The stocking rate of livestock on a pasture has a significant impact on both forage productivity and financial profitability of an operation. | Photo: iStock

The stocking rate of livestock on a pasture has a significant impact on both forage productivity and financial profitability of an operation. Too many animals in a field results in overgrazing and the need to provide costly supplemental feed while too few animals results in underutilized forages and, therefore, lost income. While many factors influence how many animals a farm can carry, soil type has a major influence and should be considered when purchasing, leasing, planning or managing livestock on pastures.

“Carrying Capacity” is the number of animals the environment can sustain indefinitely given its food, habitat, water, and other availabilities necessities. For livestock, this is how many animals a farm or pasture can carry throughout the year without negative environmental impacts. Carrying capacity is based on the soil type and slope of the land, characteristics that take thousands of years or more to change. The productive capacity will dictate what that land is most useful for.

National Cooperative Soil Survey

The National Cooperative Soil Survey (NCSS) program began in 1896 as an attempt to survey and map soils in the United States. The program started small, surveying only 2.8 million acres in Connecticut, Maryland, New Mexico, and Utah. Today, soil survey data is available online for the entire country as the Web Soil Survey (WSS) and is maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resource Conservation Service (USDA-NRCS)