New pasture means happier cows

Date: 2009-02-26 | Category: Dairy News

Waikato dairy farmer Phil Swney is in his third season of a pasture renewal programme and believes his cows have never looked better.

He and his wife Deb farm 125ha at Te Kawa, south of Te Awamutu. They took the decision to embark on their pasture renewal programme after listening to Murray Lane, then of Wrightsons, talking at a field day.

Phil, who had spent 10 years with AmBreed, had been breeding for traits other than production (TOP) for some time, but found that his pastures were letting him down. At a stocking rate of up to four cows/ha he felt he couldn’t afford to take out more than five percent of his total pastures for a conventional regrassing programme, but at that rate, improvements weren’t great enough for his liking.

Having heard Murray talk about the 18-month programme approach, Phil invited him to come and have a look at the farm.

“I really liked the idea of what he was talking about, and decided then and there to get into it,” he said.

In March 2006, he sprayed out around 20 percent of the farm and put in a short rotation ryegrass, along with chicory. This was grazed cowsover the winter and in October it was sprayed out and a turnip crop direct-drilled into non-cultivated soil. The turnip crop was grazed through January and February, and then sprayed out for a third time before permanent pasture was planted in March.

This programmed approach aims to get rid of all the old non-endophyte grass, replacing it with the more modern and pest-resistant endophyte varieties. Phil said it also has the advantage of removing residual clover pests from the soil, as no clover is present for the 12 months before the permanent pasture is sown.

Phil said he had originally been quite apprehensive about direct-drilling the turnip crop without cultivation, but his concerns were allayed when the first year’s crop produced 13 tonnes/ha.
“I have learned so much about pastures, crops and grass strains as part of this process,”
he said.
“It has taught me the damage we do to our free-draining ash country by keeping on cultivating it. Direct drilling is better because it doesn’t disturb it.”

However, one side-effect of the direct-drill approach is that insect control becomes an important part of the pasture renewal programme.

“Because you’re not chopping them up as you cultivate, you need to make sure you use the appropriate insecticide when putting in the new crops,” Phil said.

As part of the process, he has also become a big fan of chicory and aims to get it spread over the whole farm. Its ash soils can cope with wet winters but dry out quickly in drought. Chicory, with its long taproot, is able to access moisture deeper in the soil and kept those parts of the farm where it had been sown green during last summer’s drought.

Broadcast spread

Where paddocks have been sown with chicory, it represents around 25 percent of the pasture, less in winter. Rather than direct-drilling chicory and clover seed, Phil has had excellent results by simply broadcast-spreading it.

“Last autumn, we mixed the chicory seed in with the fertiliser and spread it on 20ha and got a great result,” he said.

This time- and cost-effective method is particularly attractive, as chicory only lasts a couple of years before needing to be resown.

He’s now started the pasture renewal programme on around 60 percent of the farm, and said the quality of the feed in the new pastures is much better than the old, with higher metabolisable energy (ME) values, now at 12 percent.

“The cows love it, and they just deck it, whereas the old pastures are more stalky and they leave more behind,” he said.

“They are looking the best they’ve ever done, and they show it in the vat too.”

This season the herd was producing an average of 2.2kg of milksolids (MS)/cow before the end of September, dropping below 1.7kg MS only in mid-January, a significant improvement on previous years. Phil admits that the weather has been kind and that not all of the improvement in production can be attributed to the pasture renewal programme, but is confident it has had a positive effect.

“I can see with my own eyes that what I’m doing is working, though I don’t yet have the detailed figures to prove it,” he said.

Wrightsons and DairyNZ are carrying out regular pasture cuts and will monitor the ME values until 2011, which Phil believes will prove the effectiveness of the programme in scientific terms too View Article.
Meanwhile, he intends to continue the programme across the rest of the farm. And after that?

“It will be interesting to see how long the new pastures last,” he said.

“However, I aim to continue to do 10 percent of the farm each year.”

Another benefit of the programme has been to reduce the incidence of ryegrass staggers on the farm.

“We always used to have trouble with grass staggers, but we haven’t this year,” he said.

He uses Delish AR1 as the short rotation ryegrass for the first stage of the pasture renewal programme, and Barkant turnips for the second stage. He experimented with Green Globe turnips, reputed to keep better, but the yield was not as good and the cows didn’t like them as much as the Barkant variety.

So to get round the problem he plants two crops of Barkant, three weeks apart, with the first grazed in January and the second in February. The permanent pasture is Banquet 2, chicory, and Kopu2 clover.

Published courtesy of Dairy Exporter - March 2009

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