Pasture Management for Sustainable Forage Production

In the livestock management grazing was the major feed resources in the past and even today a significant portion of livestock is being sustained on grazing resources from pastures and other grazing lands like forest, fallow lands, cultivable waste lands etc. During the last few decades ever increasing livestock population has created enormous grazing pressure on pasture resources leading to deterioration and destruction of pastures. This has led to the urgent need of improvement of pastures as well as judicious implementation of grazing management practices. There has been certain constraints on pasture development which include fragmentation and degradation of the pastures over the common land including forest contributing around 280 million tonnes of forage annually (Anon, 2007), diversion of non-demarcated grazing land to other land uses, transfer of land for development purposes, allocation of land to landless, bringing more land under irrigated crop production and invasion of pastures/grazing lands by weeds/alien species like Lantana camara, Parthenium hysterophorus, Eupatorium odoratum, Prosopis juliflora, Leucaena leucocephala severely affecting quality and productivity of pastures