A rancher moved cattle onto a bare pasture and found tumbleweeds actually help grass grow by holding moisture. The grazed side now has more feed than the ungrazed side, with taller, denser weeds compared to the neighbor's shorter grass across the fence.
All this was completely dirt road last winter when we did our grazing. You look at tumbleweeds as being a bad thing, but you know, that's something that's going to hold that water back a little bit. If they could hit it again in the near future, well, then we'd have some grass coming up in place of these weeds. When I brought the cattle up in here, held them there for a little bit, I just set them to graze right up the right-hand side of this little draw. And as you can see, the side that got grazed has got quite a bit more feed on it than the side that didn't. This is an area I'd almost forgotten about. Last winter, this on both sides of the fence was completely bare ground. We kind of moved the cattle up in here just to see what would happen if we just got a bunch of herd impact. And as you can see on the neighbor's side of the fence, they got a little bit of weeds, a little bit of grass that's all pretty short. When you come across the fence down here, you've got taller weeds and a lot more of them. That's just from the impact of Putting those cattle up here and then letting them walk back out, 'cause there was really nothing for them to eat.
