@candide - thanks for the comment, that's going to stick with me now too - isn't it wild how much wisdom comes off of this forum?
@AxelHeyst- So cattle grazing presents a multifaceted problem in our environment. The most obvious element is the actual consumption of the plants themselves, which rotational grazing would in theory solve - as then the vegetation would be "trimmed" but ultimately go on about it's life cycle after a recovery period. Then the cows would basically just mirror bison/deer/antelope and The Dude could abide... But what I've learned from observing bovine (and I spend many hours slackjawed and oggling bovine now that I'm semi-ere
) is that the cows clearly select for only certain plants within the community to flourish by leaving them uneaten. Coincidentally these are the plants that are being blamed for "encroaching on the grasslands" and there's whole govt funded operations to go out and pull them while using preposterous amounts of labor/fossil fuel so that everyone can feel good about themselves while ignoring the root cause of the issue.
What happens is that cows indulge heavily on grasses/forbes/palatable shrubs (ie. not the thorny or toxic ones), while completely avoiding "the encroachers". And unlike deer, cows are behemoth animals, so when they "graze" a shrub they literally mow it to the ground. Instead of nibbling a cactus bloom as a deer might they instead level the entire cacti, etc. We're talking 5-10 years of growth gone in a few minutes. And in an arid environment eating 4' feet off a shrub is so traumatic given the nature of the heat/evaporation that it typically kills the plant if not permanently stunts it.
So what we're left with are landscapes composed of the thornscrub that cows don't eat and the limited grasses that spread via rhizomes - since the cows aren't rotated most of the grasses never actually go to seed and so the species dependent upon the soil seedbank become rarer and rarer until they're ultimately extinguished.
The other factor at play is that cows are huge animals and much of the southwest is clay soils which compact heavily when trampled - this reduces infiltration across the landscape and creates channels that dehydrate the wider landscape by entrenching flows along the cows' preferred paths (often through once lush riparian areas that played a major role in the water cycle). They concentrate in the riparian zones due to access to water/more tender fodder/etc. so they ultimately end up compacting the most important regions for maintenance of the water cycle. They also also mow down year after year of recruitment of riparian tree saplings which would ultimately shade these spongey areas and buffer the water table further. So once the older growth riparian trees reach the end of their lifespan there are no juvenile trees to replace them.
The once broad, fertile, shaded floodplains become compacted, sunbaked scalds and then the monsoon rains dump huge amounts of water that rip down the channel beds deeper and deeper as there's no vegetation to slow/spread the flow - thus leading to incision. The whole region around the waterways dehydrates and no longer serves to charge the water table. There are cutbanks 20' deep along the creek that flows through our place. And this is happening en masse on public lands all over the southwest. No one knows about it, and yet it's almost certainly driving extinction at worst and contributing to future water shortages at best.
I think in your scenario if the grazing pressure is gone I'd look at areas that are analogs to your site without grazing history and see what species "are missing" at your place... then you could try to reintroduce them to the seedbank by harvesting a small amount of seed off site and placing it in areas at your home that mirror where you saw the plants growing at the analog location (ie. a shaded north facing rock pile). Water harvesting earthworks will do wonders of course as well.