January 2010 edition
Feeding Pastures For Profit – Unlocking the potential on your farm
Do you want more profit (and improved lifestyle)?
Do you want to know the easiest way to grow and consume the optimum amount of pasture?
Do you want to know how much supplement to feed the herd?
If the answer is ‘YES’ then the Feeding Pastures For Profit Program is for you!
Over the last few years the Dairy Extension Centre has been working on the development of a program that focuses on helping farmers improve farm profitability. The result is the new ‘Feeding Pastures For Profit’ program that strongly focuses on providing practical information and tools that will allow you to improve your farm management, and to become more confident when making some of the most important farm decisions.
The program is about making the most of the resources that you have – rather than on asking you to make large investments to change the way you do things. It’s about working with what you have.
What does the Feeding Pastures For Profit program aim to achieve?
One of the key ways to optimise profit on a dairy farm is to produce as much high quality milk as possible using the cheapest feed sources available. In order to achieve this, two of the most important decisions that need to be made each day on a dairy farm are:
- How much pasture do I allocate to the herd today? (Where do I put the herd and how much pasture do I allocate to them?)
- How much supplement should I be giving the herd today?
If you get the answers to these two questions right then you are well on the way to maximising profit from your farming system.
The Feeding Pastures For Profit program provides each farmer with a customised Rotation Right (RR) tool. The RR tool takes the guesswork, gut feel and figure work out of the daily task of deciding ‘where do I put the cows today/how much feed do I allocate’. It will allow you to grow more high quality grass, and provides the knowledge and tools required to decide on the right amount of supplement to offer your herd each day and how much surplus fodder to conserve in spring. Importantly, it can unlock the ‘unseen’ pasture potential and increase your bottom line substantially.
Experience from participants in the programs has shown that the use of the Feeding Pastures For Profit system has not only increased farm profit, but it has also improved lifestyle. The system simplifies the job of managing the pasture rotation, and provides a system that makes it easy to identify the next paddock to graze and the number of feeds that need to taken from that paddock. Once in place, the pasture rotation can easily and effectively be managed by any farm employee.
Participants in previous programs have identified a large number of other benefits that the program delivers:
- You will develop the skills and confidence to change the rotation before feed runs out (or gets away from you as it can in Spring)
- The system doesn’t rely on measuring pasture available in kg DM per ha
- You will get a better idea of the ‘ideal paddock size’ for your farm and you will develop a better understanding of the limitations of your current farm layout (paddock sizes, potential for backgrazing)
- You will develop a better feel for the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paddocks on the farm and how far are the poor paddocks behind the ‘good’ paddocks?
- You can develop a system to manage the use of annual crops
- There is potential to get much better responses from Nitrogen fertilisers
- The system allows you to better manage the spring surplus
- You will find it easier to adapt your grazing management if you have to take some paddocks out of production for development, or if you buy more land for the cows to graze.
What the program involves:
We start by introducing you to the basic principles behind the ‘Feeding Pastures For Profit’ system over two days in mid March. During the program we discuss pasture management and supplement use, we look at what it is that drives farm profit (in terms of the interaction between pasture and supplement use for any farm) and we introduce simple, practical tools that help to get this right for your farm. We develop a ‘Rotation Right’ tool for your farm, and we have a lot of practical discussion on how you can use the tool and the system to achieve your feeding goals.
The program then involves a minimum of five on-farm seasonal days over the following year where the group will be provided with practical information that helps to manage the major feeding decisions for the year (eg setting up the autumn rotation, managing wet pastures, the spring surplus, the seedhead phase, managing the hot summer etc). Each meeting will involve a farm walk and will continue to build the confidence to make profitable feeding decisions.
You can start with the very basic system that will help you to get the most from the forage that you have available, and you can build towards a tailored farming system that will allow you to make the best use of your resources, that is, your forage, supplements and cows. How far you go is dependent on your own aims and needs. We will provide support to the group over a 12-month period with group days and individual farm visits. The aim of the on farm days is to challenge the way that we are currently managing our feeding, and look for opportunities to improve.
If you feel that this program could help you improve your farm management, and you are willing to challenge the way that you go about making your feeding decisions, please follow the details below to confirm a place, or to find out more detail.
Who should consider participating? Feeding Pastures For Profit is for dairy farm owners, managers and farm staff who are in charge of, or financially responsible for, the day to day decisions relating to the allocation of pasture and supplements the dairy herd. It is very useful for farmers just starting out and even for those who have already attended an earlier Target 10 Pasture Management or Dairy Cow Nutrition program.
Programs are conducted between milkings and this year will be based at Tallangatta. Numbers in this program are limited, so it will be ‘first in best dressed’.
For further details or to register, please contact Nathan Shannon on (02) 6043 7961 or 0417 141 023.
Grow grass, and use cows to eat it
