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Optimizing intensive grazing: A comprehensive review of rotational grassland management, innovative grazing strategies, and infrastructural requirements
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2025
Abstract
Grazing is a crucial component of dairy farms across many regions of the world. This review explores challenges related to grazing infrastructure and opportunities for future improvement. Farmers who aim to increase pasture utilisation face heightened inter-animal competition necessitated by pasture restriction to achieve target post-grazing sward heights. Increasing the frequency of fresh pasture allocation beyond once per day has been observed to reduce milk production in primiparous animals, due to intensified competition for limited feed resources. Implementing grazing paddocks tailored for 24 to 36 hour allocations helps to mitigate inter-animal competition while concurrently preventing the grazing of fresh regrowth. Crucial to this approach is establishing farm roadway infrastructure, that allows access to all sections of the grazing platform. However, the development of these roadway networks has often occurred without a comprehensive assessment of their impact on the efficiency of the dairy herd’s movement between grazing paddocks and the milking parlour. The efficiency of the dairy herd’s movement is most significantly influenced by the location of the milking parlour within the grazing platform. Extreme walking distances or challenging terrain on farm roadways may have an impact on milk production per cow. Factors such as farm roadway surface quality and width significantly influence cow throughput on farm roadways. Recent studies have highlighted inadequate roadway widths on many farms relative to their herd size, while surface condition may also be limiting cow throughput on these farms. Enhancing roadway width and surface condition of farm roadways may improve labour efficiency on commercial farms.
Keywords
- Type
- Integrated Crop-Livestock Systems Review Paper
- Information
- Copyright
- The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press