How do you plan your grazing?

FAI Farms and McDonald's

Transcript

Silas Hedley-Lawrence  0:00  
So one of the main things farmers want to know when they come here and they see what we're doing in our grazing planning is how do we plan our grazing. And the first most important thing to do is actually do a whole grazing plan for the whole year ahead of you, which we actually did last week. So what we do is we think about how many groups of cattle we're going to have. For us, ideally, we'd like to have one or two, but because of our water, we have to have more like four or five. So we have to split our farm to separate blocks, and then plan how they're going to move through the whole farm over those 12 months, to give us an idea on how we can play in recovery periods, what parts of farms, we want to get rested at what times of year, that helps us to figure out how big the groups are gonna be and how many acres we need per group. So the other parts of that question is, how do we plan ourselves sizes, and what we basically do is we figure out the day demand of each group and what's available in the pasture. But what's most important is actually just monitoring that residual, because we want to achieve a specific desired outcome. So that would mean in this growing season, we want to leave at least 50% behind when we've got nice wildflowers, we want to make sure that at least half of those flower heads haven't been nibbled off, so that they can flower and seed and pollinate. That's how we can increase our biodiversity by leaving that much behind as well and making sure there's plenty of nice green vegetative material to photosynthesize and get carbon nice and deep down into the soil. Whereas in the other hand, and we go into the autumn and winter, we don't mind actually grazing a little bit more. And as the grass gets a bit more mature, and brown and decaying, that's a really good time, then start getting animals a little bit tighter. Try and trampling more of that residual, which builds your organic matter levels in the soil. People often want to know how long do you keep animals in one place? Or what do you do and they need to be in a certain place at certain times. So we look at key dates. So it's things like a TB test or someone go on annual leave, we make sure that the cows are where they need to be to make those kinds of periods easier. General rule of thumb for us is in the growing season, we don't leave animals in the same cell for any longer than four days. That's because after four days, the plants grown on day one tend to start regrowing, and that's when they'll then be nibbled off by cattle or sheep that are looking for those more nutritious parts of the pasture. That's when you then start over grazing while staying in the same place for too long. General rule of thumb we try and do a one to two day move, but never more than four days.