Virginia has about 1.5 million acres of steep pastures. Simply turning livestock onto these pastures to graze requires little management. However, managing these pastures to provide year-round grazing in the quantity and quality needed requires sound planning, excellent judgment, and an understanding of how to balance the plant-animal relationship so that both will benefit.

There are many, many factors that could cause either of these statements to be true: year-to-year weather variation, yield potential differences in and between fields, planting date differences, etc. (first published March 2019, last reviewed March 2024)