A New Agro-Meteorological Simulation Model for Predicting Daily Grass Growth Rates Across Ireland

Grass growth rates and herbage yields depend on weather conditions, soil characteristics and grassland management and differ from year to year and from site to site. In the past, grass growth has been predicted using both mechanistic and statistical models. The accuracy of mechanistic models is commonly insufficient for practical application, while statistical models generally apply to one test site only (e.g. Han et al., 2003). In this paper a semi-empirical grass growth model is presented which is numerically accurate, but which can be applied to contrasting sites across Ireland at the same time