Our Safe-to-Fail stock density trial with Holistic Management International

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In the livestock world we talk about stocking rate all the time. Stocking rate is pretty simple – it’s the number of animals you keep on your farm, and it’s expressed as animals (or pounds, animal units, etc...) per acre. It’s certainly important to know the carrying capacity of your farm, but there’s not much more you can glean from stocking rate than a general idea of how many cows you keep annually. Stock density is a little different. It can be much more variable from day to day or week to week, and understanding it gives a manager the tools to fine tune their operation over time. Stock density is really just what it sounds like – the number of animals in a given space at that very moment. It’s still expressed as animals per acre, but instead of being spread over the whole farm, it only refers to the paddock that your herd is in. So for instance, if you have 50 cows on 100 acres, and they move daily into paddocks that are 2 acres each, your stocking rate is .5 cows per acre, but your stock density is 25 cows per acre. The importance of knowing stock density comes in when we talk about management. How do we improve or maintain forage over the year? How do we make the most of the forage we have? In digging into these questions and others, stock density should be rising to the surface of our conversations.

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When we talk about regenerative agriculture, we often get into things like biomimicry, a fancy word for emulating what we see in nature. For us grazers, we like to look at wild herds like the historic American bison for inspiration. First hand accounts, given by early settlers, tell of herds so large they seem outlandish to us today. Single herds taking several days to pass through one area, in a constant stream leaving little or nothing behind, not to be seen again for months or even years, when the prairie had returned to its glory. It’s known beyond a shadow of a doubt that this cycle, massive disturbance by hooved herbivores, followed by adequate recovery, leads to the deepest and richest deposits of topsoil on earth over time. It evokes all sorts of fuzzy feelings in our brains too, but how can we apply any of that to a real farm with cows and fences? Is there even any point?

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In the early part of May we embarked on an experiment with the guidance of Holistic Management International. Wayne Knight and Larry Dyer made the trek to Kentucky to help us pull off a trial – a Safe to Fail Trial to be exact. The goal was to achieve an intensely high stock density on a very small bit of land, and monitor its recovery. It’s not for the faint of heart, either. Depending on your infrastructure and grazing style, it may be a bit of challenge to reach a stock density of over 1 million pounds to the acre. At Mt Folly Farm we managed to funnel a herd of 55 cows into a space of around 30 feet squared. I know, it doesn’t even sound possible, but we did it. Our high tensile woven wire fence was tested for a minute but passed with flying colors, while a single hot line secured the other two sides of the small rectangle. Here, completely shoulder to shoulder, the herd would spend the next few hours, before returning to their regularly scheduled program.

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So what happened? What did we learn? Will we ever do anything this crazy again? To get answers to any of these questions we first had to wait, and watch.

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First of all, you might have noticed I missed getting a shot of the herd in this space. My full apologies, it got a little intense as we closed them off into their area and I was in a hurry to move away and let them settle down. I think you can get the idea from these photos that we did manage to get a heck of a lot of cows into a heck of a small space.

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On the day of we see about what we would expect. This area had been excluded from the cattle for the whole growing season up to this point. You can see the grass on the way into the trial area was sufficiently trampled, even that had much higher stock density than usual, but our figures showed we were at or over 1 million pounds in the most affected area for about 2.5 hours.

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After a week there was total die off. While the cattle didn’t graze much, they trampled and manured on the area sufficiently to kill off all the parts of the plants that were above ground. Manure and/or urine was in contact with nearly the entire space. Based on the root sloughing that should be occurring now, and the injection of microbiology from the manure, we can expect that the biology in the soil is exploding right now.

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This photo shows the difference in between our trial area and the ground immediately adjacent, that also experienced a very brief but high stock density, but nowhere near as extreme as our target area.

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Fast forward another couple of hot summer weeks and we’ve got some nice recovery. The grass in our target area is generally thicker leafed and a little deeper green than what is growing beside it. While there isn’t any bare ground, the soil surface is still matted with trampled grasses in the spots not actively growing, there is opportunity for new plants to come through, which tend toward annuals.

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A shot showing pieces of our target area of 1 million+ pounds per acre and the space next door. Notice neither area has seed heads like the grasses in the background. Neither spot is ready to graze yet, but we’re starting to see the differences in how they are recovering.

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Fast forward again to a full 3 ½ months after our stock density trial and it’s clear to see that our target area has produced a lot more biomass, due in part to the increased annual grasses like foxtail. At this point it’s a bit past an ideal grazing state, but that doesn’t mean there’s not some good forage in there. When compared to the average continuously grazed pasture you pass by on any country drive, the amount of forage here is massive. As we moved into mid August and early September, it became clear that this spot would be producing a bumper crop even as the heat rose and the rain threatened to stop altogether. After looking absolutely barren in mid May, this spot was set up to thrive through a drought.

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One more look at the target area with the adjacent trampled area in the foreground. From this angle the back section looks rank, would have been ready to graze earlier, but all those seed heads can also be misleading. Under and around the mature annual foxtail, there’s some really lush pasture, even thicker than what’s visible in front of it. It’s important to not just look out across your pastures, but down into them, to get a full picture of what’s there.

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Conclusions. We aren’t jumping to any, but this experiment has made it clear that extreme stock density can have the effects we expected based on those historic accounts of unimaginably large herds. Does it have any real practicality in your grazing operation? That remains to be seen. While we absolutely created more growth per acre with the extreme density, how did that relate to forage quality? Clearly this could be an effective tool in preparing for drought, but what would be the outcome at different times of year? And who is really going to put that many animals in that small of a space and move them every 2-3 hours anyway? The answer to the last question is very few people, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth learning from our safe to fail stock density trial, quite the contrary. The point of this experiment is not to convince anyone to run over a million pounds per acre, but really to allow ourselves a view of the full spectrum of stock density. We see the effects of very low density all the time; any country drive can easily become a study on low density and overgrazing. What we almost never see is the other extreme on the spectrum – what it looks like when we almost can’t physically fit any more cows in a given space, and then move them along and give the land the time it needs to regenerate. Just seeing that, and gaining perspective on what the true scale of impact we can use, and how it behaves afterward, is informative. Beyond that, it’s also clear that we get some benefits from even the extremely high stock densities, particularly in overall plant growth and drought resilience. We haven’t taken into account the effects on the rest of the farm, either. If all of our animals are on one small piece of land, that means even more forage is out there recovering and growing lusher before our animals get there.

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Ultimately we have even more questions now than before. How will this area look as we continue to monitor it? When perennial grasses reclaim the spaces filled by opportunistic annuals this year, how will they compare to neighboring forages? What if we repeat this process next year in the same area? Or in different areas, and at different times of year? Some of these will remain thought exercises while others we’ll try out. For regeneration to occur and sustain over time, we must be stringent on our principles and flexible with our practices. We must be adaptive to changing circumstances, both on our land and in our lives.

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The safe to fail trial was a lot of fun to pull off. It’s not often you get a field full of cattlemen together and do something none of us had ever seen before. But beyond that it has been pretty informative. It tested a situation we all learn about, but mostly in theory, and brought it right in front of our faces. Seeing is believing for many, and I find that to be even truer for farmers. We’ve certainly seen some new things that get us thinking. Speaking for myself, this experiment won’t fundamentally change the way I graze, but it will inform decisions I make throughout the year and how I look at my fields. From there it’s anyone’s guess. The best part of planting a new seed is watching what it grows into.

Special thanks, again, to Wayne Knight and Holistic Management International for talking us into this adventure. For more information on everything they do visit their website at - https://holisticmanagement.org/

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