On train home and I see cows in a field chomping, and the grass is very short, but how come they don’t eat all the grass and ruin the field?
What made me think this is locusts or whatever they’re called which destroy crops and leave nothing behind
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Farmers often rotate their cattle between different fields to manage grazing pressure and allow the grass in each field to recover. This rotational grazing helps maintain the health of the pasture by giving the grass time to regrow and preventing overgrazing.
Cattle and horses only cut the grass so far. Sheep cut it far closer more like a golf course green leaving nothing for cattle. That and fences led to range wars between cowboys and sheep farmers. Neither of them pluck it entirely from the dirt they leave a crown of the plant where the blades grow out of.
Why do they do that? Because it’s tastier and less works. Plants don’t want that part to be easily eaten.
The part of grass that does all the growing is below the ground level. The grazing animals don’t pull it up by the roots – they snip off the leaves just like us mowing the lawn. So the grass can just keep growing in perpetuity.
This is the same reason why grass can start to grow again almost immediately after a serious land fire. The leaves are burned, but the “living” part of the plant was safe underground.
They do. We are having a big fight between animal treatment activists and farmers here at the moment. The farmers are keeping the cattle in the same pasture for longer during winter because the grass doesn’t grow as fast, and the cows eat all the grass so the field is just mud then some of them starve to death in the mud and the farmer moves the survivors to the next field and repeat until spring. The animal activists think this is cruel, so there is a big fight about farming regulations.
They mostly are just after the grass blades and don’t want to dig down into the dirt too much to get tougher stuff.
Grass is also designed to be constantly grazed and eaten and bounce back. Thats its main survival strategy.
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