The Sunday News
ONE of the dilemmas in veld utilisation during the summer season is how to strike a balance between providing your animals maximum nutrition from the veld but preserving enough veld for use in the dry season.
Naturally animals grazing on the green lush grass will select the softer newer shoots first. This is the nutritious grass which can change your animal body condition within a few weeks. Animals will naturally select highly palatable and nutritious grass shoots.
Now what I have observed being practiced by most smallholder livestock farmers, is that they would want to let the grass grow, sometimes to flowering stage before they open that grazing area for animals. Their argument is that the grass must mature so that it can carry the animals throughout the dry season. The challenge with this approach is that you will have deprived your animals an opportunity to graze the grass at its most nutritious stage saving the grass for later when its nutrient content has significantly gone down.
This is even more pronounced in sour velds which have their grasses significantly depreciating in nutritive value anytime from seed setting stage up to complete drying off. So, your animals did not graze the grass at it most nutritious stage saving for dry season and at the time the grass will have dropped greatly in nutritive value. However, in sweet veld the drop in nutritive value of the grass as it gets older is less drastic.
The important question therefore, is how do you graze your animals during summer season in such a way that they benefit from the nutritious lush shoots but at the same time letting the grass grow enough to sustain the animals during the winter period?
It is not an easy balance to strike especially in communal grazing lands where veld management practice is very difficult to implement because of the communal nature of grazing systems.
Communal grazing systems are generally haphazard with animals grazing from all directions. However, in some communities with strong traditional leadership institutions and by laws, they still manage to control grazing patterns in communal lands.
The story could be slightly different in resettlement areas because these areas still have some paddocks and grazing patterns can be managed. The general grazing principle which you can use even in your farm if you have self-contained farms, is that of a long tom can or a 500ml bottle.
Let your animals graze the green lush grass until it goes down to a level where a long tom can or any 500ml container of similar circumference lying down, is now visible. At this point move your animals to another grazing area so that this one can recover through regrowth.
You will come back to this paddock or area when your grass has regrown such that a long tom or any other 500ml container, standing upright is almost invisible. At this stage the paddock or however way you demarcate your grazing area, has regrown sufficiently for another round of grazing. This regrowth will take varying times depending on a number of factors including the rainfall received.
It suffices to say considering the generous amounts of rains we are receiving this year, your paddocks and grazing lands will recover much faster. If you have a number of paddocks you can designate those paddocks which you want to set aside for winter grazing.
These you will let them grow without interference. This will ensure that you have enough herbage for the winter season notwithstanding the low nutrition status.
The fact that your animals were allowed to graze the green nutritious lush means they will improve the body condition score to a point enough to take them through the dry season on the reserved paddocks without depreciating too much.
Grazing management is production management because if you poorly utilise your grazing your animals will always have poor body condition score and this compromises their reproduction.
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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