Pasture is vegetation-covered land used for grazing livestock. Having animals "on pasture" means that they are not on dirt lots and not confined to one paddock all year round. For our 40-acre operation with multi-species grazing, maintaining green growing vegetation on pasture requires intensively managed rotational grazing. That's a lot of farmer jargon in one sentence (wee), but it means that if we leave our animals, especially the pigs, in on place too long they'll make a dirt lot. Dirt lots means soil health is poor, soil compaction is high, and soil microbiome is degraded. The amount of time our animals spend in each pasture paddock is optimized so that the animals lightly fertilize (poop) and enhance the fertility of the pasture. We move them to fresh pasture before they can do lasting damage.
Here at BOTL Farm, some of our pastures are open fields of grass, but we also graze (and therefore consider pasture) some partially-opened woodlots and silvopasture.