Grazing & Pasture Planning: Stocking Rates, Pasture Cover, Rotations & Feed Wedges

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Convert six mobs of cattle and sheep into livestock units, find the peak and the year-average LU, measure the stocking rate per hectare and work out how many ewes would bring the farm to its target.
• Fit a straight calibration line through eight cut-and-weigh samples with SLOPE and INTERCEPT, turn the farm walk heights into pasture cover for ten paddocks, and work out the farm's total and average cover.
• Work out how much grass each paddock offers above the target residual, how many days it feeds the cow mob, how many grazing days the whole farm holds and how many paddocks are ready to graze.
• Turn the growth rate of each season into the rest period a paddock needs, set the days per paddock for a ten-paddock rotation, check the rotation length and find how many paddocks it would take to keep shifts short.
• Compare this week's grass growth with the farm's demand, rank the paddock covers into a feed wedge with LARGE, draw the target line from pre-grazing cover to residual, and chart the wedge.
• Turn a six-week growth forecast into weekly surpluses, decide how many paddocks to close for a silage cut and estimate the bales they will give.
• Size the water supply for four mobs on a hot day: daily litres, the time a trough takes to refill, the peak-hour demand and the number of troughs each mob needs.
• Close Tobias's season paddock by paddock: utilisation of the grass on offer, kilograms grazed per hectare, the farm's total grass harvested by the animals, the best paddock and a chart of grazing days.