An Economic Analysis of High-Intensity, Short-Duration Grazing Systems in South Dakota and Nebraska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Four different grazing systems: two rotational, a continuous, and a high-intensity, short-duration (mob) system, replicated twice, were evaluated from an economic perspective. Mob grazing is defined as a system having very high stocking rates for a small amount of time. Livestock are forced to eat or trample the vegetation. Stocking rates and average daily gains (ADG) were collected from the UNL Barta Brothers ranch near Rose, Nebraska. The study started in 2011 and lasted until 2014. Using the performance data and other cost data relevant to South Dakota and Nebraska, budgets were set up for each system and extrapolated to a quarter section (160) of rangeland. Profitability of each system, which was measured as returns to labor and management, was found for each replication. Next, Simetar© was used to determine the risk in each system and rank the systems according to risk preferences. These risk preferences were used to find a risk premium, the amount a producer would need to be indifferent between two systems. Finally, a sensitivity analysis ranked each system against a baseline when the system experiences decreases in cattle performance. Some important results are as follows: 1) the rotational grazing system in which cattle pass through each paddock twice (4-PR-2) had the highest returns to labor and management, 2) the mob grazing system was the least preferred system per acre when risk was not considered, 3) when risk aversion increases, mob grazing becomes the third xiii preferred system per acre, 4) a risk neutral producer would need a risk premium of $22.92-$79.84 per animal or $32.43-$132.96 an acre to switch to mob grazing, 5) if ADG decreases by 5% from the baseline system (4-PR-2) the continuous system is the most preferred system per animal and per acre. An implication of this study is that even though mob grazing was the least profitable system the potential for profitability was present. The system 4-PR-2, which had the next highest number of moves, had the greatest returns to labor and management. Therefore, a mob system could be profitable with adjustments to maintain animal performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".