Optimizing Grazing Management for Profit and Ecosystem Services: An Integrated Biogeochemical-Economic Model

Grazing lands are complex systems that deliver soil carbon sequestration, water cycling, and biodiversity habitat alongside livestock production and producer incomes. Grazing land management shapes both economic returns and environmental outcomes, yet reliable guidance on balancing profit with other ecosystem services is scarce. Focusing on rotational grazing, we develop a theoretical framework that describes the shadow value of soil carbon on cow-calf grazing land. The dynamic model nests a within-year rotation problem inside a Bellman equation to derive its steady-state value. To supply the functional forms the theory leaves open, we couple a process-based soil-carbon model directly with an animal-nutrition model and an economic module, and we demonstrate the framework at a single 60-hectare cow-calf site in Michigan.With rotation, cattle graze specific paddocks over short time periods, allowing the paddocks to recover between grazing periods. At high stocking rates (2 livestock units per hectare), the forage recovered from rotation more than repays additional fencing and labor costs and the present value of profits over ten years increases by 7.1 percent compared to grazing without rotation. At lower stocking rates, the forage recovered does not repay the added fencing and labor. At all rates considered, resting paddocks longer retains more soil carbon than grazing without rotation.