June 10, 2003
Over the next three years,
farmers from the Yass, Bookham and Canberra districts are
teaming
up with scientists from CSIRO Plant
Industry and New South Wales Agriculture to ‘benchmark’
their grazing properties.
Data from five grazing trials, each on different classes of
land, is being collected and will be
used with a CSIRO developed computer package—GrassGro—to develop
a way of determining
sustainable carrying capacity.
Knowing how many sheep or cattle can graze sustainably on a
particular paddock has always
been a difficult problem. Calculations have been made using
rainfall data or by following local
experience. Sometimes this has locked farms into lower stocking
rates than necessary or has
led to overgrazing.
GrassGro gives farmers more objective information when
determining sustainable long-term
stocking rates for their farms. It uses local weather, soil,
pasture and animal data to simulate
the whole grazing enterprise and is already used by grazing
industry advisors.
Accurate assessment of land capability will be a highly useful
tool for farm managers in south
eastern Australia, helping to increase profitability while
maintaining environmental quality across
a range of land types and seasons.
The study will also develop new guidelines for advisors and
graziers, making it easier to use
GrassGro simulations when benchmarking or managing their grazing
enterprises.
The project is funded by Australian Wool Innovation Limited.
Background on GrassGro:
analysing grazing systems
GrassGro is a decision support tool developed by CSIRO Plant
Industry to examine variability in pasture and animal production
and assist decision-making in sheep and beef enterprises. By
testing management options against a wide range of seasons,
farmers and natural resource managers can
achieve more profitable and sustainable utilisation of
grasslands to fit the unique combination of weather, soils,
pastures and livestock at a particular location.
Matching management goals with land capability
GrassGro helps analyse profit, risk and sustainable use of
resources in temperate grazing systems.
GrassGro is a uniquely flexible and powerful tool that can be
applied to a broad range of issues in
agriculture and natural resource management at both farm and
regional scale:
- Assessment of land capability
and production benchmarking
- Resource sustainability:
ground cover, water balance, nutrient deficiency
- Drought management
- Testing the suitability of
pasture types, animal bloodlines and enterprises at a location
- Testing strategic and tactical
decisions before committing funds: lambing and calving dates,
supplementary feed policy, market specifications for livestock
and more
- Supply chain analysis
WHAT IS GrassGro?
GrassGro is a computer program that delivers grazing systems
research in a useable form to farmers and their advisers.
GrassGro incorporates decades of field experimentation from
across Australia and lets the user focus on the management
decisions at a selected site.
Behind GrassGro's interface, inputs of historical daily weather
data drive models of the interacting
processes of pasture growth and animal production. Day-to-day
changes in water content of soil, pasture growth and decay and
responses to grazing are simulated for a chosen enterprise.
The user enters a description of livestock, their management and
costs and prices. The GrazPlan animal model, familiar to users
of the decision support tool GrazFeed, is built into GrassGro to
predict animal intake and production of wool, meat and milk.
GrassGro helps assess productivity, profitability and risks that
climate variability imposes on a grazing
system. Seasonal and year-to-year variation in animal production
and gross margins are presented in
graphs and tables for analysis of risk.
ADOPTION
Since its release in 1997, GrassGro has been adopted by
agricultural advisers, researchers, tertiary
educators and policy makers. GrassGro analyses are typically
interpreted and disseminated to farmers by advisers, both
private and within state government departments.
Over 100 licensed copies of GrassGro, with a comprehensive
training package, have been sold to users in the temperate
regions of southern Australia.
Teaching
GrassGro is used by the University of New England to deliver
innovative undergraduate programs in Rural Science to integrate
specialist areas in animal science, agronomy, soil science and
economics and to develop systems thinking in agricultural and
natural ecosystems studies.
Support from Australian Wool Innovation has helped expand the
UNE teaching program to other
universities using web-based delivery of GrassGro and course
materials. Students have found GrassGro to be an ideal teaching
aid.
A Canadian version of GrassGro
has also been developed for tertiary teaching at the University
of
Saskatchewan.
USING GrassGro
Users describe each component of the grazing system, drawing
where possible on databases built in to GrassGro. Daily weather
inputs for the selected location are obtained from the
Australian Bureau of
Meteorology database. The soil profile is described by the user
in terms of its water holding capacity. Soil physical
properties, which are hard to measure, are can be obtained from
default values derived from the National Soils database.
The user chooses the combination of legumes and grasses from a
list of temperate pasture species and cultivars. The pasture can
be simulated as an ungrazed paddock or grazed by one of the
following sheep or cattle enterprises:
- Ewe breeding flock for meat,
wool or dual purpose
- Wether flock
- Prime lamb production
- Fattening enterprises for
steers or bull beef
- Beef breeding herd producing
vealers, weaners, yearlings or bullocks
- Opportunity feedlotting
GrassGro is suitable for any
breed of sheep or cattle. The user sets costs and prices and
management rules for each enterprise, for example, the time of
mating and initiation of supplementary feeding. More than one
paddock can be simulated at a time, in which case the user
determines when different classes of livestock graze each
paddock.
A wide range of output treatments and presentations as graphs
and tables permit powerful analysis of
each part of the grazing system. A gross margin table shows the
financial performance of the whole
enterprise and sensitivity analysis to costs and prices can be
quickly determined.
An extensive online Help facility guides the user in the
practical application of the tool and provides
background information on the biological models that GrassGro
uses to make its predictions.
APPLICATIONS
GrassGro's flexibility makes it applicable to a wide range of
grazing industry issues, both on-farm and
beyond.
Farm management advice: helping solve practical problems
for an individual farm or district
Long term decisions:
- What is the best long term
stocking rate?
- What is the best time to calve
or lamb?
- Should I run a different
bloodline of sheep?
- In how many years will need to
supplement stock?
Short term decisions:
- Drought management: How much
feed should I buy?
- What is the chance that these
animals will meet market weights?
Agricultural business and
finance
- Supply chain management across
a range of environments
- Establishing risk for
contracts
Research: animal and
pasture science and agricultural economics
Education: a new approach in teaching systems thinking in
agricultural science
Policy-making: modelling for drought, dryland salinity,
greenhouse gas emissions, grassland fire risk, food sources for
mouse plagues
END USERS
The role of the user is important: a GrassGro analysis depends
on accurate description of the site and the user's ability to
interpret and apply the outputs to a particular issue. A typical
GrassGro analysis enables the user to explore interactions
between a grassland ecosystem and its management and should be
used as a tool to support rather than make decisions.
Training
To get the most out of GrassGro, training is essential. Training
aims to improve the user's level of
understanding and application of the tool, and, importantly, to
appreciate any limitations imposed by gaps in our scientific
knowledge of the grazing system simulated.
Technical support
GrassGro users have ready access to technical support from the
software development team. For example, weather localities for
alternative sites can be obtained on request. Feedback from
users has been important in developing further releases of
GrassGro that incorporate new science.
Ongoing development
To broaden the range of environments in which GrassGro can be
applied, descriptions of new plant species are released as they
become available. This is a major scientific undertaking that
incorporates the latest published information on the
interactions between a plant genotype, the animals grazing it
and the environment. As a result GrassGro requires no 'tuning'
but users need to consider appropriate species and management
when describing a grassland ecosystem.
For information on pricing and purchase, contact
Horizon Agriculture Pty Ltd
About Horizon Agriculture
About Horizon Agriculture is an
Australian company that specialises in linking science to
productive solutions. Horizon services agriculturists with
special interests in the areas of: Livestock and Pasture
Management Systems, incorporating Decision Support Systems for
the evaluation of whole farm management strategies.
Horizon has developed a close association with CSIRO Division of
Plant Industry. The research group for Profitable and
Sustainable Agriculture, headed by Dr John Donnelly, has the
goal to complete the research to enable consistent profits
through sustainable production from mixed farms in the better
watered, more productive areas of temperate Australia.
A hallmark of the program is active collaboration with rural
industry and government organisations. Horizon's role is to
facilitate this collaboration.
A major CSIRO Plant Industry initiative is the AusFarm Project.
The aim is to integrate the results of research into computer
based Decision Support tools for rural industry. AusFarm
encompasses the GrazPlan family of DS tools for the management
of grazing systems.
Horizon Agriculture specifically facilitates the commercial use
of the GrazPlan family of decision support tools including
GrazFeed, MetAccess and GrassGro.
These tools are a cornerstone of a revolution in the way
pastures and livestokck are managed on many Australian farms.
Use of these tolls is also growing in South America, Canada, USA
and a number of other northern hemisphere countries.
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