Gallagher-powered cell grazing set-up doubles production while protecting pasture
Monday, 01 August, 2022
A beef finishing operation near Huntly in the North Waikato has used cell grazing to double production per hectare while protecting pasture. Guy Melville has been farming at Puketotara for two years. He runs around 1,600 trade bulls and up to 3,000 trade lambs across 940 effective hectares. He has split his operation into more than 60 cell systems, with more than 720 paddocks, with potential for more to be developed. The system he uses is powered by Gallagher electric fencing. Guy has seen his bulls go from gaining weights of well under 1kg per day to around 1.8kg per day, all while doing less damage to his soils.
“The biggest benefits of cell grazing compared to our traditional system have been bull weight gain, the opportunity for the grass to recover and being able to grow more grass. Our cell grazing system is doing less damage to the soils on the farm through pugging and we’ve been able to fence off our creeks and native bush with the lower cost of fencing. We’ve also increased our pasture growth rate from around 6 tonnes of dry matter per hectare to around 10 tonnes.”
Before he implemented the cell grazing system, Guy’s bulls gained between zero to 0.3kgs during the winter, and he was constantly shifting mobs but growing less and less feed. “Now we always have grass in front of the bulls, so we can speed them up or slow them down depending on the conditions of the environment and time of year. If we can grow more grass we can increase production per hectare, so more meat per hectare, and hopefully develop a more profitable and environmentally sustainable business.”
The system is powered by nine Gallagher electric fence units each fence using two wires. At the back of the farm Guy has deployed two solar systems to drive the fences that are too far from power sources.
His bulls start off at around 300 to 400 kgs in May and are generally sent to the works from December to February. Guy also buys weaner calves in December and April every year, which are planned for a 2-year policy. Between January and May, Guy buys the remainder of his stock as rising two-year-olds and grows them all through to killable weights. His trade lambs arrive around April and Guy sends them off to the works from July to October.
“It’s a busy operation. We try to maximise our grass growth, so we treat it a little bit like a dairy farm with our grazing management. We put the different mobs into grazing rotations based on their weights and we also try to match livestock to the class of country.”
Guy has sectioned off 400 hectares of the farm and divided it into 60 systems. They each have 12 permanent paddocks but can be divided into 24 or 48 paddocks per system. Each system ranges from 4.5 to 12 hectares with an average of around 6 hectares per system. They are all mapped and GPSed so each paddock in each system is the same size.
Mobs of cattle are divided up according to weight and Guy has more than 60 mobs of cattle rotating through the grazing cells. His aim is to start off with 1,000 – 1100 kilos of liveweight per hectare on the 01 May. The mobs are generally shifted to a new grazing cell every two or three days. But Guy adjusts his animals’ movements depending on grass growth and time of year. During spring and summer, he works on a 30-day grazing round. In Autumn he extends the round to 60 days and over winter aims for 90 days.
While the system has taken time to set up, Guy says it has been relatively straightforward and has made shifting the mobs a breeze. “We put springs in the fences so we can drive over them with our motorbikes and it speeds up the process for shifting. Last year we could shift 400 bulls in three hours,” says Guy.
He is also working with Farmax to keep records of all his mobs so he can track progress over time, see what rotations and mob size work best throughout the seasons, and track farm production for each block. “It’s all about trying to get the best out of the property in an environmentally and sustainable way. Using cell grazing with the support of Gallagher fencing is helping us maximise our production per hectare and giving us great returns.”