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Pasture (; past participle of 'to feed') is land used for grazing.
Pasture in a wider sense additionally includes , other unenclosed pastoralism, and land types used by wild animals for grazing or browsing. Pasture lands in the narrow sense are distinguished from rangelands by being managed through more intensive agricultural practices of sowing, irrigation, and the use of , while rangelands grow primarily native vegetation, managed with extensive practices like and regulated intensity of grazing.
Soil type, minimum annual temperature, and rainfall are important factors in pasture management. Sheepwalk is an area of grassland where sheep can roam freely. The productivity of sheepwalk is measured by the number of sheep per area. This is dependent, among other things, on the underlying rock.R. Elfyn Hughes, "Sheep Population and Environment in Snowdonia (North Wales)", Journal of Ecology Vol. 46, No. 1, March 1958, 169-189 Sheepwalk is also the name of townlands in County Roscommon, Ireland, and County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Unlike factory farming, which entails in its most intensive form entirely trough-feeding, managed or unmanaged pasture is the main food source for ruminants.
Pasture feeding dominates livestock farming where the land makes crop sowing or harvesting (or both) difficult, such as in arid or mountainous regions, where types of camel, goat, antelope, yak and other ruminants live which are well suited to the more hostile terrain and very rarely factory-farmed. In more humid regions, pasture grazing is managed across a large global area for free range and organic farming. Certain pasture types suit the diet, evolution, and metabolism of particular animals. Their fertilising and tending of the land may over generations result in the pasture combined with the ruminants in question being integral to a particular ecosystem. "Agricultural biodiversity’s contribution to ecosystem functions" Dr. Devra I. Jarvis, CGIAR. Retrieved 2014-12-01
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