Many landowners are interested in purchasing horses and other livestock to graze their property. To ensure that the animals have sufficient forage to remain healthy and to ensure that grazing does not permanently damage soil and vegetation resources, animal numbers and/or grazing time must be controlled. If either too many animals are allowed to graze or animals are allowed to graze too long, forage will be adversely affected. Repeated removal of forage by grazing animals will weaken plants and allow less palatable plants to replace them. Eventually all forage plants will be eliminated from a pasture if heavy grazing is left unchecked. In the extreme, uncontrolled grazing can change a pasture with grasses and other forage into a dirt lot with a few weeds.
Without vegetation to stabilize the soil, wind and water erosion will remove the soil. Wind erodes unprotected soil resulting in dust and poor air quality. Water also erodes unprotected soil and increases sediment load in watersheds and decreases water quality. Poor grazing management can adversely affect neighboring landowners. The objective of this paper is to provide owners of small land tracts some approaches to determining initial carrying capacity and refining the initial carrying capacity estimate.