SWIFT CURRENT, Sask. – The old cowboy art of herding cattle is back in style. But herding is not the same as harassment, warned Jeff Mosley, professor of range science at Montana State University.
“It’s being in tune with animals and using the knowledge to move them where you want them to be,” he said.
Herding isn’t just about moving cattle. Mosley said spending more time with cattle makes it easier to detect disease and injuries and cull effectively.
This doesn’t mean abandoning everything else to watch cows, he added.
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“I think you can do a lot of things to make small improvements without spending every waking hour herding.”
It’s been a long time since cowboys routinely spent their lives on the range with their charges.
Mosley said herding fell out of vogue as technology such as fencing became more prominent. Cowboys moved off horses and into trucks.
“I think one of the things we’ve learned is that those things are very expensive,” he said. “Maybe we need to rethink some of those things and look for some lower cost solutions. I don’t think it’s a matter of going back all the way to the 1800s but try to take the best of both worlds and merge them.”
Mosley said animal husbandry practices have diminished in the past 50 years, but added that is now changing. Producers who are spending time with their animals are learning more about how they behave and produce and where and what they eat.
He told producers attending the Foraging into the Future conference in Swift Current that they would need herds of between 500 and 800 cows to justify hiring a full-time herder.
Producers who have converted grain land to pasture might have more time to spend with their animals, he added.
