A twelve-week feed budget. It is loaded with figures from a real inland Taranaki sheep and beef unit; some of them are a few seasons old. Every figure can be changed.
None of these figures are measured from your place; they come from national tables and a published profile of a farm nearby. These five will get it close, in the order they move the answer:
Items 2 to 5 are under Figures and assumptions, below the chart. Everything recalculates as you change it.
The yellow button sits in the bottom right corner. Click it, then click whatever you are asking about and type.
No login, and it takes about ten seconds. Anything you send comes straight back to us, including "this number is wrong" and "why does it say that".
On these figures, cover drops below your target in week 3, the week of 1 Sept.
The low point is about 1,390 kg DM/ha against a target of 1,500 and a residual of 1,200. At today's demand that is 15 days of feed above residual. On the low-growth run the low point is about 1,290 kg DM/ha, above residual.
The lowest week is marked. Tap the chart to pin any week, or use the arrow keys.
Figures are given in days of feed rather than tonnes. NZ research puts the error on a whole-farm cover figure at roughly ±300–400 kg DM/ha, so smaller differences than that are not measurable. How this is worked out
Share of daily intake by mob at the lowest week in the forecast. Lambs at foot are counted with their mothers.
Every figure the model uses is listed here and can be changed.
| Mob | Head | Liveweight kg | Per head kg DM/day | Mob total t DM/day |
|---|
Figures below are for the lowest week in the forecast, so a mob that reaches its intake ceiling later in the season will not be marked here. Per-head intake is calculated from liveweight, pregnancy stage and lactation, so it changes through the season but not with the number of head. Changing head count moves the mob total and everything downstream of it. A marked figure is one where calculated requirement is higher than the animal can physically eat.
Close to lambing, twins and triplets reach the same intake ceiling, so the budget shows the same feed cost for both. Where requirement is higher than intake, the difference does not show up as a feed deficit: the ewe eats less than she needs. Beef + Lamb report that a triplet ewe in late pregnancy is usually unable to eat enough from pasture and loses condition over that period. Any cost of that sits outside this budget.
Share of the grazing area in each class, and how much less the harder country grows than the easy country. The 0.60 figure for steep is extrapolated from fertiliser-response trials rather than a published growth curve, so it is the least certain number in the model.
At the split above, the farm as a whole grows 79% of what the easy-country curve says. Percentages that do not add to 100 are treated as proportions.
Kilograms of dry matter per hectare per day, by month, on the easy country. The contour split above knocks these down to a whole-farm figure. They are built from the Beef + Lamb sheep and beef default and Taranaki seasonal data, and are not calibrated to any particular farm.
Whole-farm equivalent right now: — kg DM/ha/day.
Utilisation is the share of what grows that gets eaten, rather than trampled, fouled or left behind. NZ published defaults sit between 80 and 90%. It is set to 85% here. Wet winter conditions with pugging are usually costed nearer 75%.