See advice from UF/IFAS on spring pasture management for Florida beef producers looking to start off on the right foot.
Spring is in full swing, and it’s awfully easy to want to just turn your herd out to the pasture and move on to other things, but that’s not what should happen, according to a UF/IFAS blog. It shared advice for spring pasture management for Florida beef producers looking to start spring off on the right foot. See the details below.
Spring Pasture Management for Forages
The blog maintained that there is a danger to forages in letting cattle graze too early. “Warm-season perennial pastures (bahia, bermuda, limpograss, etc.) survive their winter dormancy by metabolizing stored energy. This is the same supply of stored energy that they utilize to regrow after they have been grazed or mowed,” the article explained.
Essentially, if forages are grazed before they are allowed to grow and rebuild their stores of energy, then “with very little stored energy left, the plants must dip even deeper into their reserves to produce more leaf tissue. This puts the plants in a very precarious place. They become highly susceptible to disease, insect, and especially drought stress. Conditions that would otherwise not be an issue can now become very serious problems.”
Forage leaves must be allowed to increase their leaf area to utilize photosynthesis to grow, restore energy, and regrow roots lost over winter. The blog shared that “The effects of over grazing are magnified during the spring transition when are grasses are more fragile than they are later in the year. It is easy to overgraze during the spring transition, because the plants are not in a position to handle much grazing pressure. The exact same grazing practices that are perfectly fine and sustainable in the summer (ie. a given number of cows on a given number of acres for a certain number of days) can be very problematic in the early spring.”
The blog shared the takeaway of “let the grass get further ahead of the cows than you normally would before the first grazing in the spring and then be sure to graze off no more than half of the standing biomass the first time you graze the pasture. Just an extra week or two of growth prior to the first grazing can go a long way towards maintaining a strong healthy pasture which will ultimately result in more season-long forage production.”
Griffin Fertilizer is committed to helping both growers and ranchers make sound agronomic and economic decisions in order to maximize the health of their grove and pasture. As a full-service custom dry & liquid fertilizer blender and crop protection product distributor, we will continue our mission to further advance Florida agriculture. For questions or concerns about your farm or pasture, contact us and one of our team will be in touch.