Talk:Pastoral farming

Note on terminology (probably Australia-only)
In Australia, especially South Australia, pastoral farming is called grazing and a "farmer" who (say) runs a few thousand sheep but does no cropping would be called a grazier. At one time, the term farmer was reserved (at least in South Australia) for someone who grew crops; this distinction has faded in the last couple of decades.

I don't know whether someone who grew crops but only for consumption by his/her livestock would have been called a farmer or a farmer and grazier. In practice, the majority of Australian farms grow both crops and livestock, so the distinction is rather thin. (However, the majority of Australian farmland is unsuitable for cropping.)

—Chris Chittleborough 08:49, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

December 2009
I've just rewritten the article. It's still a stub. Worse still, it has no references.

To Do: Cheers, CWC 03:04, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Find and add references
 * Check whether any regions of Canada do pastoral farming
 * Maybe add this article in "See also" sections of other articles

April 2012: needs references
Someone just changed this article to a redirect to Pastoralism. I've reverted this change (along with two related changes]. Pastoralism and Pastoral farming are significantly different activities, despite the common element of raising livestock: pastoralists are nomads who rely on naturally-occurring pastures, whereas pastoral farmers grow crops and improved pastures for their livestock on land they own or rent. Also, the term "pastoralism" is mainly used by anthropologists, whereas "pastoral farming" is used by farmers, agricultural scientists, geographers etc. (The really important difference is that pastoral farming is much more productive than pastoralism.)

But I agree with 68.165.77.253 that this article needs references. Unfortunately, it seems hard to find good sources. So far, I've found lots of academic publications that assume you already know what pastoral farming is, quite a few websites aimed at UK secondary students and several items about farming in New Zealand. This is kinda barely OK in a Wikipedia stub article but I would like to turn this into a proper article, for which we need good sources. Can anyone help? Pretty please?

Cheers, CWC 05:44, 11 April 2012 (UTC) who lives on a mixed farm and often drives past pastoral farms

Intensive vs Extensive
Thanks to 175.100.10.76, we now have a paragraph saying:
 * There are two main types of Pastoral Farming: Intensive Pastoral Farming and Extensive Pastoral Farming.

Unfortunately, the anon did not explain those terms. I guess that Intensive Pastoral Farming is basically feedlotting and Extensive Pastoral Farming is grazing livestock on unimproved vegetation. Does anyone know for sure what these two terms refer to? Ideally, we would have a 'Reliable Source' giving definitions.

Which raises a question: which category includes, for example, running sheep on crops grown for fodder? I suspect that there are in fact more than two types. Nevertheless, the article would be better if we gave details of various kinds of pastoral farming, so I added an {&#123;expand section}} tag. Cheers, CWC 12:54, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Delete?
This article is a bit of a mess, and makes no clear distinction from or reference to other pages on livestock production. If I knew how, I would nominate it for deletion.Mukogodo (talk) 16:03, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

This article is a mess
As a wise man once said, this article is a bit of a mess. It seems to conflate pastoral farming, which is a type of livestock farming involving the grazing of animals on pastures (pastoralism), with livestock farming in general. Pastoralism, which includes nomadic pastoralism and pastoral farming alike, is already covered by its own article, and animal farming in general is already covered by Animal husbandry. Additionally, there is Ranching, which is a type (regional variant?) of pastoral farming. Ultimately, I see three ways forward for this article:
 * 1) Delete this article and merge its salvageable content into Pastoralism, Ranch, and Animal husbandry.
 * 2) Move this article to Livestock farming (or something similar) to align with its general focus on the farming of livestock in general, merging its salvageable content on pastoral farming content into Pastoralism
 * 3) Split this article in two: Livestock farming and Pastoral farming

Any input would be valued.  Mysterymanblue  08:42, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

"Grazier" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Grazier. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 August 16 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 03:03, 16 August 2021 (UTC)