Grasslands of the World.pdf - Disasters and Conflicts - UNEP

MAE ELSINGER
Grasslands of central North America 239
Plate 6.17
Winter grazing on the Canadian prairie.
350 kg/ha at the end of the summer grazing period to support both livestock
performance and desirable vegetation condition for short-grass rangeland in
eastern Colorado.
Most livestock operations in the Great Plains are relatively small. Over
85 percent of the farms and ranches in the Great Plains (including North
and South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma)
had less than 100 head of cattle , and only 5 percent had more than 500 head
(Mitchell, 2000). Over 46 percent had less than 50 head. These were probably
small operations where cattle were produced in conjunction with cropping
operations. There were over 180 000 individual units in these seven states in
1993. Numerically, cattle are much more important than sheep in the Central
Plains grasslands (Mitchell, 2000). Total cattle numbers for most of the states
making up the Great Plains was about 25 million head, compared with about
5 million sheep (Ensminger and Parker, 1986; Mitchell, 2000). Sheep numbers
have declined during the last 50 years because of predator problems, economic
conditions, lack of herders in some western states, lack of demand for mutton
and lamb, and other factors. These data on livestock numbers do not distinguish
among different types of operations.
The northern and southern Great Plains (including Texas) support about
half of the total beef cattle in the USA (Holechek, Pieper and Herbel, 2001),
while the rest of the West supports less that 10 percent of the total. There was
no distinction between those in feedlots and those on farms and ranches , but
these numbers illustrate the importance of the Great Plains as a livestock-producing
area.