Why Rotation Pays on a Small Plot

If you keep three or four sheep on a paddock behind the house, the temptation is to simply leave them to it. It works for a while — until bare patches appear, the dung piles up and the grass stops growing back. Rotational grazing is just the practice of splitting your land into smaller blocks and moving the animals on before the grass is hammered, then letting each block rest and regrow. On a smallholding it costs you nothing but a bit of planning and a reel of electric netting, and it delivers three things: more grass over the season, fewer worms, and pasture that recovers instead of deteriorating.

The principle is straightforward. Grass needs leaf area to photosynthesise and roots to store reserves. Graze it down to 4–5cm and it can bounce back within a few weeks. Graze it to the bone, day after day, and it takes months to recover — if it recovers at all. A rested pasture is also a hostile place for worm larvae, which is why moving animals regularly does more for internal parasite control than any drench you can buy.

Start With a Paddock Plan

You do not need perfect fields. Even an awkward acre can be divided usefully if you think about shape and access.

• Aim for four to eight paddocks. Fewer than four and the rest period is too short; more than eight becomes fiddly for a handful of animals.
• Make them roughly square. Long thin paddocks encourage sheep to walk the fence line and poach the corners.
• Leave a central lane or track so you can reach every paddock without walking stock through another one.
• Include a hard-standing area — a sacrifice paddock or yard — for wet weeks when any grazing would be churned to mud.

As a rough working figure, five ewes with lambs will clear a 400 square metre paddock in two to three days during good May growth. In August, the same paddock might last a day. Size your paddocks for your busiest month, not the average.

Fencing and Water: The Practical Bits

Electric netting is the workhorse here. For sheep, three strands at roughly 20cm, 40cm and 60cm does the job; goats need a lower strand at 15cm and a higher one at 90cm because they will test every gap you leave. A mains-powered energiser is best if you can get power to the field. Otherwise a 12-volt battery unit with a genuine output of at least one joule will comfortably run a few hundred metres of netting, provided you keep the bottom strand clear of long grass.

Water is the part people underestimate. Moving a trough every few days gets old very quickly, so either run a pipe to a trough that sits on the lane and open a gap into it, or fit a small mobile trough you can carry on a barrow. Check it daily in hot weather — a ewe with lambs can drink eight litres or more a day.

How Long to Graze, How Long to Rest

Put animals onto a paddock when the grass is 8–10cm tall and move them off at 4–5cm. In practice that means three days in spring, two in summer, and often a single day in a dry August. Do not let them tidy up — the leaf you leave behind is what fuels the next growth spurt.

Rest periods stretch as growth slows:

• Spring: 21 days, if growth is strong
• Early summer: 25–30 days
• Late summer or drought: 40 days or more, or stop grazing and feed instead
• Winter: hold paddocks back entirely and run stock on the sacrifice area with hay

Over winter, let the grass stand. Long grass protects the crown of the plant from frost and gives you early spring growth. Topping the silage leftovers in late summer and letting them rest will tidy the sward without costing you a bale.

Worms: The Real Reason to Keep Moving

Most worm larvae live in the first 5cm of grass and survive best in warm, damp conditions. Moving animals every few days keeps them ahead of the heaviest larval challenge, and a three-week rest gives many larvae time to die off before stock return. Rest alone is not a cure — larvae can survive months in cool weather — but it dramatically reduces the dose your animals pick up.

One trap to avoid: the old habit of drenching and then moving straight onto fresh, rested grass. That selects hard for resistant worms, because only the survivors are deposited onto clean pasture. If you must treat, move first and drench two or three days later, or keep animals on the same paddock for four days after treatment before moving them.

Use faecal egg counts to decide whether treatment is needed at all. A count of a few hundred eggs per gram in a healthy adult ewe is often tolerable; a rising count in lambs or kids is not.

Sheep and Goats: Small But Important Differences

Goats are more prone to worms than sheep and do not develop the same level of immunity, so give them longer rests — 30–40 days minimum in the growing season — and consider grazing them behind sheep rather than in front. They also browse rather than graze, so paddocks with hedges, scrub or tree browse work far better than clean ryegrass. Give them shelter; they hate wind and rain more than sheep do, and they will strip bark from any tree you leave unprotected.

Finally, do not be afraid to mow a paddock for hay if growth runs ahead of your animals. A smallholding with a bit of surplus grass is a much easier place to manage than one where the stock are always chasing the last blade.