There are many benefits that come from rotational grazing. Having a high concentration of animals on a small paddock eats down the vegetation evenly. It can help get rid of pasture weeds and seedling trees, and it builds your soil quickly. The herd moving over a small paddock is a manure spreader on hoof, fertilizing as they go. This helps regenerate the grass as it regrows post-grazing. Another benefit is that you can raise more livestock on less acreage: as your soil builds up it will be able to sustain more animals.

Contract grazing involves the use of livestock to control specific undesirable plants, primarily for ecological restoration and wildfire prevention purposes. The landowners we worked for saw grazing as an ecologically friendly alternative to mowing, mechanical brush removal, and herbicide application.

The term mob grazing is often used to describe short duration high-intensity grazing – with many cattle on a small area of pasture, moved once a day or even several times a day to a new section of pasture. Kevin Fulton, of Fulton Farms in central Nebraska, says not everyone has the same definition when they think about mob grazing. “We’ve been doing rotational grazing on our place for nearly 40 years, but didn’t do it very intensively until about 9 years ago when we started doing some daily moves and even some multiple daily moves,” says Fulton.