What is it about?
For intensive grazing systems, the pasture is sometimes limiting, and the restriction of the time of access is used to maintain high stocking rates. The response of the animals to this management depends on the level of restriction and on their physiological status. In this paper we studied what happens on intake and digestion when the time of restriction increases, in growing heifers consuming a fresh high-quality forage
Featured Image
Why is it important?
We observed that the effects of the restriction were less evident on digestion than on ingestion. Heifers developed behavioral changes in order to maintain their intake, but these changes resulted insufficient when the time of access to forage dropped below 6 h/day, resulting in a decrease of the energetic balance and N retention.
Perspectives
We think that is important to take into account for planning grazing management, that six hours of allowance time of an unlimited quantity of forage, appears as a threshold below which the animals can not compensate the lack of time to eat.
Professor María Cecilia Cajarville
UdelaR
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Restricting the time of access to fresh forage reduces intake and energy balance but does not affect the digestive utilization of nutrients in beef heifers, Animal Feed Science and Technology, April 2017, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.anifeedsci.2017.02.016.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
