Grazing Systems Research and Impact of Stocking Strategies on Pasture-Animal Production Efficiencies.

Grazing systems research includes a wide array of component experimentation to assess plant-animal responses during specific short term, seasonal, and/or strategic periods from pastures. Pasture experimentation has been targeted to quantify relationships of forage attributes on liveweight gain per animal and gains per unit land area. These databases have been characterized using fixed and/or variable stocking rates, continuous or rotational methods of stocking, and various stocking strategies to evaluate comparative levels of production efficiencies. The challenges of developing strategic stocking strategies requires the integration of periodic and total forage mass, associated nutritive attributes, specific defoliation regimen-responses, and incorporation of climatic conditions to meet end-point objectives of animal performance and pasture utilization for biological-environmental efficiencies and ecosystem sustainability. The integration processes includes the combination of comparative forage-animal databases with experience, flexibility in land resource use, and intuitive initiative for accommodating non-predicted, erratic climatic conditions. The opportunities for developing and validating stocking strategies are enhanced by long-term, site-specific pasture experimentation as well as multi-vegetational zone collaborative research efforts. Documentation of the impacts of stocking on nutrient cycling, stand-maintenance, ecotype diversity, and watersheds further defines soil-forage-animal responses. Management prerequisites for application of stocking strategies includes foundational forage-animal interface information, land resource limitations, animal husbandry-behavior awareness, initiation-termination of stocking sequences, projections-expectations for climatic changes, biological and economic risk, and reward expectations. There are numerous emerging, positive opportunities to enhance production efficiencies through extended research, teaching, and education principles of stocking strategies for implementation by scientists and stakeholders.