I am sure most of you are wondering how or why someone would measure grass, but on a grazing dairy farm it is one of the most important daily tasks. Measuring the grass tells us how much pasture we can feed the cows everyday and if we need to give them hay so they are not under fed. There are three ways to measure the amount of grass in the pasture, otherwise known as the pasture cover.
1. A plate-meter - a handheld stick with a disk at the bottom, and a little computer that measures how far up the stick the disk goes when you drop it (I will take a picture to show you).
2. A C-Dax machine - A fancy, relatively new invention that someone pulls behind a quad. It uses lasers to measure the height of the grass as you drive through the paddock. A monitor, which sits on the quad computes and stores the numbers for the amount of grass in each paddock.
3. Eyeing it - After using the other two methods long enough your eye gets trained to tell how much grass is in a paddock. This can actually be quite accurate and it is also very quick.
I have been using the plate-meter over the past couple weeks to measure pasture covers but today I used the C-Dax machine for the first time. I measured all the grass on the whole farm, it took about two hours. It was really neat to be able to see the entire farm today, especially the areas I have rarely been in yet. So that was my big excitement for the day! I also have been working on getting my eye trained to read pasture covers and I am starting to get pretty accurate.
We are down to about 100 cows that still need to calve out of 800 so we are on the home stretch, yay! (that's the excitement from Brittany) That's all for now! -Paul
1. A plate-meter - a handheld stick with a disk at the bottom, and a little computer that measures how far up the stick the disk goes when you drop it (I will take a picture to show you).
2. A C-Dax machine - A fancy, relatively new invention that someone pulls behind a quad. It uses lasers to measure the height of the grass as you drive through the paddock. A monitor, which sits on the quad computes and stores the numbers for the amount of grass in each paddock.
3. Eyeing it - After using the other two methods long enough your eye gets trained to tell how much grass is in a paddock. This can actually be quite accurate and it is also very quick.
I have been using the plate-meter over the past couple weeks to measure pasture covers but today I used the C-Dax machine for the first time. I measured all the grass on the whole farm, it took about two hours. It was really neat to be able to see the entire farm today, especially the areas I have rarely been in yet. So that was my big excitement for the day! I also have been working on getting my eye trained to read pasture covers and I am starting to get pretty accurate.
We are down to about 100 cows that still need to calve out of 800 so we are on the home stretch, yay! (that's the excitement from Brittany) That's all for now! -Paul
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