Breaking Down Barriers, Not Fences: Rotational Grazing at VXV Farms

VXV Farms | Regenerative Alberta Living Lab

Rotational grazing is one of the most effective tools a cattle producer has for building healthier grassland and soil: move the herd through smaller paddocks, graze each one evenly, and give it time to recover. The idea isn't new or controversial. What keeps a lot of producers from doing it is everything it takes to make it work on the ground, water in every paddock and enough cross-fencing to control where the cattle go. On 4,000 acres, that infrastructure can be costly and labour-intensive enough to leave the practice on the shelf.

At VXV Farms near Claresholm, Gerald Vandervalk has spent years chipping away at that barrier. The first post in this series covered how he distributes water across the landscape without fossil fuels. Once water reaches an area, it can be cross-fenced and grazed deliberately, instead of cattle wearing down the ground near a single source and leaving the rest behind. His fencing is where the next piece of the barrier comes down.

Taking the cost out of cross-fencing

On the tame grass, the Vandervalks run single-wire electric fence on recycled fiberglass posts, and the fiberglass is the key. Because it doesn't conduct electricity, the wire runs directly on the post with no insulators. Conventional electric fence depends on insulators to hold the wire off a steel or wood post, and insulators are a known weak point. They crack and break, and when one fails the current stops flowing and a whole stretch of fence can go dead. Take the insulators out of the system and that failure mode goes with it.

The posts are sturdy enough to serve as permanent cross-fencing but light enough to move when the grazing plan changes, so Gerald gets permanent and portable at once, at lower cost and with less maintenance than conventional fence. The posts and pipe are sourced and repurposed from other industries, including oil and gas. Alberta producers are surrounded by those industries and the materials they cycle out, which makes the approach something a lot of operations could copy, not just VXV.

Gerald has worked out the smaller problems too. Brace posts, the ones that hold tension at corners and ends, can be dislodged when cattle rub on them, so he runs an electrified wire along the braces to keep the cattle off. It's his own fix, and it's the kind of detail that decides whether a fence stays standing. He's also set the line posts so that if wildlife hits the fence, a single pin pops out rather than taking down a whole run. “If something hits it, something's gonna break,” he says, “so it's just as easy if the pin pops out, and then we can come back and just put it back in.”

Point by point, the usual reasons producers give for why electric fence can't replace more expensive barrier fence, Gerald has found a cheaper way around. That is what turns rotational grazing from a good idea into something that actually pencils out on a commercial operation.

The grazing it makes possible

With water and low-cost cross-fencing in place, the Vandervalks can move cattle daily, grazing each paddock hard for a short time and then leaving it to recover. “As we're getting better at figuring out how much to graze and how fast to move, our tame grass is lasting a lot longer,” Gerald says.

Part of the shift is mental. “It's a mindset, for some people it's hard to change, because they think you're wasting grass,” he says. “We're starting to learn that you're really not wasting grass. That grass is still there, and it's an insulation layer, and it breaks down and goes into the soil again.” Leaving cover also holds moisture, which matters more every year as the country dries out. “The soil, if it's chewed off fairly short, then it evaporates and you lose moisture.”

Tame and native grass are managed on different clocks. Tame grass bounces back and can usually be grazed twice in a season. Native rough fescue is less forgiving. “When you kind of clip it off, lots of times it can be done for the year.” So it is now largely rested through the summer while the cattle work the tame grass, and by September it has had a full season to recover. “Resting that native grass all summer, the roots went deeper, the stands are more viable, but also there's just that much more material.”

Closing the loop

Lowering the barrier gets the practice adopted. Knowing whether it's working is the next piece, and it's where the Living Lab is built as a feedback loop rather than a one-time measurement.

Describing a grazing system by a single label, rotational, continuous, adaptive, doesn't capture much about what's actually happening on a commercial operation. What shapes outcomes is the specific combination of how long cattle occupy a paddock, how often they move, and how long the land rests before they return. Those variables look different on every ranch and change season to season.

The Regenerative Alberta Living Lab is set up to capture exactly that. Producers log their grazing moves through Ranch Ops, a custom app the RA-LL team built with IEG Consulting, led by Dr. Olivier LaRocque. The moves a producer records on their own operation are overlaid onto soil maps built specifically for this project, 4,500 soil cores sampled across the province and mapped using predictive sampling to account for landscape variability, with sampling repeated three times over the five-year project. That overlay is the loop: a producer's own management, captured as data, lined up against what the soil is doing, so the effect of a grazing decision becomes something you can see rather than guess at. It is a management tool producers can use themselves, not just a record for researchers.

At VXV, where the pace of a working ranch doesn't always leave room for data entry in the field, the RA-LL team works with Gerald to enter it, meeting the operation where it is rather than asking it to change to fit the system.

The goal isn't to crown one grazing system that works everywhere. It's to generate evidence specific enough to be useful, showing how particular combinations of grazing, timing, and rest interact with a given landscape and soil, so the next producer weighing the jump to rotational grazing has more than a neighbour's word to go on.

What Gerald is watching

Gerald follows the soil sampling closely, comparing areas under different management across the ranch. “This is where I am now, and this is what I'm doing, and I've seen what I think our changes have been better,” he says. “But I'm curious to know in a couple years, is it going to be better in five years? And that's my goal.”