Скачать или смотреть What AMP grazing does

We are glad folks are studying grazing with their goals and metrics. Just don’t call a method AMP grazing when it is not AMP grazing as defined in the literature.

Adaptive Multi-paddock (AMP) Grazing definition:
Mosier et al, Journal of Environmental Management 288 (2021) 112409
"AMP involves using multiple fenced paddocks, which are grazed for short periods (hours to days, depending on the season), during which plant consumption is monitored (aimed to leave ~50% forage uneaten), followed by an adequate time of recovery after grazing to allow vegetation regrowth (Teague et al., 2013). AMP grazing management adjusts livestock numbers to not exceed available forage and to avoid overstocking and overgrazing. Additionally, AMP practitioners seek to minimize the use of external inputs (i.e., fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides)."

Unfortunately, concurrent to our publishing our results (13 papers to date), there are some research groups that have misappropriated the term AMP.

To be truly adaptive, you must constantly observe the conditions of your land and adjust the rotation frequency and paddock sizes to meet the needs of your livestock. Set-sized paddocks that stay unchanged throughout the study period, no matter what the forage production is, coupled with prescriptive grazing strategies, fail to capture the full benefits of adaptive grazing. These more prescriptive and less adaptive grazing methods will produce underwhelming results - and to say those results are the product of AMP grazing is just not accurate.

When research groups call their research AMP, when it isn’t AMP, they muddy the waters. Their results reflect their research design and have nothing to do with AMP. Their study lacks the full suite of adaptive methods the farmers in our study practice - methods we have observed and measured in our peer-reviewed research.

For an example, see: https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles...

In other words, we support your science. But if you’re not studying AMP, please don’t call it AMP.

We’d love to have conversations with these groups - and to learn from the practices they’ve experimented with. But for science, clarity comes first.