Field note
Grazing Management
When and How to Rest Your Veld
Rest is the cheapest input you have. Here is how to use it deliberately instead of by accident.
12 May 2026·1 min read
Grazing Management
How to Calculate Grazing Capacity on Your Veld
A practical, field-tested method for turning veld condition into a defensible stocking rate — without guesswork.
FFrits van Oudtshoorn·18 June 2026·2 min read
Grazing Management
Key takeaways
•Grazing capacity is a measure of how much forage your veld can sustainably produce, expressed in hectares per large stock unit (ha/LSU).
•Measure standing biomass objectively rather than eyeballing it — a disc pasture meter turns readings into kilograms of dry matter per hectare.
•Always leave a safe grazing fraction behind; harvesting everything sacrifices next season's production.
Grazing capacity is the single most important number in veld management, and the one most often guessed at. Set your stocking rate too high and you strip the veld faster than it can recover; too low and you leave production — and income — on the table. This note walks through a repeatable method you can run on your own land.
What grazing capacity actually means
Grazing capacity is the area of veld required to sustain one large stock unit (LSU) over a year without degrading the resource, expressed as hectares per LSU. A lower number (say 4 ha/LSU) means productive veld; a higher number (say 12 ha/LSU) means sparse or arid veld that needs more area per animal.
It is not a fixed property of your farm. It shifts with rainfall, veld condition, and how you have grazed in previous seasons. That is exactly why it should be measured, not inherited from what the previous owner told you.
Step 1: Measure standing biomass objectively
Walk a representative transect across each camp and take a series of settled-disc readings with a disc pasture meter. Take 50 to 100 readings per camp so a few bare or rank patches do not skew the result. Average the readings, then apply your regional calibration to convert mean disc height into kilograms of dry matter per hectare.
Visual assessment feels faster, but two experienced people will disagree by 30% or more on the same camp. An instrument removes the argument.
Step 2: Apply a safe grazing fraction
You never graze everything that grows. A portion must remain to protect the soil, feed the roots, and carry the sward into the next season. As a working rule, plan to use roughly a quarter to a third of the standing crop over the grazing period, adjusting for veld condition and season.
Multiply available dry matter by that fraction to get the forage you can actually allocate to animals.
Step 3: Convert to a stocking rate
One LSU consumes roughly 10 to 12 kg of dry matter per day. Divide your allocatable forage by daily intake and the number of grazing days to arrive at the number of animals a camp can carry — and therefore the hectares each animal needs.
Re-measure each season. A wet year genuinely raises capacity; a drought genuinely lowers it, and the veld will punish a stocking rate that ignores the difference.
You cannot manage what you have not measured — and on the veld, a number beats an opinion every time.
F
Written by
Frits van Oudtshoorn
Grassland ecologist with thirty years of veld assessment and rehabilitation experience across Southern Africa. Author of the Guide to Grasses of Southern Africa and Veld Management: Principles & Practices.