Tactical stock control
This is module 2 of the MLA More Beef from Pastures – The producer’s manual, which offers practical information to help lift the productivity and profitability of southern beef businesses.
It will help you to manage stock numbers regularly to tactically increase or decrease grazing pressure.
What this module is about
- Predict monthly pasture growth in kg DM/ha/day for a range of weather patterns.
- Continually match animal feed demand to predicted feed supply.
- Use partial budgets to assess the benefits and costs of options to match supply to demand.
There are 2 steps for tactical control of stock numbers
- Predict pasture availability for a range of weather patterns and compare with stock requirements
Estimate or measure the amount and quality of pasture currently available and the number of days that pasture is required; then compare the number of days that pasture is required with the number of predicted days available for various weather patterns.
- Take early corrective action when a shortage or excess of pasture is predicted
Increase (or decrease) stock numbers on pasture or utilise excess pasture by other means.
Toolkit 2
This tool will assist the on-farm implementation of each step in this module:
- Guidelines for establishing minimum and maximum limits for whole enterprise pasture availability into the future (or days of feed available)
Linkages to other modules
This module accompanies Module 1: Setting directions and Module 4: Pasture utilisation.
More information
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