Track 1-08: Improving Quality of Livestock Products to Meet Market and Community Demands
Description
Stocking rate is a poor indicator of grazing intensity because, in contrast to forage allowance, it gives no information of feed availability. Forage allowance (FA), measured as kg of forage dry matter (DM) per kg of live weight (LW), is the ratio between forage mass and stocking rate (Sollenberger et al. 2005). Crossbred cows demonstrated higher production efficiency than purebreds in poor and rich quality pastures (Barlow et al. 1994) but few experiments have been conducted under different FA in Campos grasslands with growing beef steers (Maraschin et al. 1997, Soares et al. 2005), and no work has been conducted with beef cows during various gestation-lactation cycles. Also, there have been no studies on FA to test for interations between cow genotype and environment. The objective of this work was to test the effect of two FA and two cow genotypes on pasture traits, stocking rate and body condition score (BCS) of cows.
Included in
Effect of Forage Allowance on Native Pasture Traits, Stocking Rate and Beef Cow Body Condition
Stocking rate is a poor indicator of grazing intensity because, in contrast to forage allowance, it gives no information of feed availability. Forage allowance (FA), measured as kg of forage dry matter (DM) per kg of live weight (LW), is the ratio between forage mass and stocking rate (Sollenberger et al. 2005). Crossbred cows demonstrated higher production efficiency than purebreds in poor and rich quality pastures (Barlow et al. 1994) but few experiments have been conducted under different FA in Campos grasslands with growing beef steers (Maraschin et al. 1997, Soares et al. 2005), and no work has been conducted with beef cows during various gestation-lactation cycles. Also, there have been no studies on FA to test for interations between cow genotype and environment. The objective of this work was to test the effect of two FA and two cow genotypes on pasture traits, stocking rate and body condition score (BCS) of cows.
