Listen to some “experts” and you’d think pasture management comes out of a bag or a bottle. They’d have you spraying weeds, seeding “improved” species and spraying fertilizer to make pastures productive.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is the phrase that kept coming to my mind as I looked at range condition on a ranch recently, except the tool wasn’t a hammer; it was a hoof.

At a recent workshop, I told the audience that if they looked in any farming or ranching publication, they would find articles about cutting feed costs and improving production efficiency, but they wouldn’t find anything about reducing land, labor and other overhead costs.