Managing paddocks

A paddock or field is a single management unit of land, usually fenced, where selected animals are able to graze pasture or crops growing in the paddock. Paddocks are used to separate animals to control breeding, place specific animals on the best pasture for animal production, divide the larger farm into more homogeneous areas for managing pasture utilisation rates and access to water, or hold animals prior to sale.

While paddocks are usually associated with a type of land and represent a fenced area of the farm, in CLEM a paddock is a management concept. We assume that a paddock consists of a single Land type (e.g. soil type), otherwise we would require more spatial information to manage different growth and grazing across the paddock. Paddocks are managed by the Manage pasture activity and one of these activities is required for every paddock included in your simulation. This management activity links to an associated Graze food store type. This is the resource store that tracks the amount and quality (through DMD and N%) of pasture in the paddock that can be grazed. The manage pasture activity will request an area of a Land type for the paddock that will be provided if there is land available at the time of the request. There is an property of the Manage pasture activity to use the remaining land for grazing. This will allow the area grazed change dynamically (not fully implemented) as other activities (e.g. cropping) request or release land and allows you to graze the unallocated area of a farm (single land type).

Paddock management can start to become complicated and you need to ensure you know where animals are at all times. Individuals are moved to a paddock with the Move ruminants activity. You may have to provide a number of Ruminant move activities with associated timers to control the placement of animals in paddocks during the simulation. Activities such as Manage ruminants provide properties to define the location of purchased and separated individuals.

If you are using natural/uncontrolled mating, breeding will happen whenever males and females of breeding condition are in a paddock together

An example of the relationship between Land and GrazeFoodStore resources and pasture management activities.

In this example you might use the black soil paddock (Manage pasture #3 on Land type #2 linked to Graze food store type #3) for part of the year to graze a trade herd. Paddock one could be the breeder paddock and paddock two could be used as your steer grow out paddock.

Note you are free to name the Land types and Graze food store types with representative names in the simulation tree with the Graze food store type providing the paddock names in drop down lists throughout the activity properties

Land resources

  • Land type #1 (red soil)
  • Land type #2 (black soil)

Pasture resources (Graze food store)

Activities

  • Manage pasture activity #1
    • Defines paddock area from Land type #1 and links to Graze food store type #1 (Paddock #1)
  • Manage pasture activity #2
    • Defines paddock area from Land type #1 and links to Graze food store type #2 (Paddock #2)
  • Manage pasture activity #3
    • Defines paddock area from Land type #1 and links to Graze food store type #3 (Paddock #3)

See also