Beef farmers can learn from dairying

Beef farmers could learn a lot about pasture management from their dairy farming colleagues, Totally Vets veterinarian Lindsay Rowe said. He was talking to around 60 people at a Meat and Wool New Zealand finishing farm seminar in Feilding last week reports The Manawatu Standard. "There are three things the dairy guys focus on: the interval between grazing, the grazing intensity [how hard a paddock is grazed], and how long they graze for," Mr Rowe said. Grazing beef stock is usually less intensive, he said, so practically, it is more difficult to manage it the way dairy farmers do, he said. "The dairy guys, because they are milking twice a day, they are always moving their cows up and down the farm, which lends itself to a rotational system very easily."The attraction of a beef system is less day-to-day management of pasture." It makes hands-on rotational grazing more difficult for beef systems, he said. "The bottom line is the more a farmer is able to do an intensive grazing system, the more pasture you harvest, and the more money you make. It is a straight-line graph," Mr Rowe said. "The top dairy guys are harvesting 14 tonnes of pasture, and average guys only 8-9 tonnes." He said while some beef farmers know about cattle harvesting pasture at optimum times, many don't. "But I think, by and large, it is a pretty set-stocked system out there. That means, a farmer puts stock in a paddock, until the grass is gone, then they're moved on. So they are not growing as much grass as they could have."