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ARS Home » Plains Area » El Reno, Oklahoma » Oklahoma and Central Plains Agricultural Research Center » Livestock, Forage and Pasture Management Research Unit » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #421642
Research Project: Integrated Research to Enhance Forage and Food Production from Southern Great Plains Agroecosystems

Location: Livestock, Forage and Pasture Management Research Unit

Title: Cattle performance does not differ between patch and broadcast burning

Author
item Moffet, Corey
item Gunter, Stacey

Submitted to: International Rangeland Congress
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 6/2/2025
Publication Date: 6/2/2025
Citation: Moffet, C., Gunter, S.A. 2025. Cattle performance does not differ between patch and broadcast burning. International Rangeland Congress. In: XII International Rangeland Congress Australia 2025, June 2-6, 2025, Adelaide, Australia. p. 1817-1820.

Interpretive Summary: In the US Southern Plains patch burning is being recommended as a method of prescribed burning on rangeland pastures where part of a pasture is burned each year in a rotation with 3 to 8 patches. A more conventional method of prescribed burning would be to burn the entire pasture every 3 to 8 years. The patch burn approach offers the benefit of offering grazing cattle a recently burned patch each growing season with very high quality forage whereas the broadcast burns only offer this high quality forage in the growing season following the fire. The patch burn method requires more frequent ignitions than the broadcast burns. There have been no prior direct comparisons of cattle performance between these two methods of implementing a prescribed burn program in Southern Plains mixed grass rangelands. This long-term experiment has shown that there is no performance difference for steers grazing in both the growing season and dormant season between the patch burn and broadcast burn methods.

Technical Abstract: Over the past few decades, patch burning has become a recommended practice in the Southern Plains of the USA rather than burning an entire pasture at one time. Patch burn plans follow a burn sequence where several patches with different times-since-last-burn occur within the pastures, whereas for the broadcast burn plans entire pastures are burned at one time every several years so that each year the time-since-last burned is uniform across the pastures. The objective of our study was to determine whether animal performance, per hectare or per head, differed between the two treatments. In our long-term experiment, in 3 replicate blocks, the blocks were divided into two pastures that were randomly assigned the patch-burn treatment, where ¼ of the pasture was burned in a 4-yr rotation, or the broadcast burn treatment, where the entire pastures was burned every 4 years. The pastures were grazed each year with weaned growing cattle (BW = 242±16 kg) to harvest a targeted 25% of the expected annual forage production over an approximately 180 d period (45% of the use was in the dormant season, DS, and 55% of the use was in the growing season, GS). Cattle received a range cube protein supplement during the dormant season. The annual gains per hectare were 60.0 kg/ha for both the broadcast and patch burn treatments. The effect of grazing season on gain per hectare and average daily gain was significant with GS gain of 49.4 kg/ha and DS gain of 10.6 kg/ha. Average daily gains were more than three times greater in the GS (0.78 kg/d) then in the DS (0.21 kg/d). These data show that whatever benefits exist for patch burning over broadcast burning, animal performance cannot be counted among them nor can animal performance be used to justify one over the other.