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Animal Report - Dairy grass fed percentage

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With the launch of the MPI Grass-Fed Administrative Standards in June 2025 OverseerFM uses the terms of the MPI dairy and red meat standards to report on grass-fed status. 
The MPI standards are legally recognised administrative standards to give exporters and local brands a single, defensible definition of “grass-fed”, and OverseerFM can help demonstrate if farms are meeting the definitions.

The Dairy grass fed standard report provides an indication of whether or not the dairy enterprise of a farm meets the standard

The dairy grass-fed standard criteria

  • New Zealand Grass-Fed for dairy means that types of grass must make up, on average, at least 90% of the diets of dairy animals supplying the milk pool. The animals must also have access to pasture for at least 340 days of the year, for at least 8 hours per day. (A milk pool is the total volume of milk collected from a group of dairy farms, in this case, the farms operating under a particular scheme).
  • New Zealand Grass-Fed for an individual dairy farmer means at least 90% of the animal’s diet is grass-fed feed types, and they can graze outside at least 340 days a year. Grazing days are now clarified, against the number of days that the model has knowledge of the animals whereabouts e.g. in the example below, the herd is sent to a grazier for 3 months of the year over winter, and so additional data from the grazier would be required for this farm to meet the 340 days requirement. 

The percentages are then further broken down in to two tables:

The first table shows the monthly breakdown of the wet matter (WM) fed to the dairy enterprise from grass-fed compliant feed in kg WM and as a percentage of the total wet matter they were fed in each month.

Table 1: Source of grass-fed standard feed

The second table shows shows a monthly breakdown of the estimated time the dairy enterprise spent on non-milking structures in hours and as a percentage of the total hours in each month. This helps to understand the amount of time dairy enterprise animals have access to pasture by considering where they are when not milking and not on structures.

Model version 6.6.0 updated the calculations of grazing time when time on a wintering pad was defined. Previously, the time on a wintering pad was calculated as the hours outside milking less the hours grazing entered, so the milking time was subtracted from the time on the pad rather than from the time on pasture. The milking time also excluded the time cows spend on the lanes to and from the farm dairy, and it was subtracted all year, including the dry period. From v6.6.0 (Nov'26) the time on a wintering pad is 24 hours less the hours grazing entered, and the milking time, including lane time, is subtracted from the time on pasture only while the herd is lactating. 

Table 2: Understanding time on pasture

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