So whether we’re talking about pokeweed or goldenrod or dog fennel or dew berry, etc……..by having mowed some areas back in late May, right now I have two different stages of growth of the same plant species/communities……Some fresh sprouts and some much more mature….……when I go mow tomorrow and knock back more strips of mature growth, I will create a third stage….and another few weeks I may mow some more remaining mature areas one more time and create a 4th………If you count the buffer strips of dog fennel and sich that haven’t been mowed at all then it would be 5…….This begins to make the understory a lot more dynamic and provide fresh flushes of growth and cover throughout the summer a lot more than if everything were just in one single stage….like if say you had burned in the spring and that was it. It’s very possible to do this with a tractor and bushhog/disk and likely gonna be one of the best options for many people……maybe you do it in thinning rows or something like that…….

If you get the idea now of how this process makes the understory more dynamic from the standpoint of food and cover…..then imagine if we had say 15+ stages interwoven with each very randomly all in a continual daily rotation as the cattle herd roamed around and grazed at their discretion. In a nutshell I think that is what you could accomplish by running a light stocking density of cattle through a place every other year or maybe every third year. It would create very fertile, dynamic understory habitat. Other "tools" would still need to be used but they would be a very valuable edition to the habitat management toolbox. I know a lot of this is just being repeated but it took some people 10 years to listen to the other ideas soooooooooo........