Combating drought and increasing long-term economic profit.
Grasslands in the U.S. are threatened by overgrazing, increasingly frequent and severe drought, and land use change.
On pasture and rangelands of the Great Plains, continuous grazing is the conventional practice for domesticated livestock production.
In contrast to continuous grazing, rotational grazing rotates livestock through several paddocks, with only one paddock grazed at a time while other paddocks rest.
As the grazing system becomes more intensive, the grazing area is divided into more paddocks, and the cattle are rotated on a more frequent basis.
Management Intensive Grazing (MIG) is an intensive form of rotational grazing, which generally utilizes at least 20 paddocks with very short grazing periods of 1 to 7 days followed by a grass recovery period of 60 to 90 days depending on the weather conditions (Teague et al., 2013) Unlike continuous grazing, intensive rotational grazing usually allows sufficient time for defoliated grass to regrow and hence sustains long-term grassland resilience.
Anecdotal evidences show intensive rotational grazing practice or MIG helped ranchers extended their grazing season and reduced purchased forage cost.
Despite anecdotal evidence and support from consultants and government, adoption of rotational grazing practice remains low.
Moreover, most farms adopting rotational grazing are under extensive rotational grazing, instead of intensive rotational grazing, MIG.
The overall goal of this multi-disciplinary effort is to investigate the economic, environmental and land use consequences of MIG practice in the Northern and Southern Great Plains of U.S., as well as barriers for non-adoption and incentives to overcome such barriers, to help ranchers to increase profit from rangeland and pasture, while decreasing surface runoff and increasing soil infiltration.