Some considerations about grazing areas in livestock systems
(Edited)
The lack of planning in the management that is carried out for the production of pastures, negatively affects the productive process within the livestock agroecosystem, even more considering what was proposed by Tobias (2010), who indicates that a determining factor for animal production is the scarce availability and poor quality of forage phytomass, which varies with the distribution of rainfall. It is important to note that producers do not consider grass as a crop and therefore do not adopt practices that make it sustainable.
Faced with this situation, biological factors have become important criteria to assess the management of resources, in such a way that the need is created to orient agricultural production towards new technologies based on the recovery of soils through agroecological management, the use of forage species of high nutritional value, reduce the use of agrotoxins, among others; which translates, according to Vallejo (2013), into an increase in biodiversity to ensure greater stability of the agroecosystem, and thus improve productivity.
In some production units the production of forage biomass is based on the planting of monoculture of grasses with conventional management, so it is necessary to promote a change, implementing agroecological practices that allow diversifying plant species to obtain sustainable production without compromising environmental resources such as water, soil and biodiversity. All this is due to the fact that agricultural ecosystems are natural systems transformed by man, to obtain mainly food.
In the same vein, the limitations of forage biomass of pasture monocultures in some production units are due to poor management and use of pastures, particularly as indicated by Faria (2006), that the lack of control of the animal load, can cause problems of under or overgrazing, high populations of Arvenses and little persistence of the vegetable resource in the paddocks, which generates losses in production and therefore economic. In this sense, the production of grazing animals depends, as mentioned by Chacón and Marchena (2008), largely on the rational practices used; therefore, they should have as their main objective to achieve a balance between the growth rate of grass, its nutritional value, the efficiency of use or harvest and consumption of the animal.
This situation does not escape certain production units of the tropics such as the south of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela which is a livestock area par excellence and which demands the use of fodder for animal feed as its main food source, so it depends on the availability and the quality that they present to achieve adequate nutrition of the herd, in these systems the cattle herds are managed double purposes with a tendency to milk, and the availability and supply of forage species found in agroecosystems are unknown, causing low productive yields or high costs if concentrated commercial feeds are used.
All of the aforementioned has generated new agricultural paradigms based on sustainable development where all aspects of an integral nature must be considered, from a social, productive and economic point of view, without ignoring any link in the search for well-being; as indicated by the Tropical Agronomic Research and Teaching Center CATIE (2010) the first steps to carry out a production unit planning, the area of action must be identified, the agroecological paradigm must be shared in search of obtaining healthy products, limitations, potentialities and opportunities must be identified.
Finally, dear readers, it is necessary to mention that changes in current production patterns using technologies that lead to sustainability, as well as using appropriate open and flexible technological arrangements instead of closed and inflexible technological packages can directly benefit the farm owner, by reducing production costs and increasing profitability and indirectly to neighboring producers, since, they can adopt appropriate and easy-to-apply technologies to increase production per animal unit and per unit area, and thus contribute to agri-food security.
| Bibliographic references |
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Tropical Agronomic Research and Teaching Center-CATIE, (2010). How to prepare a farm plan in a simple way?. Technical series-Technical Manual No. 96.
Chacón, E. and Marchena, H. (2008). Appropriate food technologies for production with pastured cattle. In González-Stagnagro C, Soto Belloso, Madrid Bury (Eds.) in: Sustainable Development of Dual-Purpose Livestock Farming. Maracaibo: Astro S.A.
Faria, J. (2006). Pasture and forage management in dual-purpose livestock farming. Memory of the X Seminar of Pastures and Forages. Maracaibo: University of Zulia - FCV.
Tobias, C. (2010). Protein and energy production in the farms dual purpose. Memories XVI workshop of ASODEGA 2010. (pp. 40-44) Mérida: Universidad de los Andes.
Vallejo, V. (2013). Importance and usefulness of soil quality assessment using the microbial component: experiences in silvopastoral systems. Revista Colombia forestal, 16 (1), 83-99.
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