Livestock Management on Rangelands

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Unlike much of the land at higher elevations which is publicly owned, 80% of the oak woodlands in California are privately held.

The majority is used for grazing, primarily for beef cattle. It is therefore essential that these property owners understand the importance of oak woodland conservation and be made aware of the latest management recommendations. Since its inception, UC’s oak conservation programs have worked closely with ranchers and the professional organizations that represent them, including the California Cattlemen’s Association, the Woolgrowers, and the Farm Bureau. We have also been actively involved in the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition. Our experience is that the vast majority of rangeland owners are good stewards of the land and want to ensure that their properties are passed along to future generations with their conservation values intact. Maintaining large acreages as ranches provides myriad public benefits in terms of high quality water, critical wildlife habitat, and iconic landscapes at little or no cost to the general public.

Alternative Cow-Calf Grazing Concepts: A Rancher’s Perspective

There are many ways that cows can be run on the range. Many ranchers spread their cows out across the entire ranch, letting them graze where they want through the year and gathering only when it’s time to brand and vaccinate or at weaning. These operations typically seek to maximize the number of cows on the ranch in order to maximize returns.

Drought years can change everything. The number of animals that a ranch can feed in a severe drought might be only half, or even a quarter, as many cows as in a more typical rainfall year. The subsequent culling of cows can be emotionally painful and economically harmful. In dry years, everyone is selling and prices will be depressed. After a drought, it can be a long, slow process to rebuild your herd from within, or a costly one to purchase replacement animals, some of which will not be well-acclimated to your range.

A potential alternative is to run fewer cows than a ranch could typically support, and in drought years you can hang on to your cows, or perhaps only sell a few. In wetter years, you can keep your weaned calves until maturity, or purchase stockers to convert the extra forage into protein
and keep your operation going at full capacity.

Operationally, this mixed cow-calf plus stocker approach can be used effectively by keeping a portion of the ranch untouched until you know what the rains have brought. If dry, use the unused fields for your cows; but if it’s wet, use those same fields for your stockers.

Another concept is rotational grazing. Some landowners create small pastures and move their cows frequently. Usually, the cows will get used to this arrangement and will be eager to move to the new field without pressure. Larger ranches may not be able to create small pastures because of the cost of fencing. While electric fences can be quickly and easily installed in regions where the land is wet and soft most of the year, in the Southwestern US, the ground is too hard and the terrain too rugged to move the fences quickly and easily.

Instead of electric fences for small pasture rotation, ranchers can put all their cows together in one large field for a few weeks, then gather and move them to the next large pasture. This is more labor-intensive, but crowding the field encourages the cows to move into harder-to-reach areas and to clean up the forage, rather than eating only favored plants, which leaves woody and weedy species to gain a competitive advantage later. With well-timed rainfall, a pasture that is grazed near the end of the growing season can also regrow before turning dry, giving the rancher more forage than would otherwise be available.

By Douglas McCreary and Melvin George (2005)

• Avoid grazing in summer when oak seedlings are the only green forage available (it is best to graze in winter and fall when there is plenty of green grass)
• Graze at a low to moderate stocking density
• Plant oaks more than 0.5 miles from livestock water and on slopes more than 20%
• Plant oaks away from known feeding and resting sites and trail corridors
• Place livestock attractants (salt, supplements, rubbing posts, etc) as far away from oak seedlings as possible
• Fence fields with oak seedlings or protect individual seedlings using tree shelters until they are at least 6.5 feet tall
• As an alternative to planting oaks, protect existing volunteer oak seedlings like you would for planted seedlings