Livestock Science | 2019
Intake, milk production and grazing behaviour responses of strip-grazing dairy goats to daily access time to pasture and to dehydrated lucerne supplementation
Abstract
Abstract The ability of grazing dairy goats to adapt to short daily access time to pasture is not well known, while, in practice, access time to pasture (AT) is often lower than 12\u202fh/d. A 3-week trial was carried out in spring with 36 Alpine dairy goats in mid-lactation to study the effect of a restriction of access time to pasture, coupled or not with a dehydrated lucerne supplement. Three treatments were compared: (1) 7\u202fh/d of access time to pasture, between milkings, without dehydrated lucerne (namely AT7); (2) 7\u202fh/d of access time to pasture, between milkings, with 371\u202fg DM/d of dehydrated lucerne, distributed individually after evening milking (namely AT7D); and (3) 11\u202fh/d of access time to pasture, 7\u202fh/d between milkings plus 4\u202fh/d after evening milking, without dehydrated lucerne (namely AT11). The daily pasture allowance was 2.3\u202fkg DM/goat at 4\u202fcm above ground level in each treatment. Each goat received 602\u202fg DM/d of a commercial concentrate, given twice daily at milking. Pasture intake decreased by 433\u202fg DM/d (i.e. 18%) between AT11 and AT7 (P 0.10). Milk production response to dehydrated lucerne was 0.82\u202fkg of milk/kg DM. Grazing time decreased by 2.5\u202fh/d between AT11 and AT7 or AT7D (P