USDA-NRCS · PACIFIC ISLANDS AREA
A Prescribed Grazing (Conservation Practice Standard 528) planning tool for the Pacific Islands. It balances the forage a property can grow against the forage a herd needs, month by month — then turns that balance into a stocking rate, a rotational schedule, and the signable NRCS plan.
This is a faithful, transparent rebuild of the Excel workbook 528_PI_IR_Grazing_Management_2026.xlsm — every input, formula, lookup table, chart, form, and help note preserved, organized so the logic is easy to follow.
For each month (Jan–Dec) and each management track (grazing system, alternative pasture, dry lot):
\[ \textbf{Supply}(m) = \sum_{\text{paddocks}} \text{Acres} \times \text{Yield}_{\text{lb/ac}} \times \text{Eff}\% \times \text{Growth}\%(\text{species}, m) \] \[ \textbf{Demand}(m) = \sum_{\text{classes}} \text{Head} \times \text{Weight} \times \text{Intake}\% \times \text{days}(m) \times \text{seasonality} \]
The month-by-month Difference and Accumulated balance drive everything downstream: hay reconciliation, carrying capacity, the rotational time-control schedule, and the 528 Implementation Requirement. The guiding rule is “Take Half, Leave Half” — only 50% of total forage production is considered available for grazing.
Reading convention. Throughout the app, a yellow chip marks a value the planner enters; everything else is computed or looked up — exactly as the workbook colors its editable cells. Where useful, a small grey note records the originating workbook sheet/cell so the supervisor can trace any number back to the spreadsheet.
The geography spans Hawai‘i, Guam, American Samoa, CNMI, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and Palau. Explore the underlying databases on the Reference Data & Maps page.