Block grazing beef cattle to get the most out of grass

AS part of the Northwest Livestock Programme, Reaseheath College organised and Eblex supported a visit to a Cheshire beef farm, looking specifically at grazing management.

(Read the full report by Katie Lomas at Farmers Guardian).

After managing a dairy unit for many years, Graham Parks now applies his knowledge of grazing cows to a beef finishing enterprise.

He block grazes 500 Aberdeen-Angus-sired cattle every year on 100 hectares (250 acres), buying them in as two to three-week-old calves, both privately and from local auctions, and finishing around 200 off grass alone.

Mr Parks started out with 20ha (50 acres) at Pastures Farm, Gawsworth, Macclesfield, a county council holding, and built up to the current acreage with various short-term FBT agreements. This allowed stock numbers to increase, until three years ago he gave up his job at the dairy farm to manage his beef unit full-time.

Deciding to use some of his grazing knowledge, Mr Parks first compared block grazing to set stocking by putting electric fences up on a block of land and keeping cattle on each block for around four days, taking around a month to move around all blocks.

The set stocked cattle ran out of grass three weeks before those being block grazed and so now, each spring, Mr Parks puts up temporary electric fences and block grazes everything.

“Whenever the cattle want moving I just move them,” he said. “I make them graze each block as tight as a lawn before they are moved. This means three quarters of the grazing ground is always growing so I can carry more grass and increase stocking rates.”

He said there was ‘no hard and fast rule’ on how many days the cattle should stay on each block but said the key was getting the cattle out as early in the spring as possible.

“The sooner you get the cattle out, the sooner the grass starts to grow. Grazing early in the spring means the winter growth is grazed off,” he said, adding that in a very wet spring cattle spend less time on each block so they made less mess.

Read the full Farmers Guardian feature

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