Successful pasture-based milk production systems pivot on balancing dairy cows’ feed requirements with seasonal and annual fluctuations in pasture production. In order to maximise cow production from grazing dairy systems, it is necessary to reach an efficient utilization of grazed grass for feeding cows and the development of appropriate grazing management systems designed to maximize daily pa...

successful pasture-based milk production systems pivot on balancing dairy cows’ feed requirements with seasonal and annual fluctuations in pasture production. in order to maximise cow production from grazing dairy systems, it is necessary to reach an efficient utilization of grazed grass for feeding cows and the development of appropriate grazing management systems designed to maximize daily pa...

The biological value of fodder is estimated on the basis of its content of particular macroelements (N, P, K, Ca, Mg). Concentration of these components in fodder depends on many factors, mainly on the properties of soil, type of land use and growth phase of crops. The aim of this paper was to estimate the effect of soil properties, land use and species composition of a sward mixture on the con...

The numbers of horses grazing at pasture are increasing in developed countries, so a proper understanding of their feeding selectivity and of the tactics they use for extracting nutrients from swards is essential for themanagement of horses and grasslands. Resource acquisition in herbivores can be optimised through the modulation of their intake and patch selection both being strongly dependent...

Sward composition and structure influence herbage intake of grazing animals. We conducted a grazing study to examine how forage mixture complexity affected sward structure. Replicated 1-ha pastures (Hagerstown silt loam soil: fine, mixed, semiactive, mesic, Typic Hapludalf) were planted to either orchardgrass (Dactylis glomerata L.) and white clover (Trifolium repens L.) or a nine-species mixtu...

Effects of breed and sward surface height on ewe liveweight and body condition changes and on lamb liveweight gains during grazing in the spring and autumn were studied. The output per hectare in each season was also calculated. A total of 112 Gallega ewes (35Æ6 kg live weight) and 204 Latxa ewes (47Æ5 kg live weight) with their lambs were used during the spring (March–June) to study the effect...

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Sward variables did not differ between the indoor grazed turves and the outdoor grazed swards (P>0.05), giving confidence that turves extracted from the plots were representative of in situ swards. Sward height was generally greater for grasses than white clover at the same maturity stage, but bulk density was greater for the clover. Reproductive swards had greater mass b...

The vertical distribution of biomass, chemical composition (crude protein (CP); neutral detergent ®bre (NDF); acid detergent ®bre (ADF); acid detergent lignin (ADL); total soluble carbohydrates (TSC)) and organic matter digestibility estimated from pepsin-cellulase (PCOMD) of a perennial ryegrass sward was studied under strip-grazing management. Measurements were carried out during three grazin...

1 In this work we propose a novel method to analyze and recognize automatically 2 sound signals of chewing and biting. For the automatic segmentation and classi3 fication of acoustical ingestive behaviour of sheep the method use an appropriate 4 acoustic representation and statistical modelling based on hidden Markov models. 5 We analyzed 1813 seconds of chewing data from four sheep eating two ...