Impact of deferred grazing on profitability of a hill country farm in north-western Waikato

Abstract

Deferred grazing is a common management practice in which pastures are rested from grazing between mid-spring and the end of summer/early autumn. It has been used to rejuvenate pastures and better manage the spring pasture surplus although its impact on farm profitability is unknown. FARMAX was used to explore the impact of deferred grazing on profitability on a north-western Waikato beef and sheep hill country farm based on experimental data and likely management responses. The Base Scenario modelled farm profitability assuming spring surplus in a typical year. When 15% of the farm was deferred and it was assumed that the increased grazing pressure on the rest of the farm led to greater control of the spring feed surplus and improved pasture quality, there was an increase in ewe performance and the number lambs sold at target weight. Per head and total farm gross margins increased by 8%. Results demonstrate how the use of deferred grazing as a pasture management tool to increase resilience can also enhance livestock performance and profitability at the whole-farm level.

A horizon scan for temperate pastoral weed science–a New Zealand perspective

“…Workshop participants thought we should use viable alternatives as full or partial replacements to herbicides, if they are effective, but more work is needed to understand alternative strategies. Some alternatives deserve to have continued scrutiny and testing, such as classical and inundative biocontrols (Bourdôt et al, 2007(Bourdôt et al, , 2018Bourdôt & Cripps, 2018;Ghanizadeh & Harrington, 2019), deferred grazing (Tozer et al, 2020(Tozer et al, , 2021, or regenerative agricultural practices. There was a hope that new herbicides with benign breakdown products could be developed in future, perhaps using innovative genetic approaches (Duke et al, 2019) or naturally occurring chemicals involved in plant defense.…”