Rethinking grazing management:

Measuring how ranchers learn and adapt

- By Jenna Likins and Urs Kreuter

No two years are ever the same in ranching. Rainfall, forage growth, animal performance, and markets are always changing and, therefore, so are the decisions managers have to make to reach their livestock production goals. The most successful ranchers are usually the ones who learn from what the land is telling them, who make adjustments for changing environmental and market conditions, and keep improving their decision-making over time. That process is known as adaptive management and is the central piece of effective rangeland stewardship in a dynamic world.

The problem is that while adaptive management has been widely discussed as a necessary component of proper rangeland management, it has rarely been measured. What does it look like on a working ranch and how can producers know if they are managing adaptively, rather than just reacting to whatever the season throws at them?

A recent study by researchers at Texas A&M University set out to answer those questions. The goal was to make the often-vague idea of adaptive management into a well-defined framework that both producers and researchers can understand and use in decision-making. To accomplish that, the team developed the Adaptive Management Index (AMI), which helps measure how ranchers plan, monitor, evaluate, and adjust their decisions.

Adaptive management is a process

For years, the term 'adaptive management' has been used loosely in livestock production and often has been associated with rotational or adaptive multi-paddock grazing practices. While such grazing systems can include flexibility, they are not automatically applied in an adaptive manner. Additionally, a continuous grazing operation can be run adaptively, while rotational grazing can be applied rigidly. What makes management adaptive is not a specific number of paddocks but rather the process of learning and adjusting decisions as prevailing conditions change through time.