Grass growth

Grass is the acres that feed the herd. On a 160-acre tract the acres are split among grass, brush, timber, and surface water. Those four add up to 160.

How grass appears

Clearing brush or harvesting timber turns those acres back into grass. That is the way you make more grazing ground. A crew does the work. You pay them in TOUGH, and you wait out the contract.

How grass disappears

Brush and timber grow back by taking grass. They do not appear out of empty air, and they do not grow while a contract on that cover is still running.

• Brush returns at 2.5 acres per season, until it is back to the brush acres the tract had when it was released.
• Timber returns at a rate set by how many timber acres you left standing. The bands are on the Timber harvest page. It stops when the tract is back to its released timber acres.

A season is seven real days. A partial season does not grow anything. Whole seasons do. Every acre that grows back into brush or timber is an acre the herd no longer grazes, and the AUM of the tract falls with it.