Additional Information on Nutritional Monitoring

At the most basic level, nutritional monitoring to inform grazing, habitat, and or feeding management decisions involves determination of quantity and quality of available forage. Forage quantity (weight per unit area) and quality (nutrient concentration) can be obtained relatively easily by harvesting above ground standing crop samples representative of the pasture in question and then having these samples analyzed at one of the many reputable forage testing laboratories.

This method works reasonably well in monoculture pastures and or low diversity rangelands where animal diet selectivity is limited. Even so, depending on a variety of factors (notably stocking rate), grazing animals will still exhibit some level of attraction for new-live-leaf and thus select a higher quality diet than the average for available forage. In this case, “hand plucking” or sampling plant tissue for analysis that mimics the diet selected by resident grazing animals will yield a more accurate estimate of nutritional status. The method will also require more time and skill from the manager. Emerging remote sensing techniques may also be applied to estimate forage quantity and quality. Many of these tools are readily available at regional to local scales.

All of the aforementioned methods are useful in making informed grazing or nutritional management decisions; each has its advantages and disadvantages (Table 1).