Maximising feed performance

Pasture eaten is the single most important physical key performance indicator in a successful dairy farm business and can generate additional profit with very little extra effort.

What is my potential profit?

Increasing the amount of pasture and crop eaten on-farm could equate to around $300 of extra operating profit per hectare of dry matter eaten. Use the Pasture potential and Pasture and crop eaten tools below to calculate your own figure from the following formula:

Pasture potential	-	Pasture and crop eaten	=	gap	x	$300	=	Potential profit
e.g. 15.5 tonnes	-	13.5 tonnes	=	2 tonnes	x	$300	=	$600/ha

What is pasture eaten?

Pasture eaten is a measure of how much pasture grown on the milking platform is being eaten by cows to produce milk, and is measured in kilograms of dry matter per hectare (kg DM/ha) or tonnes per hectare (tonnes/ha).

The pasture and crop eaten calculator assess how much energy it takes to drive your farm (cow numbers, type and milk production) and deducts any feed bought onto the milking platform or any feed consumed by cows grazed off. The remainder is the quantity of pasture and crop eaten.

What is potential pasture eaten?

Potential pasture eaten tool allows you to create regionally relevant ‘benchmark’ for your farm by looking at other farms in your locality. The tool defines pasture potential as the ‘90th percentile of pasture and crop eaten on nearby farm’ (i.e. the level that only one out of ten farmers beat).

The tool provides a chart with the distribution of DairyBase pasture and crop eaten within a 20km, 40km and 60km distance from the chosen location.

The potential achievable (the 90th percentile) is shown as a dark blue line with a numerical value. The uncertainty band of this estimate is shown as a shaded area around this level.