The participants in the Pure Graze Grazing Course 2021 are fanatical grazers. When they started in March there was some skepticism, but they went for it!
The participants follow the online course with a presentation, a power point and background information on PDF. The Whatsapp group, the interactive webinars and practical meetings are a valuable addition to this.
The aim of Pure Graze is to ensure that the participants are successful with their grazing.
At Pure Graze, successful means: That the participant has more money and time left over. Earn more, have more liquidity and have more free time.
There are considerable differences between the participants and their companies. This turns out to be a major advantage, because the basis of grazing is due to the variation in farms; plant growth and plant behavior.
Several participants have quite automated the business model, ranging from automatic feeding to robotic milking. Gradually, however, participants find out that for successful grazing, herd behavior is essential for good green fodder intake, which is essential for increasing the ETW (Own Added Value).
After all, the aim is to achieve the lowest possible cost price, which we achieve by removing links between cow and green fodder. At the same time, we also want to reduce the workload that we achieve by having the cows work for us and not us for the cows.
Some participants were made to think about this automation. Partly because it did not provide the labor relief they were counting on, but also because it leads to a higher cost price and hinders the flexibility of business operations, making cost reduction difficult to achieve.
Savings on concentrates have been realized by several participants; they are amazed at how much dairy cows can give from green fodder.
A saving of 5 kg/cow/day on concentrates appears to be easily achievable.
For 100 cows that is 500 kg/day, 3,500 kg/week, 182,000 kg/year X € 25.00/100 kg = € 45,500 savings per year on concentrates.
