Clarifying One's Objectives in Grazing

Beef cattle farming Farming Dairy cattle farming

Knowing how to clarify one's objectives allows to:

Ensure to have available pasture resource at different times of the year: increase quantity and quality in line with grass growth, this is well known. But one can also have the objective to develop offset resources.
Renew vegetation: vegetation depends on soil, climate but also on practices. These evolve the flora over seasonal, annual, and multi-year time steps through the death and birth of other plants. Defining objectives for vegetation evolution through practices ensures the reliability of this resource in the long term and avoids reducing the productive potential of the plot.
Not suffer from administrative "constraints" and become autonomous in decision-making: defining objectives that take into account the structuring of vegetation and the needs of animals prevents getting lost in purely administrative objectives when setting up agro-environmental contracts.
Assign the "right" plot to the "right" group of animals at the "right" time: changing perspective on the handicaps of certain plots allows to value their qualities.
Reason the restoration of a plot by integrating it into the grazing chain: before clearing, brush cutting, or fertilizing a plot, one must have a clear idea of the role it will play.

Farmers often seek to implement practices that increase yield and consume young grasses of high nutritional value. However, while these objectives are relatively consistent with the desire to provide standardized and controlled feeding in buildings, they lead to difficulties in farms oriented towards grazing and diversified surfaces. The risk of having to mow refusals, exhausting the environment, or neglecting so-called "less productive" areas is increased.

Describing one's objectives

For farmers, an implicit objective often emerges: "to have grass". However, spring grass does not have the same interest as summer or autumn grass. All these "grasses" do not have the same properties and require different practices to valorize and renew them over the years.

The farmer's job is to organize the meeting between herds whose nutritional needs vary and vegetation whose availability also varies. Some of these variations are predictable (e.g., physiological stage of animals and plants); others are not (e.g., climatic hazards, etc.).

Thus, reflection on objectives should lead farmers to consider the role of the plot in the system, the nutritional needs of the animals, and the expected evolution of vegetation. For this, it is often necessary to make hypotheses about the interactions between vegetation, herd, and practices.

Ways to define an objective and associated examples:

Objective:

From the point of view of the plot's role

Way to define it:

Respond to the assigned role in the feeding chain: use for grazing or mowing, for groups of animals, in particular seasons, with or without a safety role.

Example: A plot:

to start grazing as early as possible
to make hay stock
on which one can return often
that serves as a safety net for late summer

Objective:

From the animal's point of view

Way to define it:

Provide adapted resources to cover nutritional needs: level of nutritional needs of groups according to periods of the year based on their physiological stage or production level, quality of forage needed, planned supplementation, etc.
Develop animal aptitude: learning to walk, to consume diversified vegetation, etc.
Arrange the plot: size, fencing, fixation point, shelter, etc.

Example: For forage:

to last 10 or 15 days at the end of spring and 10 days in autumn
for 30 ewes in lactation (high needs)
complete, with a balanced mix of leaves and fibers
in a park with shelters, and water at the back.

Objective:

From the vegetation's point of view

Way to define it:

Maintain and renew vegetation properties: functionality, productivity, seasonality, flexibility, nutritional value
Evolve vegetation: diversification of the herbaceous layer, densification of broad-leaved grasses, etc.

Example: Vegetations:

with good residual growth
diversified, balanced between rushes and grasses
where grazing controls blackthorn around thickets.

A well-formulated objective should allow understanding both the stakes at the farm scale, on the herd and on the vegetation.

Example of an objective: A plot grazed in spring and autumn, for lactating ewes without supplementation, with vegetation that remains diversified and whose brambles are stabilized by grazing.

Conditions for success

Have a global reflection on the system even if it is to clarify an objective at the plot scale: "The grazing circuit is a balancing game"
Learn to observe the plot and characterize its properties to know what role it can play in the system: "Open the palette of possibilities"
Share plot objectives within a GAEC even when tasks are divided among partners (one person manages the herd and the other the maintenance or mechanization of the plot)

Verify coherence between objectives, practices, and vegetation evolution

Reconciling several objectives on the same plot is often complicated. This would imply implementing sometimes contradictory practices. Each objective is legitimate, but in the end only one practice will be implemented on a plot. It is therefore necessary to verify the coherence between each targeted objective, linked to associated practices and the predictable evolution of vegetation.

To resolve inconsistencies, the farmer may be led to revise their objectives or seek a compromise to finally decide precisely on the practices to implement.

Example: Applying nitrogen to promote yield on a plot used in summer: nitrogen will make vegetation earlier, with a reduced leaf lifespan = inconsistency with maintaining late-season nutritional value.

Theoretical inputs

Overall, it is possible to rely on the properties of a plot to make it play a role in the feeding chain: meadows for spring or stock, wet lowlands for summer, heathlands for winter. But it is also possible to evolve vegetations through practices to bring about desired properties. For the environment to evolve towards a vegetation state that can be used differently later, adapted different practices are implemented over several years.

It must also be admitted that practices do not guarantee in all cases the achievement of the desired objective, notably due to natural hazards and the complexity of links between vegetation, herd, and practices.

Example: animals change their feeding behavior depending on the management mode.

In practice

Conditions for success:

Know the links between practice and vegetation dynamics. For this, it is enough to experiment with varied technical itineraries to pool results. Example: Spring grazing penalizes late plants, the harrow stimulates couch grass growth, etc.
Adapt objectives to animal needs and define management rules that are coherent with vegetation condition. Example: In brushy environments, "I will ask my lactating animals to take the best and move quickly to something else while a maintenance group can attack the brush more."
Accept that objectives evolve over time. Example: At a given time, "we will establish an objective on a plot entering our production cycle." Over time, parks that were central in summer will become optional, as it is more interesting to go elsewhere at that time.

Example of a farm in Brittany

On this farm, the beef cattle operation is based on raising Nantes cows. The grazing season runs from mid-April to November. The animals, managed in two groups, graze coastal marshes.

Characterizing plot properties

On several of these plots, vegetation is largely dominated by herbaceous plants, with in places an abundance of rush (Sharp-flowered rush and Soft rush).

Describing initially implemented practices

Defining the plot objective

During reflections conducted in recent years to improve grazing management, the following objective was formulated for all these plots: maintain agricultural use of marsh plots, reduce dominant species (rushes and brush) that impoverish diversity, and provide throughout the grazing season a quality diet for animals with medium needs.

Analyzing coherence between vegetation, herd, and practices

A reflection was initiated to define adapted practices and achieve this objective. A difficulty appeared quite quickly because reducing rushes and brush requires rigor in grazing management:

consumption of rush stems very early after winter to avoid loss of palatability during spring;
consumption of young brush stems several times in spring and summer to weaken their reserves and cause mortality.

But implementing this management was hardly feasible, due to:

pedoclimatic conditions of the plots (poor bearing capacity in early spring);
limits of mowing and shredding these species observed in recent years: rush, bramble, and blackthorn vigorously resprout and gradually become more abundant after cutting;
technical management constraints of the farmer (moving animals between plots and on roads).

There is therefore an inconsistency with the plot objective.

To resolve inconsistencies, the farmer was led to revise their objectives

Revising the plot objective

They accepted a certain proportion of rushes in their plots. Ultimately, it is about controlling rushes and brush to prevent their increase on plots.

Implementation

This small change in the objective allows a more serene consideration of practices to implement on the plots. The technical itinerary is more flexible, it consists of fully consuming areas dominated by grasses in each plot. This grazing limits the spread of rush, favoring well-defined clumps.

Autres fiches Pâtur’Ajuste

Sources

SCOPELA, with the contribution of farmers. Technical sheet from the Pâtur’Ajuste network: Knowing how to clarify one's objectives. March 2015. Available at: https://www.paturajuste.fr/parlons-technique/ressource/ressources-generiques/savoir-clarifier-ses-objectifs