First, make sure you have a very hot perimeter fence and your cows are trained to electric fence. If you don't have that, stop everything and get your fence at least 4,000 volts and set up an electric fence inside your current pasture a couple feet off the permanent fence to train your herd. If your fence is hot, they will learn quickly.
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When you set up your fence for the first time, you're probably going to do it the most inefficient way possible. It took me about a week of trying different methods and orders of operations until I could change my fence in less than an hour, and most of that was because I was walking about a mile when moving 1/4 mile of fence. I'm much faster now.
How much acreage per paddock should you start with? I liked to do about a day's worth of feed per paddock. I had about 30 cows when I started intensive grazing, so I gave them about half an acre of alfalfa/orchard grass mix that had roughly 2 tons per acre on it if we'd have made it into hay. Each of my cows eat, very roughly, 30 lb of forage (dried) per day, so 30 cows would eat around 900 lb of forage per day, or about 1/2 ton of dry matter per acre. Since I gave them 1/2 acre per day and each 1/2 acre produced 2 tons of dry matter feed, they were eating approximately half the foliage on that half acre in 24 hours. The equivalent stocking rate was around 84,000 lb live weight per acre. Compared to some folks you'll find on the internet, that's a pretty low stocking rate.
To get started, I just guessed at how much forage was available, how much was left after they'd been on it for 24 hours, and then refined how much pasture I gave them the next day when I moved them again. When the cows had been left in an area too long, they let me know. When they were content, they were quiet. No matter what I did, they were always ready to head into the next section of pasture and moving them (once I figured out how they liked to move) was never a problem.
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Finally, after three or four days, I would set up a back fence so the cows couldn't go back into areas they had already grazed. Back fencing is important to avoid overgrazing, allow the plant to repair itself, and allow the forage to regrow more quickly. If it's the last grazing that field will get for the year (such as fall or winter grazing), I didn't bother with the back fence as the pasture is already dormant.
Note: DO NOT let the cows graze it down to the ground if you want any kind of regrowth. You need to leave at least 4" of height if you want your pasture to come back quickly (assuming it's the kind of pasture that will regrow in a season). Most of the energy of the plant is stored in the part closest to the ground, so manage how long you leave cows in an area based on how much foliage you have left.
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