Abstract
Crop-livestock mixed farming systems depend on the efficiency with which nutrients are conserved and recycled. Home-grown forage is used as animal feed and animal excretions are applied to cultivated crop lands as manure. The objective of this study was to develop a mixed farming system model for dairy cattle in Japan The model consisted of four sub-models: the nutrient requirement model, based on the Japanese Feeding Standards to determine requirements for energy, crude protein, dry matter intake, calcium, phosphorus and vitamin A; the optimum diet formulation model for determining the optimum diets that satisfy nutrient requirements at lowest cost, using linear programming; the herd dynamic model to calculate the numbers of cows in each reproductive cycle; and the whole farm optimization model to evaluate whole farm management from economic and environmental viewpoints and to optimize strategies for the target farm or system. To examine the model's validity, its predictions were compared against best practices for dairy farm management. Sensitivity analyses indicated that higher yielding cows lead to better economic results but higher emvironmental load in dairy cattle systems integrated with forage crop production.
Highlights
Production, crop production, feeding and the handling of manure is needed to properly evaluate dairy producer’s
Animal excretions and promoting their use as manure were has been used to determine least-cost rations and optimal completely implemented in November, 2005
Computer simulation popular means to address the problem of nutrient imbalance. with environmental-economic models at the farm level
Summary
Production, crop production, feeding and the handling of manure is needed to properly evaluate dairy producer’s. Normative modeling limited amounts of land have intensified dairy production in approach at farm level is one way to determine the effects the past several decades. This trend has created imbalances of management measures on the environment (Berentsen of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) and serious and Tiessink, 2003). Production performance (Berentsen and Giesen, 1995; dairy farmers face a new challenge: to simultaneously Berentsen, 1999; Herrero et al, 1999; Rotz et al, 1999a; increase economic efficiency and decrease environmental Thornton and Herrero, 2001; Van Calker et al, 2004).
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