A West Texas rancher is running a multi-month experiment managing 400 cows across 32,000 acres using low-stress handling and no electric fencing. The goal is to move the herd as one cohesive unit through rotational grazing, with cattle following a leader calmly. Full herd assembly should take 2-3 weeks, then another month for them to act consistently as a group.
This is part 1 of what's going to be a several-month project. What we're doing here is we're using low-stress cattle handling techniques to get cattle to grazing as a herd holistically. Long story short, we're going to take and be herding 400 cows through a 32,000-acre planned grazing system in West Texas without using any of the electric fences like what are usually used. I believe in the long run this is going to be the way to graze cattle in the future because you can rotate them within pastures. And do precise grazing where you need it. You can get the cattle to acting like a herd to where when you start to move them, you just go into the front end and start having them go by you, and all of them will pick up and follow. The set of cattle right now that I'm working on is In the training stage, but you can see I come up to this cow, I'm not chasing her, I'm not doing anything, but I rode up to her head and she just turns and she goes with the rest of the cattle, or towards the rest of the cattle. They're more or less in this thicket and grazing pretty nice. Ah, the way you tell that your cattle are acting as a herd Grazing as a herd is that they will all be facing in the same direction. And these cattle just came in Saturday. This is Wednesday. We put them down here. I come down and I move them Friday or Monday morning. Oh. And place them where I wanted. Came back today and they were coming down out of water and basically were wanting to head back the same way when I took them off water, and I just moved them back here. And as you can see, they're all pretty darn content in here, just grazing away. And this is feed. The reason I say that this method will take Over what is traditionally done with holistic grazing. There have been cattle put in here in the past, but as you can see by some of the underlying matter, it hasn't been grazed in this area in years. And I'm putting these cattle in here today. They think that they came up here of their own accord, so they're just going to come right back up here tomorrow. And Like I say, this— I'm going to be doing weekly updates, if not biweekly updates on this. It'll probably take close to a month to get these actually acting as a herd because the cattle are trickling in a truckload at a time or 2 truckloads at a time. So it's going to take me about 2 or 3 weeks to get the full 400 head in here. So the training process will be Oh. Stretched out quite a bit.
