#85 Understanding Plant and Soil Succession

Hello, I am Jim Elizondo, and I would like to welcome you to today’s blog: Understanding plant and soil succession.

But before we start, I want to give you some good news. If you weren’t ready to join Total Grazing Academy this year but are committed to regenerating your land with livestock, then I want to invite you to join the Total Grazing Program which is the 1st pillar of the Total Grazing Academy.
This way you can be ready to join the Academy when it opens again and you can start now.

Whether you are a new grazier starting from scratch or an experienced rotational grazier who wants to have his or her land regenerated with their livestock.

The universal principles taught in the Total Grazing Program Online Course will equip you to maximize your productivity and regenerate your land.

Enrollment is open today and will close this Thursday so make sure you enroll, go to www.rwranching.com/grazingpillar.

The Total Grazing Program is one of the 4 Pillars that will create real wealth in your land and in your life.

Here's what you will put into action:

✓ Plan and set up your fence and water infrastructure in a simple and low-cost way

✓ Implement the Total Grazing Program correctly

✓ React fast when there is mud

✓ Define when and for how long you will stockpile

✓ Transition from selective grazing to Total grazing

And to celebrate your commitment to improving your grazing to transform your soil, your forages, and your life... I am adding all of the support and bonuses offered by the Total Grazing Academy free of charge!

This includes 7 weeks of live group coaching sessions and access to an exclusive coaching forum where you can share pictures and videos and get your answers right away. 3 months of Fat Wallet Ranchers which is an incredible membership for continuous growth and unstoppable momentum.

You will also get the Jumpstart Success kit and the Q&A sessions vault.

So go to www.rwranching.com/grazingpillar to enroll today before enrollment closes this week!

At Real Wealth Ranching we strive to get you maximum productivity while your land improves the fastest, including plant and soil succession.

We know that we can use our livestock, hooves, and grazing, to improve our grasses and our soils by creating lush and leafy pastures in their regrowth, which by allowing them to grow to full recovery will create strong and deep roots.

But, we also need to be cd. Your soil’s quality or more specifically, its humus content, will determine which grass species can establish and prosper, then your management will determine which grasses or forage species will dominate your land. Why?

As I have explained in previous posts, the way that humus, our soil’s slow cycling carbon, is created by the soil microorganisms' bodies when they are digested by other microorganisms with the final digestión carried out by fungi, which after a process of maturation, is called humus: our soil’s real fertility.

Okay, when our soil is improved by increasing its humus levels, it starts to behave differently; your soil will hold more water and release it on demand to your plants which will have stronger and deeper roots if you manage your grazing correctly, note I said managed correctly. Your higher humus-content soil will also release more nitrogen and your plants will start to grow faster and longer in dry conditions as this type of nitrogen feeding is not impaired by dry soil conditions!

This means that your desirable plant composition will improve as your soil improves! This is plant succession, where pioneer species prepare the soil for intermediate species and finally for climax species which will give much higher productivity per acre and feed your livestock better as they are of higher quality.

How can we know which species are better? Besides palatability we can observe the width and length of the green leaves, the green leaves-to-stem ratio, and how long they stay green into the dry or cold seasons. This makes a lot of sense. as, when it gets dry or cold, the only plants to remain green and palatable will get clobbered by livestock or wildlife, and after being continuously overgrazed, they will go extinct, right? Imagine a large paddock where it gets very dry or cold where all plants turn brown, but some species, somehow manage to stay green and palatable, will the livestock go to them and eventually kill them by repeated grazing? Yes, I have seen this happen in the dry mountains of Mexico, where in their winters the only grasses to stay green were preferentially grazed under the previous rotational grazing management and are now a very large part of the grass on offer, I have also observed this in Mediterranean environments in Europe, where they no longer have warm-season perennials in their pastures, as livestock have been grazing continuously for over a thousand years, the best plant species get overgrazed- re-grazed many times without giving them the chance to recover which ultimately kills them.

If in this soil and plant succession, we do not manage correctly our grazing, the land will start to go back to its formerly degraded condition, and it’s what I have been observing worldwide. In dry or brittle environments, after many years of overgrazing, brought about by continuous grazing which leaves the soil bare and stays bare which means the land is desertifying, a bio crust forms on the soil surface. This is nature’s way of protecting the soil, but it is an early succession; from bare soil to a bio crust, or cryptogram soil, which impedes water from infiltrating into the soil, and productivity is seriously impeded if we allow the land to stagnate in that succession phase from bare soil brought about by overgrazing to a bio crust. A bio crust is NOT a high succession environment, it is a low succession environment with very low productivity, maybe 1 to 2% productivity compared to a good grass stand with desirable species close together. So what should we do when we encounter a bio crust? Continue doing set stocking but at lower livestock densities as most agencies recommend. Completely de-stock as some people suggest?

I have been to those wrongly called “protected areas” where livestock is excluded from the land. The land and plants, in those arid to semi-arid environments, go backward after the lack of animal impact degrades the soil and the bio crust inhibits the best grass species from germinating, the grass plant species that can establish and dominate will be undesirable ones that have awns to penetrate the hard crust and thrive on the, by now, low oxygen content soils. The biocrust effectively seals the soil and inhibits water infiltration compared to a thriving community of desirable grasses close together as would happen under the Total Grazing Program. We have the results in arid and semi-arid environments. Productivity can be greatly enhanced by utilizing this knowledge about succession!

The same happens in rainy environments, but in a different manner: a moss-hard crust is created in the soil surface from years of continuous grazing. This bio crust impedes water infiltration, and I personally observed powder-dry soil under it in North Wales, even after a week of rain. Of course, the roots of the forages were very short and productivity was very low, while in another spot close by, we observed the grass 7 times taller, we went to dig and found that the rain had infiltrated deeply and the grassroots were deep and strong. This happened as heifers had been kept there for longer and animal impact had been enough to break the bio crust seal and grass/clover growth exploded!

What needs to be done, is to implement the Total Grazing Program, I cannot emphasize enough that it is a program, not a grazing style, and if you implement it you will get the best results. Why? Because we follow nature as it was designed, we consider basic plant physiology, actual results, how soil humus, or slow cycling carbon is created, and actual results that can be observable and measured: like increased stocking rates or cow days harvested per acre per year, desirable plant composition, number of growing points of desirable plant per square yard or every 10 yards on a Canfeld line, organic matter %, water infiltration, etc.

This is what you can learn in the Total Grazing Program online course: The Why of the Total Grazing Program.
How to graze in the green season to get the highest quality grass for your livestock while grazing a much smaller portion of your land, allowing the rest to grow for standing hay to be used later.
How to graze in the dry or cold season to get as many cow days harvested per acre as possible
What to observe in your livestock manure and gut fill to make sure they have the best health
How to determine when to start offering a small amount of a high protein supplement, in the standing hay área, only if needed. And, how much would be the minimum amount of high protein percentage supplement to maintain the rumen functioning?
Getting the best nutrition to livestock classes that require them
Flexible and minimal infrastructure: water lanes that double as ways to move your livestock around your farm, rectangular high tensile paddocks, with the design taking into account future increases in grass productivity, low initial cost, and low maintenance. Ease of management!
If you want your land to improve and continue improving, you need to achieve the best soil and plant succession for you, your pastures, and your livestock

Conclusion and recap:

1. Soil and plant succession involves your forage species and your soil's ability to feed and provide water for your best forage species

2. On the forage plants side: we know that succession starts with pioneer species, then to intermediate species, and finally to climax species with the quality of these species normally increasing. There are some pioneer species that provide high-quality forage.
3. On the soil side, we know that increased humus or organic matter content, faster infiltration rates on clay soils or more water being retained on sandy soils, sandy soils darkening in color, and your soil smelling more like forest liter soil, which means it is improving. We know that each 1% of organic matter your soil increases equals 25,000 gallons of water retained in your soil, to be slowly released to plants and the aquifer, and 40 pounds of nitrogen slowly released for forage growth

4. Our grazing management and our livestock impact will determine the leaf-to-stem ratio in the regrowth of our grasses, which will, in turn, determine the energy available for grass regrowth, the amount of root exudates to feed soil microorganisms, and the vigor of the regrowth.

5. We know that our livestock need high-quality grass in the green season and a large amount of standing hay in the Winter or dry season.

6. By implementing the Total Grazing Program, you cover all these bases. Giving your best species the chance to fully recover their energy reserves in their roots and crown, before being grazed again, ensuring the highest quality feed for your livestock in the green season, saving on hay in the dry or winter season, advancing your soil and plant succession every year, and improving your soil capacity to feed your best grass species for longer into the dry or winter season. Greatly increase your stocking rate with thriving livestock, and drought-proof your soil, while diminishing your hay costs.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast and it sparked some ideas and thought processes as to what can be achieved in your own land. The Total Grazing Program is currently open for enrollment! You can enroll at www.rwranching.com/grazingpillar.

I really hope to see you there!

Subscribe to our blogs at www.rwranching.com and be a part of our community.

May God bless you all and you and your family have a great week