Rotational grazing with fire and water

Garry Riggs from Lakefield Station recently told me about the importance of spelling country.

“If you graze during the wet, cattle will select the preferred species, so they won’t develop roots or reproduce. If you don’t spell one in three years minimum, you’ll start to lose those preferred species. A lot of grasses need to be spelled so they can develop a root system, and the bigger the root system, the more feed for the cattle.

“We spell 2-4 paddocks each wet season for our weaners to go onto in the dry.

“We also try to burn half of each paddock every year. We burn at the start of the wet season after a minimum six inches of rain. The undesired annual grasses and weeds have germinated so the fire can knock them out with the woody weeds.

“The cattle go onto the burnt area when it starts to green up and they stay there. That gives the other half of the paddock a spell.
We manage numbers to keep a cover of about 50-60% over the wet and then get it down to 30% by the end of the dry to create a firebreak. The grazed area then gets a spell over the wet and we burn the other side. It seems to work well with our land systems, and with healthy grasses we get a quick response to rain and plenty of infiltration.

“You need 65% groundcover to have a good fire. If we want to burn an area we take cattle out of the paddock when it gets down to 65%.

“I disagree with burning after the wet season if you’re running cattle. If you don’t get hot fires the timber will thicken up. You’ve got to use fire as a tool and you’ve got to have a hot fire every so often.

Garry also rotates using water. “I am developing a system of fenced dams with tanks and troughs to keep the cattle away from the main watering systems for six months. That allows us to shut the bores off and rest the grass around those areas.

“Using a 3km grazing radius (water points 6km apart), we found that cattle move between water points and rotate themselves through your paddock. But if it’s too far to the next one they’ll go back to the first one all the time.”