Mob-Type Grazing May Negatively Impact Animal Performance.

This talk summarizes a research study that addressed mob-type grazing in Virginia. The study was conducted from 2013 to 2016 and compared three grazing systems: mob, rotational and continuous grazing. Various system characteristics were measured including forage productivity, forage nutritional value, animal performance, indices of soil health and clover populations. This talk will focus on forage and animal data. Mob grazed pastures accumlated more forage than continuous or rotational sysems because much of the forage was trampled and not eaten. Forage quality in mob grazed pastures was reasonably good despite an abundance of overmature grasses. This result may have been related to the considerable clover abundance, which helped improve forage quality. Cow-calf performance was significantly poorer under mob-grazing. A hypothesis is that cows may have been consuming more highly toxic tall fescue seeds compared with the other systems. Overall, we found little evidence to support adoption of mob grazing over standard rotational grazing in our tall fescue based systems.