Common land food store type

In many countries farmers have access to common land. This can be dedicated ‘common land’, unused range or forest land, or, as in the case of west Africa, transhumance herding. This presents a problem when determining available resources. As yet, no real solution has been found for this because the individual farmer has no control over the available resource, and the area available is not known, nor the number of animals using it. To accommodate this problem, a yield for common land is included as a ratio of the on-farm native pasture yield, and given a quality of a set proportion of the native pasture. It is assumed this is an inexhaustible supply. This allows the farmers to keep their animals alive after they have exhausted their on-farm feed resources, which is basically what happens in reality. The model determines the animal intake based on the yield calculated for the common land.

If common land is placed under an Animal food store it can be used as a feed type like any other feed in the store. You can determine labour requirements for cut and carry of common land pasture, especially as pasture biomass declines and more effort is needed to collect the common land pasture (see Cut and carry). When the CommonLandFoodStoreType is placed under a Graze food store the common land can be grazed by moving animals onto it.

The common land parameters are similar to Graze food store type as they can both be grazed.