Stocking
Livestock (short stocking ) or nicks (short Bestoß ) is an agricultural - ecological measure of the number of animals in relation to the technology used to these animals agricultural land , on which for example their food is produced.
To the subject
The livestock stock can refer to pastures and alpine pastures , but also to meadows and fields, provided that feed is advertised there for the cattle or the excrement is spread in the form of excrement and urine or manure (solid manure ) or liquid manure (liquid manure ). The livestock stocking is usually given in livestock units per hectare (GV / ha), which comparatively corresponds to live weight per hectare depending on the species (kg / ha).
The livestock is the most important measure of the intensity of livestock: For authentic local-regional high stocking is called intensive , with a low of extensive livestock farming .
Conversely, stocking is also a measure of the productivity of the usable area; the higher the soil yield , the higher the stocking can be. The value is therefore particularly relevant for business planning purposes, it shows how much cattle an agricultural enterprise can feed with its area, or how much feed has to be bought.
The value is thus also an ecological landscape planning criterion for sustainability : The pollution of the area by grazing animals is referred to as grazing pressure . Excessive livestock in relation to crop yield (including self- grazing ) can lead to overgrazing or eutrophication (overfertilization); too low for reforestation through undergrazing, and thus qualitative degradation (from the point of view of performance) or renaturation (from the point of view of ecology).
This makes the stocking the most important indicator of the intensity of use of the available area on an agricultural holding and the basis for many guidelines in agricultural policy . In forestry and nature conservation , you need the key figure of the stocking, for example to estimate the degree of browsing / damage to forest cultures or natural flora , to quantify the nutrient inputs and outputs and their balance and to determine usage restrictions.
units
The height of the cattle shoot was traditionally given in Central Europe in puffs . This unit of measurement has now been replaced by the livestock unit .
Push
The shock is a cattle unit of the cattle stocking in the Alps . For each alp / alp, it is specified with how much impact (Swiss impact ) it can be grazed (impacted) ; a cow corresponds to one pile, 3 cattle have 2 piles, a calf ¼ piles, a horse of 1, 2 or 3 years comes 1, 2 or 3 piles, a pig corresponds ¼, a goat or sheep ⅕ pound.
In Switzerland, a normal shock is defined as one livestock unit that is summered for 100 days. There are corresponding conversions for small livestock. Depending on the quality of the alp / alp, the full range is between 1/2 ha and 2 ha.
The thrust is divided into feet . A full push equals the needs of a cow, four feet. Cattle, calves, etc. are a fraction of that; B. a one-year-old cattle by two feet.
Livestock unit
A livestock unit (GV or GVE) serves as a conversion key to compare different livestock on the basis of their live weight. A livestock unit corresponds to 500 kilograms (about as much as an adult cattle). In the wild, it does not include small wild animals such as amphibians and insects, but game (forestry and hunting).
Examples are:
- Calf 50-100 kg = 0.1-0.2 GV
- young dairy cow 450-650 kg = 0.9-1.3 GV
- Dairy cow = 1 LU
- Horse = 0.8-1.5 GV
- Boar = 0.3 GV
- Finisher = 0.16 GV
- Piglets = 0.01-0.04 GV
- Sheep = 0.1 GV
- 100 chickens = 0.8-1 GW
- 320 laying hens = 1 GV
A more precise definition is the roughage consuming cattle unit (RGV), it corrects this value by the demands of an animal species and the direct near-natural food supply (fiber-rich roughage ) without concentrated feed .
The tropical livestock unit (in English Tropical Livestock Unit , TLU) estimates of 250 kg live weight.
Aquaculture and hunting
The following are structured in the same way:
- In fisheries, fish stock denotes the stock of fish in a body of water
- Game stock is what hunting calls the game population in a territory
Cattle stocking in relation to economic forms
| country | GV per 100 ha |
|---|---|
| Netherlands | 382 |
| Belgium | 319 |
| Denmark | 161 |
| Ireland | 158 |
| Luxembourg | 137 |
| Germany | 110 |
| Great Britain | 102 |
| EU | 90 |
| France | 84 |
| Austria | 82 |
| Italy | 71 |
| Sweden | 67 |
| Greece | 65 |
| Portugal | 61 |
| Finland | 61 |
| Spain | 44 |
Intensive agriculture
The key figure GV is required to calculate storage capacities (feed, slurry, manure). According to EU law, farms have to reserve a certain area and certain storage capacities in order to distribute manure, liquid manure and slurry as fertilizer more evenly and not have to spread it in the autumn and winter months ( slurry ordinance ). This is said to reduce over-fertilization and the leaching of nutrients (N, P, K). The key figure GV can be applied to the entire agriculturally used area (UAA). In conventional agriculture, a livestock stock of 2.0 GV / ha UAA is already considered extensive or average. Depending on the farm structure, this can mean that the number of livestock on the acreage for fodder can rise to 5 to 10 GV / ha.
Industrial companies, e.g. B. pig fattening and chicken farmers were even higher in the past. This has now been prevented by political instruments, as the eutrophication of soils and water had assumed dramatic proportions. There is a risk that manure will add more nutrients to the cultivated area in Europe than is withdrawn from it, because these farms also use purchased “ concentrate ” to feed nutrients that are withdrawn from the soil in other places, including on other continents.
Stocking of cattle in extensive agriculture
If you take the standards of ecology and nature conservation as a basis, you can of course only calculate the area on which "a livestock unit" actually feeds, i.e. the forage area actually used.
In alpine farming , the traditional unit of measurement is the impact , which converts the unit of livestock to the summer pasture area, with cow law as the unit of measurement for the area (in the Alps a little over 1 hectare, varies greatly depending on altitude and climate), so that the population is generally well below 1 GV / ha lies. The share of the UAA in the total alpine pasture / alpine area can also be well below 10% in regions.
In biodynamic agriculture and farms operating according to the principles of anthroposophy, a maximum value of 1 to 1.5 (2.0) GV / ha is assumed, which is 0.5 to 0.8 GV / ha depending on the farm structure LF can mean.
Forestry, nature conservation, ecology
An average grassland site of 1 ha, with 30 to 50 ground points (dimension of the natural productive capacity ; → Empire soil evaluation ) can roughly one cow feed a year without the site by Nährstoffabtrag (leaching and extraction for human use) impoverished eutrophic or by nutrient inputs, not acidic and its natural productivity is retained. 1 GV / ha is assumed as a natural guide value in Central Europe. Local location factors , summarized in the number of grasslands , such as microclimate , water flow, etc., can make corrections necessary both upwards (usually up to 2 GV / ha) and downwards (up to 0.5 GV / ha or less in extreme locations) .
The livestock population of 1 GV / ha also means that the consumption of herbivores is so high that forest cover is no longer possible. In connection with various ecological theories, e.g. B. the megaherbivore hypothesis and the mosaic cycle theory , it can be assumed that a population of 0.3 GV / ha of wild animals (depending on the species composition) prevents complete dense forest cover; this is at least an "alarm value" for forestry.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Glossary . ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Casalp.
- ^ Tropical Livestock Units (TLU) . Paper about livestock units from Livestock and Environment Toolbox. FAO (on fao.org).
- ↑ P. Chilonda, J. Otte: Indicators to monitor trends in livestock production at national, regional and international levels. In: Livestock Research for Rural Development 18 (8), 2006, Article # 117 (on lrrd.org).
- ↑ stocking, conceptual subdivision . duden.de
- ↑ top agrar 11/2001, onA
