Determining Stocking Rate to Benefit Cattle And Quail Part 1 of 3

I'm Andy James here with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension and Institute for Renewable Natural Resources and today we're here on the Hannah Ranch in Coryell County Texas and we're going to talk a little bit about the importance of using grazing management to benefit quail habitat. Today I have Jeff Goodwin who is the state rank specialist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service. I'm going to let him talk to you a little bit about how to set a stocking rate and how we can insure we've got enough grass on the ground for our livestock and our quail. Thanks, Andy, and I agree one of the main points that we want to talk about on a lot of these ranches that are multi-purpose where they manage for livestock as well as well as quail habitat is one of the key things to stocking rates. Most of these ranches, they're in the business of cattle production, but they're also in the business of quail hunting so we're really using cattle more as a tool for habitat management. We're moving more and more into that, so it's really important to get those stocking rates right that are going to benefit the habitat for the cattle as well as the habitat for the quail. -Absolutely. As we look at stocking rates, stocking rate is one of the things that from the standpoint of grazing management it's probably the most important decision that a landowner can make. They don't have a lot of control over the rain that they get. They don't have a lot of control over the soils that are on their ranch, but they do have control over how many of the kinds and amounts of forage that they can manage and how much is taken and that's all done through stalking rate. So, when you want to determine a stocking rate, you need basically two things: you need to know simple supply and demand. You need to know how much grass a cow needs to graze for a year, which is the demand portion. Then, you need to know supply: how much grass that we have and then how much can we actually utilize to not only keep the health that plant and keep it vigorous but also to maintain some quail habitat. Just like this plant right here for instance, little blue stem is probably one of the primary nesting plants for quail. So, we would kind of, on a site like this, we would want to probably tend to use that as one of our key species for when we're managing these pastures. When we talk about supply and demand, the first thing we do is determine what that supply is. A really easy way to do, when we talk about stocking rates and determining supply and production. There's a lot of complicated ways to do this, but there's some really easy ones, too. That's what we'd like to talk about today. This is what we call a grazing stick. It could be a yardstick. It could be anything you got around the house. This one typically has a lot of calculations on it that'll help you make some of those decisions but we're going to use it for today is actually determining that demand. So if So if you were to to take this and lay it down and make a square, that's one square yard, right? Okay, if you take a square yard of forage, clip it to the ground. We want total forage to determine our supply. Clip it all the way to the ground and bag it. Then, we want to dry it somehow, so you know, we can use a microwave things like that. The easiest way is to sit it on the dash of your pick up or something for a couple days. Let it dry down. Weigh it in grams and multiply your production by 10.7. If you multiply one square yard's production by 10.7 that'll give you pounds per acre. That's really what we're looking at. That's what we're looking when we want to know what the production is get it into that counts per acre. That's how we can relate to this. So this works on bermuda grass. It works on native rangeland like this. It's just a measurement of production.