PASTURE GROWTH RATE

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28133, 23 November 1956, Page 7

PASTURE GROWTH RATE

ANALYSIS MADE BY D.S.I.R. Members of the staff of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research have completed an analysis of pasture records as part of a project to explore the better use of pasture. The analvsis gave an economical method of arriving at the rate at which short-rotation ryegrass and red and white clover grow between grazings. The problem was to get a full understanding of the rate of pasture growth between grazings allowing for the temporary effects of fluctuation in the weather in relation to the main growth curves. One very costly and timeconsuming method would have been trials that gave an average over a great many different seasons by which the effects of fluctuations would have been eliminated. Instead, however a mathematician, working in conjunction with a biologist, was able to get results in one season, and this not only gave a clear picture of the rate of growth when undisturbed by weather conditions but showed in detail how the weather fluctuations affected the growth curves The additional value of this work is that it provides possibilities of correlating these changes of growth with specific climatic records —such as rainfall and air temperatures—and gives the relative importance of the factors The method was developed for this particular experiment, but the solution was sufficiently general to apply to many other similiar cases, and is capable of extension to more complicated problems.