Increasing Grazing in Dairy Cow Milk Production Systems in Europe

Abstract

In temperate regions of Europe where grass grows for most of the year, grazed pasture is the lowest cost feed for milk production. Grazed pasture can make a contribution to dairy cow feeding systems in other parts of Europe, but is less important. While there are many challenges to maintaining or increasing the proportion of grazed grass in dairy cow diets, there are also opportunities to increase its contribution. Grass use and quality can be challenging for several reasons, including the cow and sward interaction, and factors influencing dry matter intake. Adapting grazing management strategies can provide opportunities for incorporating grazing and perhaps increase grazing in dairy cow milk production systems. Pasture management tools and techniques offer the opportunity to increase herbage use at grazing. While there are many benefits of grazing including economic, environmental, animal welfare and social, there are also the challenges to maintaining grazed pasture in dairy cow diets. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of the challenges and opportunities for grazing in dairy milk production systems.

A Review of Precision Technologies for Optimising Pasture Measurement on Irish Grassland

“…Grassland based agriculture has a significant role to play in terms of increasing food production in an environmentally sustainable manner. Over recent decades, there has been a 30% decrease in European pasture land usage as a result of the increased levels in production efficiency and feed controllability that are achievable with confinement based systems, where animals are fed indoors [4,5]. Conversely, pasture-based systems in suitable climates have the potential to be more economically and environmentally sustainable than confinement systems.…”

Development of Machine Learning Models to Predict Compressed Sward Height in Walloon Pastures Based on Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Meteorological Data Using Multiple Data Transformations

“…Grazed pasturelands play multiple roles in agroecosystems that can benefit the sustainability of ruminant-based agriculture. This includes lower feeding costs [1], higher animal welfare and lower occurrence of lameness and mastitis, and increased milk quality compared to indoor feeding [2]. However, despite these advantages, Walloon intensive dairy farmers increasingly turn away from grazing.…”

Incorporation of the grazing utilization subindex and new updates to the Pasture Profit Index

“…Recent changes in European Policy such as the Farm to Fork 2030 program (European Commission, 2020) have restated the desire to move toward production systems with greater sustainability. The sustainability benefits of grassland-based production systems (e.g., economic, product quality, and environmental) are clearly illustrated by Hennessy et al (2020) and are particularly emphasized in ruminant grazing systems. Incorporating large quantities of grazed pasture into the diet of dairy cows is a key aspect of grass-based ruminant production systems (Horan and Roche, 2020), as this improves farm profitability (Hanrahan et al, 2018) and milk product quality (O'Callaghan et al, 2016) with potential for carbon sequestration (O'Brien et al, 2014b).…”