The key to rotational grazing is understanding the growth cycle and regrowth times of the forage in your pastures.

If you don't allow the plants to achieve a sufficient level of re-growth before the stock rotate back in, you'll overgraze your pasture in one season.

Here in Nevada, it is a target to have animals come back into the first pasture under irrigation anywhere from 22 to 30 days after you pulled the stock out the first time. This doesn't mean 22 to 30 paddocks, it means that the animals come back in 22 to 30 days later.

When grazing grasses, you don't want to let the animals graze the grass any closer than about 3" to the ground on a cold-season grazing grass. Alfalfa and some other legumes, you can let them get a closer cut.

When you size your pastures, you ideally want the animals to graze down everything that is in one paddock in no more than three or four days, otherwise they will foul quite a bit of the pasture and you'll get less than ideal utilization. So if (for example) we wanted to rotate the animals through the whole system every 30 days, and we sized the paddocks and the number of animals so they spent three days in every paddock, you'd have 10 paddocks.