Learn the habits of farmers with excellent pasture management, including controlling daily grazing area, treating pasture like a crop, and maintaining optimal pasture cover.

Regular pasture assessment on your dairy farm helps you manage your feed, plan grazing, and detect surpluses or deficits in pasture.

The purpose of allocating pasture accurately is to optimise both animal performance and pasture eaten per hectare.

Average pasture cover is the measure of the quantity of pasture on the farm. Having average pasture cover targets for the farm at key times of the year is important for managing pasture supply and demand.

Creating a new pasture isn't just about sowing. Good management, especially in the first year, can boost its performance and longevity. It's only successfully established once it's dense and has survived a summer.

A pasture feed wedge is a tool that visually displays your farm's current pasture situation. By ranking your paddocks based on average pasture cover, it can help you make proactive decisions about pasture management.

Leaf stage, in ryegrass pasture management, is an indicator for optimal grazing times. Monitoring the leaf stage helps you understand when a paddock is ready for grazing and if your rotation length is suitable for current growth conditions.

Feed quality, often quantified as metabolisable energy (ME) per kilogram of dry matter (MJME/kg DM or M/D), is as crucial as feed quantity for dairy farming. High M/D value means better feed as it has more usable energy.

Pre-graze mowing is a technique sometimes used to manage surplus pasture. However, research shows it doesn't increase cow intake or performance, and actually reduces pasture performance.

Managing high-quality pasture during feed surplus periods is a crucial skill in pasture management. This page explains that pasture surplus often develops in spring, which if unmanaged, can lead to low-quality pasture affecting milk production.