How many farmers get a pasture analyses every year?
Animals need pasture levels to be as close to TMR levels as possible so the
first thing to do when 100% pasture farming is to find out the element
levels in your pastures and to fertilise to correct them as best you can.
Some minerals may still have to be fed. Trying to work out an accurate and
complete fertiliser mix from a soil test alone is impossible and soil
testing has very little application in animal nutrition. Elements in the
soil affect each other. By how much, depends on many factors such as
quantity of each, moisture, pH, soil types, texture, organic content, etc.
Pasture tissue figures are actuals that pasture has obtained from the soil
and what the animals are eating, so the antagonistic effects of elements in
the soil are bypassed. Pasture tissue figures are more like a video of what
is happening rather than a soil snapshot on one day which could be
influenced by many things, such as moisture and temperature.
In the 1950s New Zealand agricultural scientist Ken McNaught studied the
benefits of tissue testing and wrote that measuring pasture is far more
reliable than soil. Winchmore Irrigation Research Station, Woodlands and
many other New Zealand research comparative figures confirm this, as do mine
when consulting for 200 farmers in several countries and those of many
farmers.
Vaughan Jones
Agricultural consultant
Hamilton
Waikato
New Zealand
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