The Grazing System That Will Improve Your Pasture and Animal Production On Your Livestock Farm
Successful farmers use and refine grazing systems to improve the productivity of their pastures. This, in turn, helps them improve their animal and pasture performance.
Hi, I’m Ollie from Pasture.io, and today we’re going to discuss the pros and cons of three grazing strategies. And we’ll talk about how herbage-data based rotational grazing can help you improve productivity.
Let's begin with the three grazing systems.
Grazing system number one. Continuous grazing.
In a continuous grazing system, your animals graze a pasture continuously over a period of time. In this system, your pasture doesn't get any rest period.
Continuous grazing systems don’t require you to keep farm records. It doesn’t require additional fencing or paddock setup costs. And it doesn’t require you to actively manage your pastures.
However, these advantages come at a steep price because the disadvantages of continuous grazing systems include low pasture yields, low nutritional value, degrading pasture quality and poor animal health outcomes.
That said, a continuous grazing system may work well for farms with low stocking densities. Farms that have a lot of grazing area and a small herd size. It also may work well for small scale hobby farms with a larger ratio of dry cows.
However, if you’re a commercial farmer, you’ll need high-quality forage to increase production as well as profits. So continuous grazing might not be the best system for your needs.
Grazing system number two. Sequential Rotational Grazing System.
In this system, the grazing area divides into roughly equal-sized paddocks, and livestock animals rotate between each paddock in a set sequence after a set time.
So, when the last paddock of the sequence has been grazed, the first paddock that has been given a good amount of time to rest is grazed next.
This rest period allows your pasture to recover from the previous grazing event and allows enough growth to withstand the next grazing event.
The system works better for farms that receive an annual rainfall of over 800mm and access to irrigation for the drier months. Under these conditions, sequential rotational grazing offers higher pasture yields with high stocking densities without compromising pasture quality.
However, implementing this system requires more upfront investments to create fenced paddock areas with access to a stock water supply.
However, sequential rotational grazing doesn't consider variables such as weather, fertility and soil moisture. And leaves out a lot of opportunities to improve production.
To optimise annual herbage yields and production, you need to look at the third grazing system. Herbage based rotational grazing.
This system rotates paddocks based on their herbage growth rate and not in a set sequence because each paddock has different regrowth rates based on its soil fertility, slope, irrigation and drainage.
This grazing system offers several advantages:
higher yields,
stocking densities,
nutrition intakes, and
quality pastures.
You get better yields because this system considers factors such as grazing, fertility, moisture, seasons that impact your pasture growth rate.
It also helps you meet the nutritional needs of your herd without compromising pasture growth.
To learn more about this, check out our video on Maximising your pasture yields and nutritional value by clicking the link below in the video description.
That wraps up this video on grazing strategies to improve your farm production.
I hope you enjoyed this video. And if you did, don’t forget to hit that thumbs up and subscribe button and share it with your fellow farmers.
Until we meet again, Happy Farming!
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Blog link: https://pasture.io/grazing-systems/im...
Video link: • How to maximise your pasture yields and nu...