Browsing by Author "Antila, Hannele"

The environmental effects of agriculture are on display nowadays. There are many things than can be done in livestock and grass production to help solve these negative environmental impacts of agriculture. Grass production in Finland is the base of livestock production and grazing is an important part of it. Grazing affects the biomass on the pastures and thus affects the carbon sequestration potential in the grazing areas. To control the loss of biomass in the pastures grazing should be regulated. This regulated grazing is called adaptive grazing. This project’s goal was to find out how adaptive grazing system actually works and how it affects the biomass in the pastures. Pastures’ biomass, it’s removal and re-growth affect the emissions of grazing. This is why the amount of biomass is important to find out. Hypothesis is that with adaptive grazing the removal of biomass is easier to control than in continuous grazing. This research was done in Finland, Southern Ostrobothnia in two beef production farms. Both of the farms had two pastures in the research with different trial arrangements. One of the farms was testing slow and fast adaptive grazing models and the other tested over and optimum grazing models. To measure the changes in the pastures’ biomass, biomass samples were taken and NDVI-maps formed. Samples were taken in June and August of 2021. According to the results there were clear differences between the different grazing types and their effects to the pasture’s biomass. When the pasture was separated to be grazed in lanes it was noted that the removal of biomass was smoother than when the animals got to graze a larger area at once. The uneven removal of biomass affected the re-growth of the pasture and therefore the coming grazing cycles. The results of this research gave references to the idea that adaptive grazing could affect the removal of biomass thru grazing in the pastures. It was noted that separating the pastures to smaller areas (lanes) to be grazed at once grants more even removal of biomass that grazing the whole pasture at once. These findings support the hypothesis. However, more detailed and carefully planned data collection would have been needed in order to find out how the amount of biomass actually changes before and after grazing and how it affects the re-growth of the pasture.