Lifting Production by oversowing with cereals
- [Tim Leeming ] Can everyone hear me? Right. Yeah, so just a bit of background on how this eventuated. A local farmer by the name of Rob Close had been doing a bit of cereal cropping into some existing phalaris pastures. With a lot of us as well know, supplementary feeds in the grazing system is one of our bigger costs. And not typically in our area are we a cropping area, we're in the northern part of Southwest Victoria, south of the Wimmera, we're undulating red gum country in about 600 mil rainfall zone. Sandy loam sort of soil types, so cropping, I would say, can be done quite well on well-drained country, but it's also quite risky in wet years. 2014 and 15 were really good examples of years where we had failed springs and sup feed sort of rises to the top as a major cost to our grazing businesses. And a lot of the group, my best full group, some of the guys had come home to pastures, that as Charlie DeFegely mentioned last night, some of the feed base has been let go a little bit. So a lot of guys had bought country, or had leased country or whatever, that was run down, but they also had some pastures that had a good base of perennial within them, and we were sort of looking a system where, can we put a cereal crop in there, can we clean up those pastures and preserve the phalaris? So that's how it sort of started. So as you can see here, this paddock for instance suffers from low fertility. It has got a good phalaris base in it. There's a number of annual weeds, grass weeds in there, you can see onion grass, and also there's silver grass and barley grass, so we can all probably relate to those type of pastures. And this particular paddock, and if you're gonna do any cropping in our area, we gotta make sure that it's pretty well-drained, otherwise it becomes a high-risk activity. So the purpose of the demonstrations were to, cropping into an existing pasture. We wanted to put some data and some numbers around all these demos. And we wanted to look at, okay can we clean the paddock up, can we actually get a bit of recovery in the phalaris and actually improve the health of those plants? Improve our ground cover. Can we still yield a decent crop off this system? And then later on, after the first year, we actually got some additional
funding through and EPDS through MLA to actually overlay some grazing on these trials as well, on these demos. So we also wanted to, with these trials, we wanted to analyse the livestock performance on these crops as well. So it was sort of like having your cake and eating it three times, that's what we were sort of hoping to do. Hands up in the room who's done any cereal cropping into perennial pastures, or phalaris pastures. Great. Who's grazed crops, cereal crops, in the row? Great. No worries, I'll hand over to Bindi.
- [Bindi Hunter] Thanks, Tim. Okay, so this just shows, the green here are the sites that were just sown, cereals sown into pasture, and then the orange were the sites that were actually grazed in winter. So we had two sites there in 2015, and three in 2016. Over the three years we ran the demonstration, we had three really challenging years. So this shows our growing season in 2014, and we were at decile one. And then 2015 growing season, much the same, decile one. And apparently this was the driest two consecutive years on record in this region. So we followed that up with 2016, highest rainfall on record. And so we did see quite a lot of waterlogging in that year, and our crop yields for some crop were affected as a result of that. So I've got some photos just to show you what it looked like, what the system looked like and what we did. This is Tim's site in May, just prior to sowing. And this is our chemical regime, which was provided by Darren Scott, who's with SMS Rural, he's based in Horsham. We started with a spray type in the spring before, and then we kind of got a spray regime that pretty much took care of anything that had germinated and suppressed the phalaris. And then we sowed in May with 100 kilogrammes a hectare of quoll oats with 100 kilogrammes a hectare of MAP. This is the same site when it had established. And here we are, the same paddock, in July. And in July we generally did a post-emergence spray just to get rid of any cape weed and onion weed, and broad leaves that were there. Although last year a few of the sites were too wet to get onto with the post-emergent. And this is the same paddock, just in November 2014. And you can see all these beautiful phalaris heads cracking their head out through the crop. Here were are post-harvest in 2014, the same paddock again. And then by March we were starting to see the phalaris coming back. And here's that same paddock, a photo taken last week. Tim's paddock. And it just had a really solid phalaris base. And Tim was carrying 20 DSC per hectare through winter on that pasture. So this shows our expenses, our costs over those three years, which came in around $300 a hectare, and that includes our operating, chemical, seed and fertiliser. And the benefits that we started to see, just purely from sowing those cereals into perennial pasture were that it was great. We ended up with much cleaner pastures, we got rid of onion weed where it was a problem, got rid of our broad leaves and annual weeds as well. And this is one site, this is a photo just after it was established. And this particular paddock was a sea of onion weed. And it did have a reasonable philaris base, though. And here it is at the end of October last year, and you can see it's just a much cleaner, and it's a very productive phalaris pasture now. So what happened to our phalaris? Well we did find that there was a slight reduction in plants. This shows before the crop went in, and then roughly a year later. And we did find that there were slightly fewer plants, and we feel that was probably a result of the impact of sowing and using tines. And the group felt that perhaps to do it again, they'd probably rather use discs to try and alleviate that problem. But we also found, this shows our ground cover, we also found that the plants that were there were bigger. And they'd tillered, and there were shoots coming from the crown. Yeah, so despite the fact that there were fewer plants, what was there was bigger and we had a larger ground cover of phalaris as a result. We did find though, that anything, the group felt, anything, pretty much, under 10% ground cover to begin with perhaps wasn't worth doing, it was too gappy, and once the crop was yielded there was just not enough phalaris there to make it worthwhile. So this shows our yields over the three years. And it ranged pretty much from two to 5 1/2 tonnes per hectare. The 2014 and 15 dry years, we averaged 2.6 tonnes. And our wet year last year we averaged 3.6. But this was highly variable in this year across paddocks. I know one producer said his range was sort of from nought to seven tonnes a hectare, just as a result of the waterlogging.
- [Audience Member] Sorry, just the ones that have yielded, were they grazed at all, as well, in addition to yield?
- Bindi] They were grazed after, no. No. No actually, a couple of the them were, these two were, actually, they were grazed. But the other point is that these ones that were grazed here, the producer didn't feel it was worth taking them to harvest so they grazed them. And someone else cut them for silage, and found that was a really productive use of his crop. So just the value from cropping into pasture alone, without including that grazing, ranged between $126 and $404 per hectare. And in 2016 we had our highest yield with 3.6, but the price of oats brought our profit per hectare down. So on top of that, we thought it was a really valuable, there were other values that were perhaps difficult to put a price on. And you know, there's great flexibility in this system. It's sown, there's a pasture at the end of it. So whether you cut it for hay silage, graze it or harvest it, you've got all those options, but at the end there's still a pasture, and it was a cleaner pasture. And then there's also the benefit of grazing stubbles too.
- [Tim Leeming] Right, thanks Bindi. So, as mentioned before, we got some additional funding to analyse some livestock performance on grazing these crops as well. So these first year we were probably being a bit too smart for our own good, and we thought we'd use twin-bearing pregnant ewes, thinking that they were probably the class of livestock that probably needed the most feed at that time of the year. The trouble with that is, is the cost around, these are demonstration sites, they have a limited amount of money and resources, but we did our best in that first year by comparing the ewes that grazed the crops as opposed to the ones that grazed pasture. And we analysed, this is some feed test data off the crops. So you can see there that it's an enormous amount of energy in some of the quality measurements that we got off the crop. And we tagged at birth the lambs that came off those ewes. So the ones that had two weeks on a crop were slightly heavier than the ones that were on a pasture. And that makes a fair bit of sense to probably most of you, he highly-available and the super high-quality feed. So we had some real positives come out of that. Two weeks. So as you know, in the last three or four weeks, a lot of birth weight goes into foetuses, and that was our sort of idea behind that. The trouble is, it costs a lot of money to be running around tagging lambs, and time and stuff. So in the second year, I'll hand over to Bindi, but this is the yield data off that first year. As you can see there, the crops that were grazed, and the ones that weren't grazed, there was basically no difference in this site. The difference in this site is actually a tree line, that was, as you can remember, 2015 was a failed spring. We had a tree line along the road next to this grazed area there. And that had a detrimental impact on the plants because it sucked the moisture out of the crop. In the areas further back off the road, you can see there was actually no difference at all, so it was very similar to those areas there.
- [Bindi Hunter] We've got just five minutes, so I'll speak quickly. In the 2016 year we decided to simplify things, so we just grazed with dry stock. And we had three sites. Two we grazed with 10-month-old ewe lambs for 21 days. And one we grazed with one-year-old bulls for 21 days. And we compared one hectare of crop to one hectare of pasture at the same stocking rate, and we measured our live weight gains, and we looked at the value and production of the crop and pasture. And then we once again looked at the impact that grazing had on our yield. So here's a photo of the pasture at the top that was grazed, compared to the crop at the bottom. Three different sites. Three site, the pasture wasn't great at the top, but the green paddock was kind of representing the plot they would be using for that stock type. We've got pre-grazing crop in the top left hand corner. Post-grazing, in August. Then we've got an equivalent ungrazed area in August. And here, this line has, we've got the grazed site here, the ungrazed site here. There's very little visual difference by October between the grazed and ungrazed sites. Our feed production and quality, once again our crop was better than pasture. It wasn't quite as good as it had been the year before, could be something to do with waterlogging. But we also had these massive crop growth rates that we measured that year compared to pasture. So that kind of combination of really good quality and a lot of quantity gave us these massive growth rates for our ewe lambs. So 414 grams per day in the middle of winter for 21 days, compared to 155 or 121 grams on pasture at the same time. And that equated to, when we used the August trade lamb price, that equated to an extra $222 a head, or $153 a head, over those 21 days, for the crop compared to the pasture.
- [Tim] A hectare.
- [Bindi] Per hectare. What did I say? Head. Sorry. It was the last slide, I didn't change it.
- [Tim] Really good shape, yeah.
- [Bindi] Bulls, we had a massive difference in growth rates. So 2.3 kilos a day on crop compared to 420 grams on that not-very-good-quality pasture.
- [Tim] And just to put that in perspective, last year was the wettest winter on record. And you know, feed was at a premium. We had a massive feed deficit because of the waterlogging. And that should get, those couple of last graphs there, should get a lot of people very excited. We were excited.
- [Bindi] We had low stocking rates because of that waterlogging too.
- [Tim] Yeah, we could've run a lot more bulls and a lot more lambs per hectare, it was just that we were rotten wet. So we're still getting 60 kilos of growth off the crops. And we thought we were getting about 10 to 12 kilos off of pasture at that time. So very exciting.
- [Bindi] So that worked out an extra $209 per bull, or $605 per hectare, crop over pasture, for those 21 days. Our yields were higher than the previous year, but there was a bigger difference between them. And like 1.26 tonnes per hectare difference in yield. And we put that down to the fact that it was waterlogged, and we had less leak area to use up some of that water, A, and B we'd sown earlier, and we'd grazed a bit too late, and we felt we probably cut into, we should've had our stock on by growth stage 30, and we were perhaps more like growth stage 31, and that was detrimental to our yields. And our yields came out ungrazed, $151 on average higher than our grazed, as a result of that. But by the time we added our value from the livestock growth, we ended up $200 a head on those grazed sites. So that was good. And this is with our establishment costs taken off, this is our income per hectare. Back to Tim.
- [Tim] So, sort of weighing it all up, putting it all together, and as Bindi pointed out before, bloody hard when you get two of the driest years in succession that we've ever had, and then get the wettest winter we've ever had. We had some fantastic opportunities to get some thumping good yields in 2014 and 2015, when it's mild winters, and then last year, well you know, last year we were down to two-wheel motorbikes getting around last year. So it makes it bloody difficult to get some averages. But one of the things that we were really happy about was the fact that we could get, we think, anywhere between 80 and 90% of yield potential. So a number of our sites had traditional cropping, either next door or on the paddock across the road, where it was total spray out, and then normal procedures with growing a crop. And comparing yields from what we were doing to our phalaris pastures, as opposed to a total spray out of everything there, we were getting 80 to 90, even 100% of that yield. So that was exciting. As far as your pasture improvement, it was really super beneficial. If you've got a run-down pasture, and you got onion weed and you got annual grasses in there, fantastic way of growing a crop, harvesting some grain off it, and clearing out a lot of those annual weeds and giving that phalaris a year off. So we definitely did see improvement in the plants that remained. As Bindi said there was a bit of plant reduction. If we had coulter tines or a disc equipment, I reckon we'd be a lot better, we were using knife points, and were just ripping the odd plant out of the ground. So if we could cut those plants in half, it would be a hell of a lot better, and we would think it would get virtually no plant count reduction. The meat value, putting that grazing overlay on top of that crop, it's just like the icing on the cake. And yeah, we were just absolutely blown away about some of the animal performance that we were getting in such a short period of time. And you know, as a lot of you that have been involved in grain and graze, if you use big numbers, in there for a short period of time, and you know, you can do a rotation around various crops around the farm, there's some really good benefit in utilising that growth of that cereal crop, but also actually taking, getting the benefit of getting your stock off existing pasture, so you can actually give them a spell and grow a bit of feedback in them as well. So some of the considerations. Make sure that, you know, as Bindi said there before, we wanna make, you know if your phalaris plant counts are really low, well maybe you're better off just spraying it out and putting a new phalaris pasture in there. But if you've got a pretty good core of plants, this is a great system. If you've got annual grasses that have encroached into those phalaris-based pastures, it's a great system to clear those out as well. If you can buy cereal grain for $100 a tonne, like we have in the last 12 months, we probably wouldn't put a crop in, that's the simple realities. But when it's 250, or $300 a tonne, it becomes attractive again. So yeah, and making sure that crop variety, you've got that ability, you know things like echidna oats, we wouldn't use echidna oats because we haven't got that flexibility to graze it. So something like quoll, or whatever, just had that little bit more potential to graze it as well. So we don't have to kill the pasture to grow the crop. We can use it for cleaning out the pasture of annuals, increasing the perennial plant size. Make sure you consider the plant count of your phalaris in the first place. It's good at maintaining that ground cover and increasing ground cover in those phalaris plants.
Grazing the crop is important, we found. Often having too much stubble trash in the paddock can actually deny your winter growth in that pasture the subsequent year, if you've got too much trash lying on the ground. So actually grazing it, and reducing that stubble trash, was actually quite a beneficial thing to do as well. And the feed quality, as you all saw before on previous slides, was exceptional. And the growth stage, you know, you must adhere to grain and graze principles doing this. We got greedy, and I think the fact it was so bloody wet, and we had to wait a little bit longer, and we had a pretty good start to the season, so we sowed early, grazed a little bit late, and that had a bit of an impact, we think, plus the waterlogging. And you know damn well that you're gonna hit peak prices in your livestock in winter, and to have the ability to actually slam that sort of weight on is incredible, I reckon. So that's really exciting. Where to next? We're doing some trials at the moment. Not funded, mind you, it's just within the group. You know, cereals for us, I reckon is a really good valuable tool. We're doing some stuff using a variety of annuals. But using cereals just to get that bit more horsepower and growth in winter, bloody valuable in a grazing operation and we're pretty excited about using more and more cereals. So thanks very much.