Mobile Grazing Sub-systems on Communal Areas

In the majority of situations, the movement of grazing animals needs access to communal or open grazing lands.

The mobile grazing systems are characterized by annual or seasonal movements of a part or all the human group with the livestock to new places following the availability of water and pasture resources. Mobility must be considered as a technicque and is basically the principle of pastoralism. Mobility is based on two main technical acquisitions : the skill of herders and domestication of animals. It is associated with a high degree of flexibility and adapted types of society.

There are two main types of stock mobility : nomadism and transhumance.

- Nomadism is a way of life characterized by the more or less frequent moving of the human group with its livestock to find new grasslands. It is an opportunistic practice, in the most arid regions where the rainfall needed for grazing plants to grow is so random that forecasting is impossible. Since water is available for drinking, the herds or flocks are taken to these grazing transitory areas as soon as they become available and remain there long enough to use them. Nomads are more or less free of any "terroir d’attache".
- Transhumance is a seasonal movement of herds or flocks, on a regular basis, between two or more seasonal pasture areas, sometimes very far away. Each of which has a forage value worth exploiting at a particular time of the year. During the seasonal transhumance, the herders guide livestock to available pastures and waterpoints. Sometimes, the transhumance routes are adapted each year according to pasture availability and the conditionality of access to the resources.

The concept of semi-transhumance is used when only a part of herds and the family is moving to find pasture, while the other part of the family is sedentary, staying at a fixed base with milking cows and calves and growing subsistence crops.

The movement of long duration of family and herds with a settlement in a new region is a migration. It can be sudden in response to drought or conflicts, or a continuous progress to a region, with more potential.

When pastoralists abandon mobility, or if administrative decision or incentive limits mobility, we are talking about sedentarization. In that case, the system becomes a sedentary grazing system or if crops are cultivated a mixed farming system.

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