In this episode of the podcast, the first of a two-part series about managed grazing for weed control. Managed grazing can take different forms with different names…rotational grazing, adaptive graving, management-intensive grazing, mob grazing, but the core principles of each are the same: don’t allow livestock to overgraze a given field or paddock, and don’t allow those animals to return until the field has sufficiently recovered.

There are numerous benefits to well-executed managed grazing, and one of them is that managed grazing can be an effective alternative to the use of mowing, herbicides and tillage to control weeds in the pasture. And it’s this benefit that this series will focus on.

In this episode, we focus on the principles of managed grazing for weed control.

Guests this episode:

Sarah Flack: Sarah has over 30 years of experience working with grass-based farmers on business planning combined with agronomy to improve forages, soils and pastures. Sarah also teaches workshops and has written books, articles and other publications with the goal to create more successful grass-based livestock farms.

Greg Tegart: is a retired agrologist who spent much of his career working as a field crops & range specialist for BC's Ministry of Agriculture. He primarily focused on forage crops, field crops, and livestock production.

Additional Resources

Webinar about weed control with managed grazing featuring Sarah Flack produced by Organic BC & Small Scale Meat Producers Association

My guest today is Brody Bolen. He's 28 years old and a third generation rancher and butcher based in Jaffrey, in the southeast corner of BC. Brody's grandparents established the ranch in 1957 as a commercial cattle operation. Brody and his wife Kashtyn now live there and operate a farm-to-table business model in which they're directly involved in every step of producing their beef, including delivering it themselves to households around the southern interior. 

This episode, an interview with Helen Schwantje. Helen was the Wildlife Veterinarian for British Columbia from 1992 to 2021. To this day she continues as an emeritus and conducts contract work for government and NGOs on a variety of wildlife health issues. Helen has spent a lot of her career focused on the health of BC’s wild sheep herds, and she joined me to talk about the relationship between a specific virus, the domesticated sheep that carry it, and the wild sheep populations that are under threat because of it. And how she hopes to see more action by our governments and by farmers to do what’s necessary to contain this threat.

This podcast was funded in part by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through the BC Climate Agri-Solutions Fund delivered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC.

This episode: the final chapter in our miniseries on rotational grazing in collaboration with BC’s Small Scale Meat Producers Association.

This bonus episode was produced on behalf of the Small Scale Meat Producers Association with funding it received through the Farmed Animal Disease Program. The funding was delivered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation on behalf of the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Food.