How many turkeys and quail do you think we would have in comparison if we started managing cattle in Alabama in fields that look like what the guy in the video was standing in instead of doing it the way we do it now?? You want to talk about making wholesale changes…..there you go. It wont change though because of the cattle man changing......It'll only happens when the quail plantation paves the way so to speak

What’s kind of crazy to me to think about with this whole idea is that if you imagine that we zoomed out to 30,000 ft and looked at the black belt from a Google Earth perspective……all we really have to do to create thousands and thousands of acres of prime habitat is as simple as take these cows here…..and move them around a little more to this land over there and then back again……..spread out the grazing pressure and manage the grass over abundance……..The true reality of making that happen though is a lot more complex I know………But that’s how close we are to striking a much better balance…..We have two extremes occurring with habitat management sitting side by side in the black belt…….over grazing here, under grazing there, and the need for lots of hay…..which is likely one of the reasons why we have way more hawks now………but here I go a rambling.

That habitat does look good, but the average cattle man in Alabama doesn’t have the acreage that the farms in Texas have. I would guess that most cattle farms here are 200-500 acres and usually not in one block, whereas out west 10s of thousands of acres aren’t out of the norm. Other than East Texas, you are looking at 8-100+ acres per cow/calf pair out west, where here you can run a pair per 2 acres. If habitat was your main goal, you could always run less numbers and be able to do your patch burns. But profit margins on cattle are so slim as it is, that the majority of them wouldn’t be able to afford the loss. Not to mention the initial cost of fencing, working facilities, equipment, hay, mineral, vaccines, etc. It sounds like a good idea, but I just don’t think it would work here very easily. If I had the place and money to manage strictly for wildlife, I wouldn’t worry about the hassle of running cattle on it.

So, we gonna scorch AL from the beaches to the Tennessee River and run “man from snowy river” horse/cattle ranches on it. To have more turkey.

And I was thinking I was the crazy one here

But if you’re running 60-80% grass in the understory instead of 20-30%.......and you’re soil OM levels are 2% instead of 6% and so on…..then you’re not really “maximizing wildlife production”……..How do you accomplish these things?

Adjusting the timing of fires should help. Most people only think of dormant season fires. Burning in the late growing season promotes forbs instead of grass.