If you find
Putting animals into a rotational grazing system requires an understanding of how much feed is in front of the animals, how much feed they need a day
OR
Unless you know when, how big and how long your annual Hungry gaps are, it is hard to prevent them being a problem
OR
Balancing pasture needs, optimal animal nutrition and ensuring a Year-round feed supply is difficult without crunching the numbers
Then,
A Feed budget is a way to match the amount of feed needed by livestock with the amount of feed available.
Having a budget allows you to ensure there is enough feed and to predict any shortfalls, often in time to do something about them.
Feed budgets come in two main forms:
1 The short -term, usually daily or weekly Feed budget:
This is a way to allocate areas of pasture or range in a Managed grazing system where animals are moved every day or week. It is a way to calculate the amount of feed the animals will need and match that against the amount of feed present (often by measuring or estimating the height and bulk of the vegetation) so you can allocate an area of pasture or rangeland to provide that feed and no more so the animals will graze it flat and in the process eat the undesirable species as well as the desirable ones.
So, once you know how much feed is in a paddock and how much your animals need to eat each day, you can budget the feed by restricting the area you give them, the number of animals you put on a given area of the pasture and the time you leave them there.
By budgeting your feed in this way you can:
- maintain or improve pasture composition
- ensure you have enough feed in front of you in an impending or existing drought
- keep milk production at a consistent high level,
- maintain wool strength at a consistent high level,
- ensure there is enough feed for Fodder conservation later
- improve Nutrient cycling,
- enhance animal resistance to internal parasites
- improve soil quality
- improve the eating quality of your animals
- And more.
2 The annual Feed budget:
This is a way to look at the cycles over a year that affect feed supply and feed demand and balance them to:
- minimize problems from hungry gaps (seasonal times when there is not enough feed for stock and the shortfall happens most years)
- ensure you have enough feed in front of you in an impending or existing drought
- maximize animal production and
- manage pasture composition over the year
- maintain or improve pasture composition
- keep milk production at a consistent high level,
- maintain wool strength at a consistent high level,
- improve Nutrient cycling,
- enhance animal resistance to internal parasites
- improve soil quality
- improve the eating quality of your animals
- ensure there is enough feed for Fodder conservation later
- minimize costs and complications of bought-in feed
- give you the benefits of informed foresight
- And more.
To do this you need a clear understanding of:
- how much feed each class of livestock needs at each stage of the breeding cycle (your agricultural advisor or their website can help you with this. If you know the weight of your animals you can work it out)
- how many animals you are likely to have at each of those stages — you will need to factor into this the timing of selling and buying each class of livestock and how many of them
- how much feed you can grow in each area and when that is available (your agricultural advisor or their website can help you with this. If you know what type of pasture and how much area of it you have you can work it out) and
- when is the best breeding time so that calving or lambing etc matches the feed supply as well as possible (a spreadsheet or some other system for calculating this makes it easy).
Once you have assembled all the above figures you can crunch the numbers.
It’s not difficult to build a spreadsheet in OpenOffice, Excel or whatever other spreadsheet program you have available. It is however, important to check all your numbers and entries. A spreadsheet program is a powerful tool and a small error can become magnified if it is not checked.
What the results can show you is times of feed shortage and feed surplus.
Too much feed may mean you can run more stock profitably without harming your land or you can store fodder for the lean times.
Too little feed may mean you need to let animals into your Living haystack, use other home-grown stored fodder, destock by culling from the bottom, rent some land from a neighbor or use bought-in fodder.
Because it allows you to match feed demand and supply and because it helps you predict difficult times for animals, a Feed budget can be one of the most valuable tools for anyone who grazes any sort of animal.