SARIC Translation: Grassland Management

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Grassland is the dominant land use in the UK covering 12.4 million ha (71% of a total agricultural area). Grasslands and ruminants also have great importance to the UK economy. The value of the output (£8.2 billion) of the ruminant sector (dairy and beef cattle and sheep) is the largest in UK agriculture being substantially greater than the arable (£3.5 billion), the fruit and vegetable (£4.5 billion) and the combined pig and poultry sectors (£4.2 billion). UK grassland provides approximately 70% of the 42 million tonnes of forage dry matter consumed by UK ruminants. Hence improving UK grassland managers' systematic understanding of how daily grass growth responds to a changing climate and economic environment is critical in determining the future efficiency, resilience and profitability of the UK livestock sector. This research translation project, undertaken with the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Innovation Club (SARIC) will translate a newly validated ESPRC UK process-based model of grass growth, termed here as the "Rothamsted grass model", (Qi et al., 2017) to create an adaptable decision-support and learning tool through co-design and innovative workshops with end-users. The aim of the project is to translate, co-design and use a decision support and learning tool to improve the profitability and sustainability of how current and future UK farmers manage their grassland. It has four objectives:1. To develop the tool with the support of the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Innovation Club2. To translate, and debug, the recently validated Rothamsted UK grass-growth model (Qi et al., 2017) into an open spreadsheet format to enable multi-functional and widespread use on farms.3. To co-design the layout of a decision support and learning tool, using the model, with selected end-users to improve the grassland management of current and future land managers.4. To develop current and future farmers' adaptive capacity to use the model using innovative social science methods.The project will translate an open already-validated UK process-based model of grass growth (the Rothamsted grass model) in the format of a spreadsheet tool that can be linked to existing arable crop and financial modules. The planned impact of the project is to improve the use of grass on farms to increase profits and to minimise waste, to encourage systematic thinking to enthuse future grass managers, to provide a means of bench-marking grass productivity on farms, and to provide a tool which also potentially allows assessment of other ecosystem services provided by grassland.