This post is an extract from CEO and Co-Founder, Bill Mitchell’s fortnightly Optiweigh Insights email newsletter. To get a copy in your inbox, SUBSCRIBE HERE.
Last week Jacqui and I were in New Zealand setting up our new Optiweigh office (big news — from January we’ll have our own person on the ground there). And while talking with Kiwi farmers, the conversation inevitably turned to pasture utilisation.
It’s a cornerstone of profitable grazing, but getting it right is a balancing act between how much pasture is eaten and how much weight the livestock actually gain. At the end of the day, it’s not just about weight gain per head, but weight gain per hectare that really drives profitability.
One of the things that has kept me awake at times over the years is how to make that better on our farm in the New England. And I’ve come to realise the economics of increasing output on our existing country is stunning compared to trying to buy or lease more land to achieve the same result.
“Utilisation” is just a measure of how much we grow vs how much is consumed by the animals. The Kiwis do it better than us and like most things that has probably arisen out of necessity. By the time you take out the mountains, they just don’t have as much land to work with.
Some older research suggests that in Southern Australia we only utilise an average of 20-40%, while intensive systems can be as high as 80% – that’s 2-4 times the output from the same inputs!
One of the main management tools for achieving this higher utilisation is grazing rotations. The best bit of research I could find quickly on this comes from University of Tennessee.
Rotational grazing utilisation step-changes with intensity:
- 3–4 paddocks (“slow” rotation): ~50–60%
- 6–8 paddocks (“moderate” rotation): ~60–70%
- Daily strip/very intensive rotation: ~70–80%.
The trade-off comes in the form of management intensity and the need for data. It is no coincidence that dairy farms achieve the highest levels of utilisation, because they have feedback data in the form of milk yield every day and because the cows are already coming in for milking it is easy to send them back to another paddock.
Dairy is a huge industry in New Zealand and that culture of intensity seems to have flowed through to their sheep and beef industries also.
They are commonly weighing animals every 4 weeks (even down to 2) and run intensive rotations, often with daily moves or strip grazing. We think Optiweigh will be a good fit there because it provides that data even more often, and with less work.
Virtual fencing is coming and it is going to take utilisation to a whole new level. Our friend Kent Rochester in WA has adopted it and told me recently that his Optiweigh units are a key part of making decisions around stock moves using the collars. If you have a login to Rural Press the article is well worth a read and if you’re interested to know more about how to get results out of being an early adopter of Ag Tech, then Kent is a great person to talk to.
Of course chasing higher and higher utilisation using higher stocking rates and more intensive rotations also has the consequence of increasing risk. So with it must come a plan that has an ‘out’ for failed seasons – most likely something around destocking or feeding.
If you want to play it safer and not go ‘full noise’, then lower stocking rates will leave more residual and at least for a while, a backup of maintenance feed.
But if you want to increase your output consider how increasing intensity compares to trying to do it with more land. A couple of Optiweighs and some fencing/virtual fencing can soon start to look pretty cheap.