Excerpt
IN biblical times, Abraham and Lot struggled with the problem of balancing range-produced forage with livestock needs. Abraham solved this problem simply by moving the livestock from an area with limited forage to a lightly or ungrazed area where more forage was available.
Originally, grazing land in the United States was managed in a similar manner. But, as eventually happened in the Holy Land, rangeland in the United States was stocked to its capacity during favorable years and often beyond its capacity during bad years. The result was gradual degradation of the resource (especially during the 1880-1900 period in the United States) and, ultimately, a reduction in carrying capacity; in effect, rangeland was overstocked in all years except the very best years.
Effective managment practices to halt and then reverse this trend require an understanding of the concepts and principles of grazing management and their relationship to the economic and social structure of the ranching industry. Much progress has been made on these problems in the United States (3), but not all have been solved.
Grazing management is defined as the manipulation of livestock grazing to accomplish a desired result. Although the desired result is obviously enterprise …
Footnotes
R. D. Pieper is a professor of range science, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, 88003; R. K. Heitschmidt CS an associate professor, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Box 1658, Ver-non, 76384. Journal Article 1339, Agricultural Experiment Station, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, 88003.
- Copyright 1988 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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