Acres per pasture?

[ClickMeBC]

I've come to understand that sheep tend to require not one huge pasture but several smaller ones and are to be rotated throughout the grazing season to help maintain pasture and assure that they're getting the proper nutrients. My question: about how much acreage should be included in each pasture/paddock? Or does anyone simply use one large pasture for grazing?

 

I appreciate any input.

[Geoffrey]

I believe it depends on the number of sheep and the quality of the food available...

[juliepoudrier]

ClickMeBC,

Size of pasture really does depend on numbers of sheep and especially forage quality. You could have 10 sheep on 50 acres and have it not be enough (that's an exaggeration obviously) if there's nothing nutritional on that pasture to eat. Also, you can keep more on fewer acres if you are willing to supplement with feed and/or hay.

 

Ideally, I would take the largest thing I could get and put a good perimeter fence around it and then subdivide using movable fence like electronet. That way I'd have the option of giving them the whole pasture or any smaller increment thereof. Rotational grazing does help with parasite control. Of course if you have too few sheep for the acreage, you'll still have to mow and they will graze the good stuff and not control the weeds.

 

If you are using rotational grazing, the size of the paddock becomes less important (within reason) because once they have eaten everything down to your satisfaction you will simply move them on to the next section. A good rule of thumb is about five sheep per acre (totals, so if you have 10 acres of good pasture, you should be able to support about 50 sheep), but you can put all 50 sheep in sections smaller than the 10 acres and just move them more often. Really the best thing to do is have your forage analyzed to see what if offers the sheep in the way of nutrition and then base stocking rate on that. With rotational grazing, the number of sheep you have in a particular paddock will determine how often you need to move them (keeping in mind that the forage in paddock 1 needs to have time to recover and grow before your rotation brings the sheep back around to that paddock). And of course each paddock needs to big enough to give the sheep personal space and ensure that they aren't just destroying the forage through sheer numbers and trampling.

 

I hope that makes sense.

 

J.

[Rebecca, Irena Farm]

We are putting sixty sheep/lambs on about an acre and a half and moving them anywhere from once a day, to twice a day, in other words extremely quickly. I've been very pleased with the result of this treatment on the pasture exposed so far. I could wish for a little more rain, but even without the rain these tiny plots have switched from rather rugged sour pasture to an even ground cover of native legumes and tender grasses. Once the sheep move on, I go out there with my push whirly spreader and put out 10-10-10 and a little pasture seed. I know the improvement is not my imagination because we had a neighbor stop and comment on how lovely our front pasture looked (one of them - the other is pretty devastated with winter grazing). He'd always heard that sheep killed grass but now was thinking of trying sheep himself on his little acreage!

 

I am in LOVE with managed grazing and hope we can continue this. We need a few more strands of electronet so we can split the flock and move the lambs seperately from the ewes as summer moves on, and make the grazes bigger as the grass quality decreases during the summer drought.

 

We have a field that is slightly more than twenty acres, plus three fields about three acres each, all with one line of electric supplied around the border. We were tearing our hair out trying to figure out how to come up with the money to fence all this, until we realized we could just move the flock around inside the electronet. A few hundred dollars worth of electronet is much cheaper than the thousands it would take to securely fence that whole thing! We are still physically fencing two of the three acre pastures, plus we plan to do HT boundary fence between us and our two neighbors (good fences, etc).

 

We are supplementing with a protein tub, mineral blocks, loose mineral, and a teeny tiny bit of grain as the grass they are going over right now is really yucky (that's a technical term), and the ewes have lambs at foot. The protein tub's been out there for two weeks so they are not starving (and it's not getting a whole lot lighter, to my chagrin, as we have to move it every day!). The next time they cycle through, the lambs will be weaned and the forage will be much better.

 

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, of course. That is, barring any freak cold snaps, droughts, floods, or earthquakes.