I love talking about grass. I assume if you are reading this, you are also a grass geek. If you were here on the ranch in Kenya, we would go around all day looking at grass and geeking out about the finer points. How many leaves since the last defoliation, whether the canopy was closed, whether the short plant species were recovered or the tall species. We might waste our day, but it would be such a good way to waste it. I’m not going to do that in this blog. 

I am going to tell you how to know if a paddock is recovered without talking about grass, the actual grass, much. In fact, I won’t tell you if the grass has recovered. If you want to regraze a paddock, I say go for it. It’s your ranch. Any reason is fine with me. Well,… any reason but one. There are a thousand good reasons to regraze a paddock and only one bad reason. One very, very bad reason. Oh, and you need to have a reason.

Grazing gurus don’t talk too much about how to know when a paddock is recovered. One reason for that is it's just hard to communicate some of the subtleties of grass in long-winded blog posts. And it's easy to do more harm than good with poor communication. Also, there is a certain amount of art to it that can be hard to talk about. “Art” makes it sound mystical, but it's no more difficult than learning how to operate an excavator. Probably easier.

It’s hard to tell someone how to operate an excavator, but if you go out into an open field and mess around with it by yourself for an afternoon, you will have a pretty good idea. If you start on a busy construction site where there are gas lines and power lines and everyone is watching you, not so much. If you are in the excavator, you don’t need someone shouting in your ear, “little bit more throttle!” or “watch out!” You just need to figure it out. That’s what you need in order to make good decisions about paddock recovery. This blog post will give you the tools you need to make “low-stakes mis-takes” when it comes to paddock recovery.

Let’s start with the one unacceptable reason. I call it the PHGF method. Do not regraze a paddock because you have run out of grass everywhere else, and this sorry-looking paddock in front of you is the best grass that you have. Do not regraze a paddock because it is the Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory. 

Grazing geeks, you know that feeling. Suddenly, you realize the cattle are about to run out of grass, and you scramble around to find where they are going to go next. The best paddock you have looks pretty, sorry, but there are some places that look okay, and they are calling for rain next week. It’ll be okay, you tell yourself. Well, I’m here to tell you. It won’t be okay. 

The problem is you were already going through your grass faster than you expected; that’s why you are in this situation. Now, you are going into a paddock with even less grass than the last rotation. So the cattle fly through that paddock. The next one has even less grass, and you go through that even faster. Soon, you fly through all the paddocks and go back to the first one again. It wasn’t pretty before, and now it looks pathetic, but you give it to the cattle anyway. You’ve gotten used to giving them bad paddocks.

The original grazing geek, Andre Voison, called this “Untoward Acceleration,” which I am sure is a beautiful and sensible term in his native French, but when we translate it into English, it has problems. I call this phenomenon “The Spinnies” because the cattle start rotating faster than a flywheel. Pretty soon, the grass you are putting them on looks about the same as the grass you are taking them off of. 

The Spinnies are a circle of hell that you must avoid at all costs. This is terrible for the cattle, even worse for the land, and it is worse for you. If you are engaging in the Spinnies, I would suggest that three-quarters of your work and 90 percent of your stress can be traced back to those Spinnies. Think about the cattle that broke out just when you didn’t have time to mess with it, think about the tractor breaking down when they are already bawling for hay, think about the mysterious health emergency that struck the cattle as they were roaming around with hungry eyes and dull coats. 

The Spinnies are the reason that people say “‘Rotational Grazing’ doesn’t work.”

Every grazier should go through The Spinnies once, like an Amish “Rumspringa,” designed to put the fear of God into you. But after that, it must be avoided at all costs. There is no shame in continuous grazing, not on this blog. But you owe it to your cattle, your land, your family, and yourself never (henceforth) to engage in The Spinnies. Never, never, never. 

Now, many of the people reading this blog will have gone through that trial by fire and come to that same conclusion. You know this. In fact, you know this so well that you make sure that the grass is recovered. Like, really sure. So sure that you are going to wait another six months after being sure, just in case you are wrong. Just in case you can’t trust yourself. 

Increasingly, there are grazing gurus who are telling you that you are right to mistrust yourself, and they entirely avoid the question of recovery. They advocate letting paddocks rest so long that there is no shadow of a doubt as to whether the land has had enough rest. Then rest them longer. I think that is a big mistake. If you irrigate your pasture, too much water is just as bad as not enough. Rest is the same way; too much is bad for your bank account, your cattle, and the biodiversity and ecosystem function of your land. I think science suggests that it is also bad for soil carbon. You need to be riding the edge of what is too much and not enough rest, or you will never learn very much about grass. 

So, where is that edge? How do we make sure that we are both avoiding the Spinnies while avoiding planned, chronic overrest?

This is where we bump up against the discussion about the stocking rate. I am going to talk about stocking rates in the next blog, but I need to touch on it here. If you are stocked for the “average year,” what that means is that you are deciding to leave yourself at the mercy of The Spinnies for fifty percent of those years. In those years, the years where you need management the most, you will stop managing. Because if you are in the throes of the Spinnies, you’re not managing. You are not deciding if a paddock is recovered; you're just starting the next rotation whenever you happen to be done with the first rotation, whether that is good for the grass or not. It would be much better if you had never heard of “regenerative grazing” and you were just set stocked. The Spinnies are much worse than well-managed set stocking. 

You must be stocked so that in the average year, there is so much grass that you simply cannot get to it all. When the below-average year comes, you won’t even notice. When the bad year comes, you will make it just fine. When the terrible year comes along, you make the hard decisions early. You do whatever you must to not run out of grass. I will say it again: never run out of grass. You might have to pull back ten or twenty percent on your stocking rate in order for your stocking rate to surge ahead in the future. It is one of the best investments in ranching, which makes it one of the best investments anywhere.

This way, you are always deciding whether you are going to graze the next paddock in your rotation or you are going to start a new rotation. If every day, you are deciding between at least two paddocks, both of which are good options to graze, then you are managing grass. If not, in my opinion, you are not doing much grass management. 

This is because if you have plenty of grass, you are never forced into the psychological bind of trying to justify grazing a paddock that is clearly not ready. As such, you’re going to make much better decisions. You just keep grazing along until you are quite confident that the first paddock is ready. In fact, you graze along until you flip from being nervous about not giving it enough time and giving it too much. Our feelings give us lots of clues about this if we listen to them.

But what if you’re wrong? Well, sometimes you will be. If you are wrong, no problem. A lot of people avoid making real grazing decisions because they are afraid of a mistake. What if I mess something up?! In fact, what if I damage a paddock and I don’t even know it?! It becomes a mystical thing, and you can wrap yourself up in knots around it, and you can get scared by other people’s ideas or judgments. This feeling, being worried that you will mess something up and not know it, prevents people from regrazing paddocks in time. So, before we talk about anything else, we need to address the problem of what constitutes a “mistake” when it comes to recovery time?

Think back to The Spinnies. They start because you are not getting enough feed from a certain paddock, which forces you to graze the next paddock too soon, which forces you to graze the next one even more too soon, and on and on. Eventually, you’ll be back at the first paddock way too soon. It is the cumulative impact of returning too soon to many paddocks over weeks and months(and years) that creates grass production problems. It’s the Spinnies that are the problem. But if you have a backstop of paddocks that are full of grass from the last rotation, grass that will take the cattle a very long time to eat, it will be impossible for the snowball to build up any speed.

When you regraze a paddock, notice if you are not getting the amount of time/ grass/ Animal Days you expected out of a paddock. Notice if you are not getting the amount of time you need to have a full recovery. If you rest for a month and you get 25 Animal Days to the acre, and you rest for two weeks and you get five days to the acre, then those two weeks are well worth it. It's a great investment. And it will probably be that obvious. If you were expecting twenty-five Animal Days to the acre and you got twenty-one, it's not a big deal. If you are so tightly scheduled that getting five or ten percent less from a paddock than you expected is going to be a big deal, then you are way over-stocked. But if you got five days and you were expecting and needing 25 days, don’t move them to the next paddock in this rotation. Go back to the wild and wooly stuff left over from the last rotation that you skipped. No big deal.

This way, if you graze one paddock a little too soon, it won’t add up to a hill of beans because you have all that old material from the paddocks you didn’t get to in the last rotation to keep the dominoes from falling, and causing the Spinnies. This is especially true if you are paying attention. If you gave them a paddock that was not ready, but you still moved them when they took about half of the grass that they are actually eating, you’ll be fine.

If you start a rotation and get through it with plenty of recovery time (so the first paddock is ready to graze) and with the cattle satisfied and a paddock or two somewhere that you haven’t even made it to yet, you did fine. Could you have done better? Maybe, and it is good to think about. That is one of my favorite things to think about. If it is one of your favorite things to think about, then you probably did just fine. If you don’t want to think about it… maybe it's because you could have done better. 

And I manage grass because I love managing grass. I love to feel the grass getting better every day, to feel my understanding growing all the time, to be out of my mind with impatience to see what it is going to be like in six months or ten years, but having no choice but to wait. That is the best feeling in the world. If I can’t make the decision about when to regraze the first paddock (whether it is because I am a slave to the Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory or because I have institutionalized over-rest in my paddocks), I’m just not going to be satisfied. And if you have read umpteen pages of this blog to get to this point… I am just going to tell you. You won’t be satisfied with that either.

In this way, you can go about your life, and every day, you can be excited to see if today is the day that you get to re-graze your “first” paddock, never worrying about running out of grass or whether you are creating metaphysical harm to your grass. Every day, you get to see if you are more or less right, or you feel the intolerable sting that comes with having been slightly too soon or a little too late. But then you will get to feel the next feeling, the steely determination to not let it happen this rotation. Slowly, you get to know your grass on your ranch in a deep way, in your guts. And, someday, if I come to your ranch, and we get to geek out all day about grass, you can tell me what it means for a paddock to be recovered.