Doing the pasture renewal basics well

Date: 2011-05-18 | Category: Sheep & Beef News

Te Hape manager John Valler in a crop of plantain that has helped lambs and ewes achieve good liveweight gains.

A two-year cropping project in the King Country has been running to help lift local forage production and animal productivity.

Run by PGG Wrightson, the project is based on a 12.5ha “farmlet” borrowed from Te Hape Station – a 3200ha (effective Maori-owned hill-country farm near Benneydale, southeast of Te Kuiti. The Te Hape Farm Systems Demonstration was established in March, 2010, and some of the early results from the project were discussed at a recent field day.

The farmlet has been planted with a range of different annual grasses, herbs and brassicas and is stocked with sheep and cattle from Te Hape.

PGG Wrightson national manager agronomy and crop protection Matt Strahan said the aim was to demonstrate new forages and crop management techniques. The site had been fenced into five equal-size paddocks, each of which has been sown with crops that include rape, annual and perennial ryegrasses, kale, leaf turnips and plantain.

Livestock provided by Te Hape is weighed on and off the farmlet so that key animal performance indicators, including ewe conception rates and lamb liveweight gain, could be measured.

Strahan said soil tests were conducted before the project began and fertiliser was applied to bring fertility of the pumice soils “closer to optimum levels”.

“Significant” capital fertiliser was required to lift Olsen-P levels closer to the optimum of 35 while also improving trace element levels.

Lime was applied at three to 4t/ha and fertiliser dressings included 700kg/ha of Superten and 300kg/ha Potash. About 30kg/ha of Boron was also applied. Old pastures were sprayed out in mid- March, 2010, and the paddocks were cultivated and sown according to a forage cropping plan.

PGW national manager farm systems Andrew Maw said a feed budget was also developed and the initial target for the first year was to grow 10.9t DM/ha across all crops and achieve 80% utilisation (7.6t DM/ha).

Total crop production was to be measured last month, enabling the financial performance of each crop to be compared.

Maw said the farmlet was originally stocked with 65 randomly selected Romney-cross Te Hape ewes. “It’s only a small number, but we wanted a closed system. We went for a low stocking rate at the get-go and used ‘trading’ stock to control feed.”

The ewes entered the farmlet after mating, so the project had no impact on their reproductive performance in the first year.

They pregnancy scanned at 169% and lambed at 126% (survival to weaning). Significantly, the ewes gained 8.8kg LW in the 10 months since they entered the demonstration site.

Maw said this gain was not completely unexpected “because it is not uncommon for ewes to put on weight if the feed is put in front of them”.

As a result of this extra size, an increase in lambing performance was expected next year.

The farmlet was grazed with several other classes of stock, including 100 tailend ram hoggets and 25 rising-two-year steers. The ram hoggets arrived on the block on September 10 at an average of 38.5kg liveweight (LW). They were sold to the works on November 1 at 48.5kg LW. The R2 steers were transferred to the farmlet on October 13 at 308kg LW and left the block on November 18 at 368kg LW – achieving an average gain of 1.7kg LW/day.

Another 100 steers and up to 1300 wet-dry ewes were also brought on to the farmlet briefly in mid-November to clean up excess feed before sowing of summer forage crops.

Maw said 58,000kg of drymatter was consumed by all stock classes over the year. This equated to 4662kg DM/ha. Feed utilisation was estimated at 70% at an MJME (megajoules of metabolisable energy) of 10.5.

Feed utilisation was lower than expected due to the low initial stocking rate and the higher than expected growth of some of the winter crops: “We could have run more ewes in hindsight.” The aim this year is to increase ewe numbers to 110. Targeted crop production for year two is 14t DM/ha. Just like any farm, not everything went to plan during the cropping process. Strahan said some of the steeper faces shouldn’t have been cultivated on reflection, and spray drift was an issue with crops being so close to each other. Poor cultivation in one paddock also affected the establishment and subsequent yields of the rape crop.

The final seedbed was too cloddy and should have had one more pass – the lesson being not to skimp on cultivation work.

“The stocking rate also has to be finetuned.” Responding to a farmer comment that the experimental farmlet is not a true representation of a farming situation because no hill-country farm would be planted entirely in crop, Strahan said the intention was not to mimic a true farm situation.

Visitors to Te Hape Station inspect the 12.5ha experimental cropping farmlet.

Instead the aim was to provide crop management information that farmers could “pick bits out of to improve areas of their own farm”.

He emphasised the importance of doing the basics right when establishing and managing crops. Adequate cultivation and consolidation was crucial to establish a good seedbed. Crops should also be monitored for weeds and pests, and grazed carefully to maximise feed utilisation while avoiding overgrazing.

Regime benefits tail-end ewes

Lambs grazed on this plantain crop achieved an average liveweight gain of 260g/day in 96 days.

Early stock performance results from the Te Hape farmlet show lambs and ewes achieved good growth rates under an allcropping regime.

Ewes that went on to the block at an average of 63.1kg LW weighed an average of 71.9kg LW a year later. Despite this rapid increase in weight and the all-crop diet, there were no bearing problems at lambing.

Andrew Dowling, PGW national manager animal health, said the ewes couldn’t be described as fat, “they’ve just grown to what their true potential is”. Importantly, the lighter ewes in the mob had gained proportionally more weight than the heavier ewes and this had implications for better animal health and stock production.

“A well fed ewe is a better performer. Ewes with higher condition scores at tupping time have heavier lambs at docking and weaning.”

Dowling said ewes were generally in their worst condition at docking. “You’ve got to look after those tailenders and you should be aiming for a condition score of three at tupping.” Lambs on the experimental block were grazed mostly on plantain. They averaged 30kg LW at 96 days – an average liveweight gain of 260g/day – “which was overall a good result”.

A few lambs succumbed to pulpy kidney, but finished lambs were .9kg CW heavier than Te Hape Station’s grass-fed lambs.

Financial results from the project will be released this year.

Station looks to good ideas

Farm manager Ian Valler and farm consultant Darren McNae are both keeping a close eye on the cropping demonstration site on Te Hape Station. “In another 12 months we should have some hard numbers that can be used to decide what works and what we can make money out of,” McNae said at a February field day introducing the Te Hape Farm Systems Demonstration.

Set on 12.5ha of land borrowed from Te Hape, the farmlet is growing a range of different ryegrasses, herbs and brassicas as part of a two-year PGG Wrightson project to demonstrate new forages and crop management techniques.

Te Hape is a 3200ha (effective) hillcountry farm, southeast of Te Kuiti. Governed by the Te Hape B Trust, it has two sister stations, Tiroa and Waipa. Farm manager Ian Valler said Te Hape ran about 2250 cattle, including 950 cows, and 20,000 sheep. In recent years the station has endeavoured to finish as many animals as possible by utilising cropping to improve liveweight gain and fill feed gaps.

Valler said Te Hape grew about 65ha of crop, including a recently introduced 20ha kale and swede crop used for wintering the heavier R2 cattle “so they can be finished earlier in spring”. Ewe hoggets are also wintered on crop. Winters on the station can be tough, so Valler said the aim was to get down to capital stock numbers by May 10. “If it’s a store market, so be it.”

He runs the station with the help of five full-time staff and works with Te Hape B Trust’s farm consultants Peter Livingston and Darren McNae, AgFirst Rotorua, when deciding farm policy. McNae said the station used the Farmax programme for feed budgeting and marketing decisions. Feed monitoring was updated every month and “we’ve now got a solid base of data going back eight years”.

This monitoring shows that pasture growth slows to less than 5kgDM/ha late in winter and peaks at almost 45kgDM/ ha in December.

Over the past eight years annual pasture production has averaged just over 8tDM/ha.

McNae said cropping and baleage (about 1000 big round bales annually) were used to help offset feed deficits. “We are always looking at how different feeding regimes can be used to plug gaps and help us get the best stock performance.”

McNae and Valler said the demonstration site would offer some good ideas as to what cropping regimes worked best.

Published courtesy of Country-Wide April 2011

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