Matt Barnes

Shining Horizons Land Management / Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative

In this project, we—a rancher and a conservationist—applied low-stress approaches to herding and night-penning cattle at relativelyhigh stocking density (SD) within a rangeland pasture in a larger grazing rotation. We increased herd instinct, and we used SD to increase animal impact in a target area, with benefits for rangeland forage production. W...

Livestock–large carnivore coexistence practitioners can be more effective by expanding from a direct focus on carnivores and predation-­prevention tools to the broader social-­ecological context of ranches and rural communities, especially livestock management. Ranchers can apply many of the same approaches that work for rangeland health and livest...

The article focuses on the strategic grazing management for complex creative systems. Rangelands are complex systems because the dynamic relationships between their parts result in self-organization, emergent properties, and unpredictable behavior. The discrepancy has been noted by scientists who suggest that our profession must do a better job of...

On the Ground Grazing capacity increased substantially and rangeland vegetation measurements improved after the Howell Ranch applied strategically planned and managed grazing. Increased capacity was realized from more spatially uniform grazing distribution and harvest efficiency rather than improving conditions over time. Dividing a ranch into padd...

Matthew K. Barnes examines the case studies, experiences, and observations of the symposium presenters, including ranchers producing grassfed beef or genetics primarily on western rangelands, dairy-farming veterinarians, the AGA and the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance in the American West. Richard Parry, a fourth-generation sheep rancher, sta...

On the Ground •The inaugural Range Practicum incorporated practical, hands-on training and demonstrations into the SRM Annual Meeting and Training, contributing to its "new look" in 2020. The Range Practicum translated stockmanship, packing, horse training, and prescribed fire, as well as agency rangeland monitoring and soils training, into practi...

Adopting a systems view and regenerative philosophy can indicate how to regenerate ecosystem function on commercial-scale agro-ecological landscapes. Adaptive multi-paddock grazing management is an example of an approach for grazinglands. Leading conservation farmers have achieved superior results in ecosystem improvement, productivity, soil carbon...

In this article we argue that stockmanship is an integral—albeit over-looked and underappreciated— part of range management. Low stress herding has been used to improve grazing distribution on large rangeland landscapes with continuous, season-long, or other relatively extensive grazing management. However, it may be that its most powerful applicat...

Range riders can improve grazing management for rangeland health, livestock production, and coexistence with wildlife, potentially including large carnivores, by applying strategic grazing management. In this project, practical conservationists partnered with progressive ranchers in western Montana to develop herding methods for strategic grazing m...

On the Ground Landscapes are complex creative systems that are endlessly emerging, transforming, and vanishing as a result of ever-changing relationships among organisms and environments—soil, plants, herbivores, and human beings. In the process, all organisms are actively participating in creating environments; they aren't merely adapting to them....

On the Ground By managing for more even animal distribution, ranch managers can increase the amount of forage accessible to livestock and raise their effective grazing capacity. Smaller paddocks and higher stocking density improve the distribution of grazing in each paddock. A landscape of many, smaller paddocks will spread grazing pressure more ev...

Rangelands P lant community change is inevitable, and grazing management strongly affects how change occurs. Heavy or frequent defoliation reduces individual plant vigor and productivity. 1 Animal preferences for particular pasture locations and plant species reduce the benefits of moderate average stocking rates in continuously grazed paddocks wit...

Rangelands P lant community change is inevitable, and grazing management strongly affects how change occurs. Heavy or frequent defoliation reduces individual plant vigor and productivity. 1 Animal preferences for particular pasture locations and plant species reduce the benefits of moderate average stocking rates in continuously grazed paddocks wit...

Grazing ecosystems are what scientists call complex adaptive systems: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts because of the relationships between the parts. The relationships form the web of life, so intricate that their individual and collective behaviors exhibit patterns that are beyond complicated: self-organization with emergent propert...

Generations on the Land: A Conservation Legacy. By Joe Nick Patoski. 2011. Sand County Foundation/Texas A&M University Press, College Station, TX, USA. 136 p. US$25. hardcover. ISBN 978-1-60344-241-1.

Increased stocking density increases instantaneous grazing pressure, but does not necessarily reduce diet quality and nutrient intake. Animals’ ability to select quality over time and space is driven by stocking rate for that period of time, and can be changed through management. We modeled a hypothetical grazing cell as divided into increasing num...

Rotational stocking may reduce repeat grazing of preferred plants relative to more extensive grazing methods such as continuous stocking, thus increasing effective grazing capacity. We measured repeat defoliation and documented a shift in feeding choice over short grazing periods in small paddocks.At Cedar Mountain, Utah, during July-August, we sto...

Rotational stocking may reduce the selectivity of grazing animals relative to more extensive grazing methods such as continuous stocking, thus increasing grazing capacity. We tested the hypotheses that, as stocking density increased under intensive rotational stocking, grazing use would be distributed over a higher proportion of species, and the ti...

Greater and Gunnison sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus and C. minimus) forage in wet meadows adjacent to sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) rangelands. Both sage-grouse species are thought to require a higher proportion of forbs and associated insects in their diets than is usually available in either anthropogenic grass meadows or some sagebrush rang...

Pasture subdivision can increase control of the time and place grazing occurs, often resulting in more even distribution of utilization across a landscape over a grazing cycle, but more concentrated distribution within a grazing period. However, the assumption that paddock subdivision and increased stock density necessarily reduce selectivity, nutr...

The claim that intensive rotational grazing (IRG) can sustain higher stocking rates can be partially explained by more even spatial distribution of grazing such that livestock consume forage from a greater proportion of a pasture. To test the hypothesis that utilization is more even at the higher stocking densities of smaller paddocks, mean absolut...

The benefits of multi-paddock rotational grazing on commercial livestock enterpriseshave been evident for many years in many countries. Despite these observations and theresults of numerous studies of planned grazing deferment before the mid-1980s that showbenefit to species composition, most recent rangelands grazing studies suggest thatrotational...

The New Ranch Handbook: A Guide to Restoring Western Rangelands. By Nathan F. Sayre. Edited by Barbara H. Johnson. 2001. The Quivira Coalition, 551 Cordova Road, #423, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, USA. 102 + x p. US$10.00 (+3.00 S&H) paper. ISBN 0-9708264-0-0.