Building a Fodder Flow Budget

#The month to find the hole is February

By July it is not a planning problem any more. It is a buying problem, and you are buying in the same week as every other farmer in the district.

The fix is two columns on one page — what your animals need and what your land will produce, month by month, in the same unit. Where the second falls below the first you have a gap, and the only useful question about it is when you found out.

Late summer — February and March — is when you count, because it is the last point at which every option is still open. Destocking in February is a marketing decision. Destocking in July is a distress sale.

#The demand column comes from your LSU total

You built the input in Module 3: every animal on the place converted to large stock units — cattle by frame and stage, sheep on the Meissner class factors, horses, donkeys and resident game included. Turn that total into a daily appetite.

The standard is the intake-based LSU: a 450 kg animal gaining 500 g a day on 75 MJ, which works out to 9 kg of dry matter a day — exactly 2% of bodyweight (Jordaan et al. 2021). So the demand column is arithmetic:

Monthly demand (kg DM) = LSU total × 9 kg × days in the month

Two adjustments. Frame and stage move intake — the ARC puts a 450 kg small-frame cow with a calf at foot at 12 kg DM/day and a large-frame cow at the same weight at 15 kg DM/day (Mokolobate et al. 2017), so on lactating cows the flat 9 kg understates winter demand. And demand is not flat across the year: a herd calving in August is a different appetite in September than in May. That is the lever the second option below pulls on.

#The supply column comes from your veld type

Module 1 told you what veld you are standing on, and that determines how many months of the year your land feeds an animal without help.

Sourveld supplies adequate nutrition for about 5 to 7 months a year, and the same source records that "in some conditions, sourveld only supply enough nutrients for three months of the year". Sweetveld can be grazed year-round without loss of condition (Voermol).

On a sour farm the veld pays for 40 to 60% of the feed year and you fund the rest. Hence the rule: on sourveld you plan a fodder flow; on sweetveld you plan a drought reserve. On mixed veld, both.

For the quantity side, the most useful calculation in the course converts hectares into days:

Grazing days = farm size (ha) ÷ grazing capacity (ha/LSU) × 365

That gives LSU-grazing-days — the currency the whole budget runs in, because it adds up across camps and months in a way hectares never do (Elsenburg).

#Worked: a hundred hectares on the Highveld

Take 100 ha of Grassland Biome veld at the departmental mean of 6 ha/LSU. Capacity is 100 ÷ 6 = 16.7 LSU. Elsenburg recommends running under the mapped figure, so say the farmer runs 15 LSU — eleven or twelve breeding cows with followers and a bull, converted honestly.

Annual demand is 15 × 365 = 5 475 LSU-days, or 49 275 kg of dry matter at 9 kg. The dormant window runs April to September, 183 days. Demand in it is 15 × 183 = 2 745 LSU-days, about 24 705 kg DM. Every kilogram has to come from standing hay, a deferred camp, bought roughage, or a decision to have fewer animals.

Supply into that window. Say the farmer defers 20 ha through the growing season and carries it as standing winter forage. Elsenburg's formula gives that block 20 ÷ 6 × 365 = 1 217 LSU-grazing-days, about 10 950 kg DM.

So the budget balances like this:

1 528 LSU-days is 102 days of the whole herd with nothing in front of it.

Now run it month by month, because an annual total has no date on it and a monthly balance does. Open the deferred block at 1 April with its 1 217 LSU-days and draw 15 LSU-days a day against it:

The block empties on about 21 June. From there to the first reliable green flush at the end of September is the same 102 days the annual sum gave — but now it has a date, and the date is what you act on. That is what the twelve-row page exists to produce.

Treat that as a ceiling, not a promise. The block's annual allocation is not all standing there on 1 April: hay weathers, frost and trampling take a share, and what is left is the 2–6% crude protein material from the first lesson. Even at a ceiling the answer is not close. This farm is short by about a third of a year, every year, in the same months, for reasons that have nothing to do with drought.

#Closing the gap, cheapest first

One fork decides everything else: is your shortfall a quality problem or a quantity problem?

If there is standing bulk and the animals are losing condition on it, the shortfall is quality, and lick is the answer — it restarts a rumen that already has feed in front of it. If the camps are bare, the shortfall is quantity, and lick answers nothing: you cannot supplement grass that is not there. Most farms have both in sequence. Budget them separately.

On the planted strip, do the arithmetic before the ploughing. Eragrostis curvula — the Highveld workhorse — yields 3 to 10 t DM/ha without added fertiliser under low rainfall, rising to 20–30 t/ha fertilised under irrigation (Feedipedia). Digitaria eriantha gives 12–18 t/ha under optimal conditions and 1.5–7 t/ha in the western summer-rainfall areas at 400–800 mm, seeded at 4–7 kg/ha (SA Grain).

Take Eragrostis conservatively, at 5 t/ha from the low half of its unfertilised range. Two hectares yields about 10 000 kg DM — roughly 1 111 LSU-days, against the 20 ha of deferred veld supplying 1 217. Two hectares of planted pasture does about what twenty hectares of Highveld veld does.

Two qualifications. The yield range is 3 to 10 — wide enough to change the answer threefold — and this course's research could not source South African provincial yields for Eragrostis at all, so a national extension figure is not a figure from your farm. And planting means ploughing, which violates the second regenerative principle outright. The defensible position is that a small, high-output block taking winter pressure off a large veld area can be net-positive for the veld — a context judgement, not a principle.

On bought roughage, this course will not print a bale price. Delivered fodder costs move with maize, diesel and distance. Get three delivered quotes and convert each to rand per kilogram of dry matter — not per bale, not per tonne as-fed. That conversion alone reorders most farmers' assumptions about which fodder is cheap.

#The one page you file

The artefact for this module is one page, filed where the veld condition survey and the grazing capacity polygon value already live.

Twelve rows, one per month. Four columns: LSU on the farm, demand in LSU-days, supply in LSU-days, balance. Write the month where the balance first goes negative at the top, because that is the month your feed year actually breaks — and it is almost never the month farmers say it is.

Fill it in with pencil, in February, with the rain gauge notebook and the Module 3 LSU total in front of you. Five of those pages side by side show whether the hole is getting bigger.

Keep it honest in one way: write the assumption next to every number. Which grazing capacity value, from where. Which intake figure. What you assumed the deferred block would hold on 1 April. The ARC warns that grazing capacity and the stocking rate a farmer believes he is running can differ by as much as 300% (Mokolobate et al. 2017). That gap opens because nobody wrote the assumptions down, so nobody could see which one had drifted.

Do the count this February. The next lesson turns the number it produces into the one decision most South African farms make too late.