollinators and plant diversity. We graze between 25 and 30 cow/calf pairs on about 110 acres of pasture each year, between mid-April and late September. Our grazing strategies are designed to create a "shifting mosaic" of habitat patches that represent the full spectrum of grassland vegetation structure. Each patch has years when it is intensively grazed for most of a season, but also years of little or no grazing to compensate. The current technique we're using is something I call the "open gate grazing rotation system." It's about as uncomplicated as a grazing system can be, but seems to cover all of our objectives. Our pasture is split into four big paddocks and a couple smaller ones. After quickly running cattle through several of those pastures in the spring to knock back smooth brome, bluegrass and sweetclover, we put the cattle into one of the bigger paddocks for a month or so, or until they've grazed most of the vegetation short. Then, we open the gate to the next paddock. However, instead of closing the gate behind the cattle, we leave the gate open, allowing access to both paddocks. As the season progresses, anytime the cattle start running low on forage, we just open another gate – always leaving at least one paddock ungrazed each year. Leaving gates open allows the cattle to keep grazing the paddocks they started on earlier in the season, helping to provide valuable short-stature habitat. The initial paddock gets grazed hard all season long, suppressing the vigor of dominant grasses. In the following year, that paddock is left ungrazed and goes through a year of weedy recovery, providing excellent brood-rearing habitat for birds and abundant food and cover for many other wildlife and insect species. While we're still experimenting with open-gate technique, I like what I've seen so far. Each year, the fi rst paddock grazed gets the kind of season- long intensive grazing we want and then rests for the following season and part of the next. Other paddocks receive intermediate levels of grazing intensity and duration, resulting in a variety of habitat structure for wildlife and growing conditions for plants. The stocking rate of cattle is the same as what we'd use in any other grazing rotation, so I'm optimizing our income. However, instead of trying to graze the entire pasture evenly, I'm "overutilizing" some parts of the pasture and "underutilizing" others. Because the "overutilized" areas get plenty of time to recover, we're not degrading the long-term health of our grasses, but are sustaining high plant diversity and good wildlife numbers. Prairie Management The 'open gate' management approach creates a wide range of habitat structure across the prairie, created by various stages of intensive grazing and recovery. Native bees appreciate the increasing fl oral diversity at the site.

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