NRCS offers technical and financial assistance to help private landowners manage pasture and rangeland.
Are you interested in improving the health of your pasture or rangeland? Better grazing management is the way. Grazing management can yield many benefits to your animals, to your land, and to your bottom line.
Benefits include improved plant health and forage production, healthier soils, decreased erosion, improved resilience to noxious and invasive plants, better rainfall infiltration, and overall fostering an operation that is more weather resilient and sustainable.
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) may be able to help. NRCS offers technical and financial assistance to private landowners, ranchers, pastoralists, Tribes, and Tribal entities to conserve natural resources on their land. Participation is entirely voluntary. We can help you develop a grazing management plan and install conservation practices that will help you achieve your management goals.
Popular Conservation Practices for Pasture and Rangeland
Grazing Management
The management of timing, frequency, and intensity of grazing and browsing animals to achieve specific ecological, economic, and management objectives.
Benefits:
- Improve plant health
- Improve forage quality and quantity
- Reduce erosion
- Improve soil health
- Increase water infiltration
Fence
A constructed physical or virtual barrier to animals.
Benefits:
- Allow for grazing management to control the movement of animals
Water Well
A hole drilled, dug, driven, bored, jetted or otherwise constructed into an aquifer for water supply.
Benefits:
- Provide access to groundwater supply for livestock watering.
Watering Facility
A structure that stores or provides drinking water to livestock or wildlife.
Benefits:
- Supply daily water requirements
- Improve animal distribution
- Provide a water source that is an alternative to a sensitive resource
Herbaceous Weed Treatment
The removal or control of herbaceous weeds including invasive, noxious, prohibited or undesirable plants.
- Enhance quality/quantity of forage
- Restore native or desired plant communities for wildlife habitat
- Protect soils and control erosion
- Reduce fuel loads and wildfire hazard
Brush Management
The management or removal of woody plants including those that are invasive and noxious.
Benefits:
- Restore or create desired vegetative cover
- Protect soils and control erosion
- Improve forage quality/quantity
- Enhance fish and wildlife habitat
Range Planting
The seeding and establishment of native grasses to improve plant productivity and composition.
Benefits:
- Improve forage for livestock
- Reduce erosion by wind and water
- Improve water quality/quantity
- Provide browse or cover for wildlife
Pasture and Hayland Planting
The establishment of adapted and compatible plants suitable for pasture or hay production.
Benefits:
- Improve or maintain livestock nutrition and health
- Increase forage supply during periods of low forage production
- Reduce soil erosion
- Improve water quality
Grazingland Mechanical Treatment
The modification of physical soil and/or plant conditions with mechanical treatments.
Benefits:
- Fracture compacted soil layers and improve soil permeability
- Reduce water runoff and increase infiltration
- Break up root-bound conditions and thatch to increase plant vigor
- Improve forage productivity
Strategic Harvested Forage Management
Planned feeding of livestock by controlling access to harvested forages arranged in a predetermined pattern on the landscape, also called Bale Grazing.
Benefits:
- Improve or maintain soil health
- Improve plant productivity
- Reduce soil erosion
- Reduce seasonal farm energy inputs
- Improve efficiency of field operations
Conservation Practices at Chernofski Sheep Ranch
Sheep herder Art Christenson on Unalaska Island worked with NRCS to protect the health and vigor of his rangelands and improve grazing management of his herd.