Effect of rotational grazing on plant and animal production

Abstract

It is a common understanding that rotational cattle grazing provides better yields than continuous grazing, but a quantitative analysis is lacking in agricultural literature. In rotational grazing, cattle periodically move among paddocks in contrast to continuous grazing, in which the cattle graze on a single plot for the entire grazing season. We construct a differential equation model of vegetation grazing on a fixed area to show that production yields and stockpiled forage are greater for rotational grazing than continuous grazing. Our results show that both the number of cattle per acre and stockpiled forage increase for many rotational configurations.