Example selection
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Pasture Selection Tool - Tutorial

How do I select a pasture

Using the tutorial example below you should get a sense of how to use the 'Pasture Selection Tool'. To introduce you to the selection tool and the various selection criteria and functions available to you, an example pasture selection scenario has been developed as a pasture selection tutorial.

Example pasture requirement

A farmer has a property near Moonie in the northern part of the Border Rivers district in Queensland. The farmer has cropped a particular paddock for the last 6 years and has started to see a noticeable run down in soil nitrogen. This has been a profitable cropping paddock in the past and his long term plans include future cropping on this paddock. In the short term he is seeking to rotate this paddock to a suitable pasture to help restore soil fertility but also provide a quality forage for his livestock operation as well.

The physical characteristics of this paddock and farm, and the management requirements can be summarised as:

Step-by-step guide to selecting the pasture

  1. Upon entering the 'Pasture Picker', select Queensland from the map of Australia and move to mouse over the NRM districts to reveal the 'Border Rivers' - click on the 'Border Rivers' district to load the 'Pasture Picker' tool:

  1. The screen below shows the result of selecting 'Border Rivers' from the previous screen. Note the 'Features Chosen' window showing the two choices you have made regarding the location of the property. At this stage the 'Pasture Picker' has calculated that 46 species (see entities remaining window) match the selection criteria of 'Queensland - Border Rivers'.

 

  1. The 'Features Available' window provides further selection criteria from which you can select to help determine the most appropriate pasture or forage for your system.
  2. Start at the top of the list and expand the 'Intended forage/pasture use' by clicking on the + symbol to the left of that Feature. Alternatively you could click on the button to expand all the selection criteria.
  3. In terms of the example pasture requirement above - select the criteria from the 'Intended forage/pasture use' called 'short term (2 years or less)':

  1. Click on 'Rainfall (average annual): range (mm) and enter 650, as specified by the example. Note: rainfall can be a single value or a range, e.g. 650-700

  1. Proceed to tick the other selection criteria that match the requirements outlined in the pasture example above:
  1. The 'Entities Remaining' window should have 3 species:

  1. We are not seeking 1 final species, this may never happen. However our intention is to match the selection criteria to our requirements as much as possible and use the final list of species as a good starting point for further field trials 'on-farm' or more research. It is important at this stage to examine closely the fact sheet of each remaining species for more detailed information. To open a fact sheet click on the fact sheet icon - associated with each species.

Some useful selection tool facilities

At any stage during the selection process you may wish to compare species to see how they differ in their 'scoring' from each other. This can be done by clicking on the first species for comparison, then while holding down the CTRL key click on the other species you wish to compare. With two or more species selected, click on the compare button:

Please note: This feature will be implemented soon.

Another useful feature is the 'Why discarded?' facility. If you want to discover why a particular species was discarded from the 'Entities remaining' list, select the discarded species in which you are interested and click on the 'Why discard' button:

In the case of the example pasture selection above, 'Lablab' is normally considered a suitable legume species to address fertility decline and provide a useful forage to livestock. By interrogating 'Lablab' through the 'Why discard button it shows that 'Lablab' has been rejected because it has been scored as an annual only:

More help with the selection tool

There are many more facilities available to help with your pasture selection making. Please consult the Lucid™ help guide to learn more about this powerful tool.