Written by Wayne Knight, HMI Executive Director
With the change of season approaching, it the time of the year to measure forage assessments forthe dormant season grazing plan in much of the northern hemisphere.
There are many ways to access how much forage you have been able to grow in the growing season.(I recommend the STAC method which you can find free on our website at:https://holisticmanagement.org/product/stac-spreadsheet/).
The volume of forage is only 1 data point. The other critical information point is the time over whichyou need to allocate out the forage. With the increasing variability of onset on amount of rain, thistime span is a critically important consideration in the planning process. Allocate too little time in adrought year and you will be out of forage if the rains arrive late. That translates to expensivesubstitute feed costs, poor animal performance and probably deteriorating ecosystem function.Conversely, by allocating too much time, you could land up with unused forage which translates toforgone income and a poor mineral cycle when the rains arrive. Unused forage that spoils is a wasteof resource and lost opportunity to sell solar dollars in the form of livestock.
The time allocation will surely be influenced by many factors like the timing of you production cyclerelative to the start of the growing season, the brittleness of your environment, and how much riskyou can afford to expose your business to.
Analyzing rainfall and the likelihood of later than expected onset of the growing season is veryhelpful for informing forage allocation and destocking decisions. I used 20 years of rainfall data todetermine the likelihood of onset of growth and the same data to view the latest onset of growth todetermine how much time should be allocated to get through to growth season in a drought event.Bud Williams talked about the three inventories of risk in a ranching business: livestock, forage andcashflow. His observation was that a rancher could run out of animals and cashflow and still survive,but that a rancher could never afford to run out of grass. The cost and risk of being out of forage willsink the business very fast – economically hay feeding is very bad for the economics and balancesheet. Running out of forage is also bad for animal performance and for ecosystem function and thetime it will take to grow new forage when growing conditions return.
Spending appropriate time on considering what forage you have going into the dormant season toget you soundly through to a potentially conservative estimate of the start of your next growingseason is one of the most important considerations for a grazing business. Learn the basics of how todo this at one of HMI’s Training Programs.