Planned grazing, involving rotating livestock through multiple paddocks at a speed depending on forage growth rate, contrasts to many scenarios across Africa, where continuous stocking means there is no attempt to routinely rest or reserve forage.

Real-world assessment and trials around the efficacy of pastoral landscapes have been limited, states the paper’s authors. To counter this, the research team here performed a landscape-scale assessment of the effects of planned grazing on vegetation, wildlife and cattle attributes across communally-managed Kenyan rangelands.

• Rainfall in this area is generally low (annual mean 189-430mm), and there are peaks in April-June (long rains) and October-November (short rains).
• The area is generally hot and the mean annual temperature is 16-33C.

The key findings were that planned grazing:

• enhanced vegetation condition by 17%
• 45-234% increase in herbaceous vegetation foliar cover
• improved cattle weight gain by >71% during dry conditions

These results were surprising given that planned grazing had only been in place for five years, while unplanned grazing had been in place for decades. These improvements also occurred despite higher stocking rates on the planned grazing areas.