Multiple-Paddock Grazing Distributes Utilization Across Heterogeneous Mountain Landscapes

Abstract

We use strategically planned and managed grazing to distribute utilization across broad, complex, and diverse landscapes. Graz- ing lands are complex creative systems that emerge from ever-changing relationships between organ- isms and their environment, where many processes, includ- ing grazing and recovery and their distribution in space and time, affect the emerging system (see Provenza et al., this is- sue). Planned or strategic grazing can be a creative systems approach to adaptive management. In Holistic Manage- ment, planned grazing is a “plan-monitor-control-replan” approach.1 Planned grazing is a context-speci c strategy to achieve a goal, not a grazing “system” in the sense of rigid schedules such as deferred rotation or rest rotation grazing.

DOI: 10.2458/azu_rangelands_v35i5_barnes