A Bit of Range Management

#bfrdpwy #aginternship #RightRisk

During this week I learned about range management. This week I went with one of the hired hands and identified weeds and sprayed herbicides in order to keep the weeds from over taking areas with native grass. It is important to do this because it can cause a pasture to become un useable due to livestock, such as cows, not liking most weeds. This leads to the cows eating purely grass, making it weaker and allows the weeds to move into the area and take over. This can disrupt an eco system and cause it to become very hard to get back to its native pasture.

I would challenge the concept of over grazing land to the point that it is a lot easier for non native species to move in. I think that this concept is very important because if you over graze your land you risk letting more competitive, and often non native plants, moving into that area. Once non-native plants move in it is very hard to get rid of them due to how competitive they are.

I still have some questions on how to better recognize some weeds. I would really like to be better at this because it could help me prevent non-native species from moving into areas that I would like to graze my livestock on in future years.

I think that in the future I would use these skills to help me on my own operation or any operation I would potentially work on in the future. I think that it can help me especially when it comes to preserving rangeland for future grazing for livestock. This is crucial to a lot of operations and can affect how much profit you make off of
your livestock.

Submitted by: Chelsea Finch
Edits by: GrowinG Internship Team