Set It, Move It, Track It: Grazing Rotations in Cattle360

Turn cattle out on one big pasture and leave them there all season, and you'll get exactly what you'd expect: the grass near the water gets hammered, the far corners barely get touched, and by August you're feeding hay a lot earlier than planned. Grass wasn't built to be grazed continuously without a break.

Rotational grazing fixes that — split the land into paddocks, move the herd through them on a schedule, and let each paddock rest and regrow before cattle come back through. The idea is simple. Keeping track of it by memory or a notebook, especially once you're running more than a couple of paddocks, is where it usually falls apart.

That's exactly what Cattle360's Grazing Rotations feature is built to handle.

Building a Rotation

A Grazing Rotation in Cattle360 is a named plan built on top of the pastures you've already set up: name it, add paddocks in the order the herd moves through them, and set a Target Graze Days — how many days you expect the herd to stay on each paddock before moving on.

Once it's built, the rotation screen shows you the current paddock, how many animals are on it, how many days they've been there, and a Days Until Due countdown based on your target — so you know at a glance whether it's time to move or you've still got a few days left.

Moving the Herd: One Click, Not a Chore

When it's time to rotate, click Move to Next Paddock. Cattle360 moves every active animal currently in the paddock to the next one in your sequence, records the move as a new turn-in date for each animal, resets the rotation's current paddock and due date, and tells you how many head moved. Run through the whole loop — south pasture to creek bottom to hay meadow and back — and the rotation just keeps cycling. No manually re-assigning 80 head one at a time on the animal screen.

Reminders So a Busy Week Doesn't Cost You a Paddock

Set a Target Graze Days on a rotation, and Cattle360 tracks how many days the herd has actually been on the current paddock against that target. As the due date approaches, the system can send you a reminder — so if branding, a vet visit, or just a busy week pushes rotation day out of your head, you still get a nudge before the herd overstays and hurts a paddock that was supposed to be moved off days ago.

Rainfall: Let the Paddock Tell You When It's Ready

Rest periods aren't a fixed number of days. They're a function of how fast the grass is growing, and grass growth runs on rainfall. A paddock that catches a good inch of rain can bounce back in three or four weeks. Cut the rain off for a dry stretch in July and August, and that same paddock might need six or eight weeks — sometimes longer.

Cattle360 lets you log rainfall directly on each pasture — date, inches, and source. From there, every pasture shows a rolled-up picture: latest rainfall, total over the last 7 days, and total over the last 30 days.

Storms are patchy — one pasture can catch an inch while another two fields over gets a tenth. Logging rainfall by pasture instead of guessing from the nearest weather station gives you a real per-paddock recovery picture. Before you move the herd back onto a paddock just because "it's been three weeks like always," pull up its rainfall summary and its days-since-grazed. If it's been dry, it may need more time regardless of what the calendar says.

Tying It Together

Grazing Rotations sit on top of the same Pastures feature you're already using for mapping, animal movement history, bull turn-in, crops, and maintenance costs. A rotation is just a sequence layered over pastures you've already built — so your grazing plan, your rainfall log, and your herd's movement history all live in the same place.

Pro Tips

• Set a realistic Target Graze Days to start. You can tighten it up once you see how your paddocks actually perform.
• Log rainfall the day it happens. A rainfall log filled in from memory a week later isn't worth much.
• Check the 30-day rainfall total before moving back into a paddock, not just the days-since-grazed number.
• Use the reminder as a backstop, not a replacement for walking your pastures.
• Start with fewer paddocks in the rotation and add more as fencing and water access allow.

Ready to build your first rotation? Log in to Cattle360, open Pastures, and set one up today.