GrazFeed screenshots
GrazFeed is a Decision Support Tool developed by CSIRO Plant Industry that provides a simple way of applying feeding standards to grazing animals. The main object of the program is to help farmers and graziers to make the best use of their pastures, to minimize the use of expensive supplements and to select the most efficient supplement where feeding is necessary.
The program estimates the animal production obtainable from the pasture and shows the extent to which production might be improved through supplementation.
GrazFeed is suitable for any type of pasture but is not designed for rangelands where shrubs and isolated plants make up much of the vegetation. The program is suitable for any breed of sheep or cattle; a generality that is achieved by scaling the biological functions in the program to the mature weight of the particular animal and breed type that is selected. These functions conform to the recommendations in ‘Feeding Standards for Australian Livestock. Ruminants’ (1990), prepared for the Standing Committee on Agriculture, with up-to-date modifications.
When using the GrazFeed program, the user firstly enters information about the amount and quality of the pasture that the animals are grazing on ...
The GrazFeed program then partitions the pasture into a range of digestibility classes ...
Then the user selects the animal type, breed and class ...
The first output is a summary table showing animal growth with and without supplement ...
The output provides considerable 'expert' interpretation ...
More detailed relationships can also be graphed - e.g. the relationship between dry matter intake, amount of green herbage and digestibility of the green herbage - as shown below ...
