Annual and Perennial Pastures Databases

Do you want to know what your cows are getting from grazed pastures?

Understanding the nutrients your cows get from pastures is an integral part of making feeding decisions to achieve target levels of milk production. You can predict the likely metabolisable energy, crude protein and fibre content of the pastures your cows are grazing by using DPI's Annual and Perennial Pasture Databases. They have been developed to capture existing and new data on the nutritive characteristics of annual and perennial pastures in different regions and different months of the year. The target audience for these decision support tools is dairy farmers, their service providers and researchers who wish to estimate the nutritive characteristics of pastures. These estimates are driven by inputs of time of year (month), estimated pasture mass (t DM/ha) and botanical composition of the sward. By inputting search parameters for these descriptors, the application will provide a table of the likely concentration of metabolisable energy, crude protein and neutral detergent fibre in your pasture. Help files in the databases provide explanations of terms used and how the database works. The Annual Pastures Database is specific to the nutritive characteristics of annual swards in the northern irrigation region of Victoria. Annual pastures in this region are a valuable complement to perennial pastures because of their different pattern of growth, feed supply and nutritive characteristics. The Perennial Pastures Databases cover the three main dairy regions of Victoria, the northern irrigation, Gippsland and south west regions. Within these regions there is considerable climatic diversity. The botanical composition of perennial pastures in the northern irrigation region is generally perennial ryegrass/white clover-based, with older pastures containing paspalum in the summer months. White clover content of the pastures is quite variable throughout the year, typically in the range 5 - 40%. In Gippsland and the south west, perennial ryegrass is the dominant sown species, with white clover content generally being only 5-20% of the sward. Please click on the choices below to get started. These databases were developed with funding provided by the Department of Primary Industries Victoria and the Geoffrey Gardiner Dairy Foundation. Annual Pastures Database Perennial Pastures Database