Grazing: what it gives the animal and what it gives the meadow

There are robust figures on grazing, not just feeling. The studies of the Thünen Institute and the Lower Saxon survey “Systemanalyse Milch” with around sixty farms show the same picture: on soft ground there are fewer lamenesses and fewer hoof diseases, the animals are cleaner and therefore have udder and uterine infections less often, they lie longer, go at each other less and die prematurely less often than in year-round barn housing.

And now the honest part. Pasture is not a switch you flip. In the largest of the studies – 124 organic farms over four years – the differences could only partly be attributed to grazing alone. Where the supplementary feeding wasn't right, the benefits vanished again. Add to that: pasture cows often give less milk than cows kept in the barn year-round, they slip more easily into a negative energy balance, and gastrointestinal worms, lungworm and liver fluke are an issue on pasture, not in the barn. Heat is by now the third.

So grazing is good practice – but only together with the right supplementary feeding, parasite management and shade. Whoever can do that has healthier animals. Whoever can't has cows on a meadow and has gained nothing else. That is exactly what separates a farm that manages pasture from one that lets animals out.

The idea persists stubbornly that light animals spare the ground and heavy ones ruin it. The figures say otherwise. A standing cow puts around one kilogram per square centimetre on the ground, a walking one up to four – more than most farm machinery. Sheep, despite pointed hooves, hardly compact at all. So far the picture holds.

Except: sheep bite very low and gather on ridges, knolls and resting places. Exactly there, browsing, trampling and nutrient input combine, and exactly there it tears open. A Swiss evaluation of nine sheep alps over twenty years even concluded that snow gliding clearly exceeds grazing as an erosion factor, and that switching from set stocking to rotational grazing helped only in places.

What actually counts: how many animals stand how long on the same area. Short and dense beats long and thin, because short occupancy limits selection. And on large, hard-to-survey Almen, herding is the decisive lever of all – without a herder the animals don't spread out, they overgraze the comfortable spots and let the rest grow over. The worst erosion damage on Austrian Almen comes not from animals that are too heavy, but from herderless summering.

The taste is the obvious part. Animals that eat herbs from different altitudes over the summer give a milk that makes a different cheese than silage milk. That is no marketing line, you can taste it. Incidentally, Alm cheese still counts as a primary product under food law – it may be sold directly from the farm and from the Alm.

The second you see on every hike, if you know what to look for: an area with short, dense growth and still blossom into late summer, without bare patches and without knee-high old grass. That is not untouched nature. That is an area where someone has the density under control.