Can I ask what passages you're looking at? Land reform was an issue throughout the period you mention, but if you're reading the Penguin edition, that volume stops at the end of bk 5, a long time before land reform became the crisis that helped bring about the end of the Republic. If you could pinpoint the passages you're having trouble with it would be a great help.

The only reference to land reform that I can find in the early books of Livy is in Book 2 (41-42):

For the next year [486 BCE] Sp. Cassius and Proculus Verginius were elected consuls. A treaty was concluded with the Hernici, and two-thirds of their territory was taken from them. Of this Cassius intended to give half to the Latin allies and half to the Roman plebs. He contemplated adding to this a quantity of land which, he alleged, though State land [ager publicus], was occupied by private individuals. This alarmed many of the patricians, the actual occupiers, as endangering the security of their property [in other words they were illegally cultivating public land]. On public grounds, too, they felt anxious, as they considered that by this generosity the consul was building up a dangerous power. Then for the first time an Agrarian Law was proposed, and never, from that day to the times within our own memory, has one been introduced without the most tremendous commotions. The other consul resisted the proposed land grant. In this he was supported by the senate, while the plebs were far from unanimous in their support. They were beginning to wonder about a gift so cheap as to be shared between citizens and allies, and they often heard the consul Verginius in his public speeches predicting that his colleague's gift was fraught with mischief, and that the land in question would bring slavery on those who took it, and that the way was being prepared for him to seize power [through the plebs]. Why were the allies, he asked, and the Latin league included? What necessity was there for a third part of the territory of the Hernici, so lately our foes, to be restored to them, unless it was that these nations might have Cassius as their leader in place of Coriolanus?' The opponent of the Agrarian Law began to be popular. Then both consuls tried who could go furthest in pandering to the plebs. Verginius said that he would consent to the assignment of the lands provided they were assigned to none but Roman citizens. Cassius had courted popularity among the allies by including them in the distribution and had thereby sunk in the estimation of his fellow-citizens. To recover their support he gave orders for the money which had been received for the grain from Sicily to be refunded to the people. This offer the plebeians treated with scorn as nothing else than the price of a throne. Owing to their innate suspicion that he was aiming at monarchy, his gifts were rejected as completely as if they had abundance of everything. It is generally asserted that immediately upon his vacating office he was condemned and put to death. [...] [2.42]The popular anger against Cassius did not last long. The attractiveness of the Agrarian Law, though its author was removed, was in itself sufficient to make the plebeians desire it, and their eagerness for it was intensified by the unscrupulousness of the senate, who cheated the soldiers out of their share of the spoil which they had won that year from the Volscians and Aequi. Everything taken from the enemy was sold by the consul Fabius and the amount realized paid into the treasury. In spite of the hatred which this produced in the plebs against the whole Fabian house, the patricians succeeded in getting Caeso Fabius elected with L. Aemilius as consuls for the next year. This still further embittered the plebeians, and domestic disturbances brought on a foreign war. For the time being, civic quarrels were suspended, and patricians and plebeians were of one mind in resisting the Aequi and Volscians, and a victorious action was fought under Aemilius.

So in short: when the Romans conquered the Hercini, they allocated a substantial amount of their land to be doled out. Some of it they reserved for their Italian allies, some they gave back to the Hercini, and some was to be given to lucky members of the urban plebs as new farm plots. In addition, the consul Cassius wanted to throw in a rider on the legislation which would also include a bunch of Roman state land (ager publicus) which was supposed to be settlement free, but had been illegally worked by members of the Roman aristocracy (probably for a long time). The aristocrats were annoyed by this, and a talking war began between the two sides. Cassius tried to pander to the plebs too much and wound up looking like a demagogue aiming for a coup -- it's a delicate business to pander to the volatile Roman plebs. Hundreds of years later it would be the same basic issues for land reform: what to do with the ager publicus, especially as it relates to the parts upon which the patricians were squatting, and those occupied or about to be occupied by the Italian allies. The basic function of Tiberius Gracchus' land commission was to take this ager publicus and assign it to individuals or families of the Roman urban plebs.