In the United States, government sponsored conservation programs are under increasing pressure to quantify the environmental benefits of practices they subsidize. To meet this objective, conservation planners need tools to accurately predict phosphorus (P) loss from agricultural lands. Existing P export coefficient based tools are easy to use, but do not adequately account for local conditions....

Pastures are an extensive land cover type; however, patterns in pasture greenhouse gas (GHG) exchange vary widely depending on climate and land management. Understanding this variation is important, as pastures may be a net GHG source or sink depending on these factors. We quantified carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and methane (CH4 ) fluxes from subtropical pastures in south Florida for three wet-dry sea...

Quantifying botanical composition is important for evaluating the effects of management on legume content and of legume content on pasture yield and quality. The standard for measuring botanical composition is hand separation of clipped samples. An alternative is taking point counts of botanical components on photographs of the pasture. The latter was tested on a rotationally stocked pasture, w...

Scientists call pasture a natural eco-system and range is an agricultural eco-system. In this point of view although pasture that was full of plants growing by itself and not growing by human being (Pirdashti, 2007; Mohgadam, 2005) and two groups of living beings such as human being, plants, domesticated, and not living being like weather, Wind, gradient which are effective in making of pasture...

Dairy cows fed on perennial-ryegrass pasture produce higher-quality milk in terms of fatty-acid composition; however, they produce much less milk compared to dairy cows under other systems. The low dry-matter intake (DMI) has been identified as the main factor responsible for the lower milk production in pasture-based systems. To maximize milk production from those systems it is important to ma...

We study the role of bush encroachment control for a farmer's income and income risk in a stochastic ecological-economic model of grazing management in semi-arid rangelands. In particular, we study debushing as an instrument of risk management that complements the choice of an adaptive grazing management strategy for that sake. We show that debushing, while being a good practice for increasing ...

Herd management on large cattle ranches is a difficult task. Most functions on cattle ranches are done manually. As such, ranches stand to gain significant benefits with the aid of technology. In this paper, we present the design of NIMBLE, Networked Identification and Management of Bovine on Large Expanses. NIMBLE is an RFID based application that automates many functions that cattle ranchers ...

The objectives of the current study were to determine the amounts of aboveand below-ground plant biomass production, P uptake by forage, and P concentration of cool-season grass forage as influenced by management and season. Five forage management treatments were evaluated over 3 years in smooth bromegrass (Bromus inermis Leyss) pastures. Management practices were: ungrazed (U), hay harvest/fal...

Protein nutrition of cows on pasture deserves special attention as protein costs/unit weight tend to be higher than those of energy, and choice of protein type and/or energy source interact to affect forage intake and performance. When discussing protein supplementation, level of energy nutrition must be at least described to determine the overall interaction between these two nutrients. Under ...