Today we are going to talk about planning in crop-livestock integration systems, why is it so important? We are going to give you four tips to keep in mind when planning your property.
One of the points is spatial and temporal planning, which is very important for Crop-Livestock Integration, because it defines the use of land for different areas over the years. So, this planning to have a good integration system is extremely important and we will have it for several years, too. Check out the tips:
1 – Try to ensure that livestock farming takes place in all farming areas.
In some cases, livestock farming will be present throughout the year, but in systems where crops remain in some area for a longer period of time, we sometimes tend not to include livestock farming and only use it in some areas, which is easier.So, it is important to try to include livestock farming in all areas of farming because it will have a huge benefit in terms of nutrient cycling, production of organic matter and soil restructuring.
2 – Fertilization systems, why?
Today we think a lot about fertilizing crops and livestock. We have to think about fertilization as a whole and with that, a construction of management over time, we can bring fertilization from the crop to the pasture moment, to the forage moment. Why is it so beneficial for us to do this? Because the cycling of nutrients at this time is very large and the extraction of nutrients is very small by cattle, by livestock production. So, that application that we make when grazing will actually benefit the crop. We can start little by little, starting with 100% planned fertilization, for example, putting 30% on livestock and the other 70% on crops and increasing this percentage until we reach excellent areas where we can put 100% of the fertilization at the moment. livestock and this is excellent for several reasons.
2 – Escalation
Scheduling is common and widely used in agriculture. But, we have to think about this in the system as a whole and then think about the scheduling of agriculture, but also think about the scheduling of pastures or using some pastures at different times. Why? Because we have to have the structure, the supply of adequate forage on the property to maintain a herd passing through different areas. And, for this, you need a pasture that has a greater production of dry matter earlier or later, another at the beginning of summer, anyway, we then have to have a staggering.
3 – Use the different cultivars that we have on the market, different forage species.
There will be a species that will have better production early on, we will use it in one area. It’s not that it’s better or worse than another cultivar, but for our system we see where it comes in, what we need. For example, needing an area earlier in the morning and then an area later in the afternoon, because all the other pastures are not yet ready. So, making this temporal distribution of livestock farming as well, this is very important and we have a lot of good tools on the market to use.
Sometimes, the same species and different cultivars, which behave in different ways, i.e. greater production early or late or the same cultivar and we simply adjust the planting season to have grazing at the time we need it, marrying farming.
