As farms become larger and systems more varied, the challenge is to make pasture management decisions easier, accurate, and less stressful. The answer for many farms will be the implementation and use of the pasture feed wedge.
Why use a feed wedge?
Plotting a feed wedge weekly is essential if you want to achieve high pasture utilisation on your farm.
A feed wedge is most useful when the round length is not changing i.e. from balance date through to the autumn. At other times of the season when rotation length is changing, the feed wedge is best used with other pasture management tools.
A feed wedge can help you:
- quantify average pasture cover (APC) on farm
- identify targets for both pre and post grazing residuals
- identify surpluses and deficits early
- decide the grazing order for next week’s grazing
- reduce stress around pasture management decisions
- make timely pasture management decisions.
What is a feed wedge?
A feed wedge is a graph of paddock covers (kg DM/ha) (y axis) and paddock descriptors (x axis) for a dairy farm for a selected day, sorted by paddock from longest to shortest pasture cover.
The line drawn on the graph from longest to shortest paddocks, along with the graph axes resembles a wedge shape, hence the name.
If target pre- and post-grazing covers are placed on the graph at the highest and lowest paddock covers and connected by a target line, it is easy to see which paddocks have a surplus or deficit of pasture.
What do feed wedges tell us?
Constructing a feed wedge
For step-by-step instructions on how to construct a feed wedge and add a target line see the Feed Wedges Farmfact.
Once the cover is assessed in each paddock, the paddocks can be ranked from longest to shortest in a table. This can be done manually using a pen and paper or using computer software providers. If you are constructing a feed wedge manually the Feed Wedge Ready Reckoner can help.
For a list of programs that offer feed wedges see the Pasture assessment page.