Question

Design pasture paddocks in consideration of water availability, forage availability, stocking rate, days on rotation

Answer 1

Designing of pasture Paddocks

Designing a pasture paddock is fairly simple, it has to be more like growing or designing a paddock rather than subdividing their farms into paddocks. At first there are many things to consider before designing a paddock like water management, fencing, rotational grazing and forage availability, let us see the steps to be taken for designing a paddock in detail.

Water availability

There is a general myth as most paddocks are symmetrical and flat squares, unfortunately they are not flat, most paddocks have hills, streams and often woods. But the general recommendation for paddocks is the cattles must have access to water Within 800 feet from any point of the pasture paddock for increased water consumption.it has been proved that cattles tend to undergraze farther from the water sources if it has to walk more than the proposed 800 feet distance from water.

Forage availability

The next step is to calculate the forage needs of the cattle and how much land is needed for periodic rotations, general belief is to have a stock density of about 30,000 to 50,000 pounds of animals per acre per day is fairly good. This is based on how much forage is available and how much the animals will eat in one day and how much residual is left in the paddock. If a person is rotating every three days then that is 10,000 to 17,000 pounds of animals per acre for that period is required.

Stocking rate and days of rotation

The stocking rate and days of rotation varies in accordance with the paddock size and number, some low calf operations are never stocked heavily enough to justify daily rotation policy because their animals do not have that much high enough nutritional requirements, so these paddocks tend to stock lightly and do daily rotations and heavy stocking is required in terms of high level of calf operations.