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NOTHING matches on-farm trials to see how different pasture varieties perform under your style of farming, in your regional conditions.
Muswellbrook dairy farm manager Tony Burnett was eager to put up his hand to plot trials of a range of annual and Italian ryegrasses last year.
“It’s the only way to learn which varieties really suit this farm and our management techniques – we need to know what stands up well to our grazing, rotations and fertiliser regimes. I’ll choose for the season ahead on the basis of what I learnt from the trial.”
Mr. Burnett said that having a pasture trial conducted on the farm in 2008 by PGG Seeds had “really opened my eyes to the level of work required to run a successful replicated trial”.
“However, it was no hassle for me. I simply had to fence off a small area of 25m x 25m, then conduct my usual management practices. It was no extra work for the benefit of seeing what performed well at different times of year.
“One of the biggest things we noted from the plot trial was the visible difference between untreated seed and seed treated with Gaucho.
The treatment clearly gave pastures a better chance to establish and mature. So this year we will use mostly Gaucho-treated seed.”
On the dairy farm owned by Butch and Robyne Smith - with 110% allocation from the Hunter River and 210 ha able to be irrigated - the majority of the farm is planted to a mix of short-rotation and annual ryegrasses, with about 20% under perennial ryegrass.
About 75% of the farm has 2-3kg of clover/ha sown with the ryegrass, providing carry-over summer feed, and 2kg/ha of kikuyu seed is also being added to the ryegrass over 60% of the farm to more speedily establish kikuyu across the farm.
The plot trial at Muswellbrook is part of PGG Seeds ongoing testing of new and existing pasture cultivars in different regions. The Muswellbrook trial was sown on 20th March, replicated 4 times, with 9 cut harvests carried out over the growing period. All plots had dry matter percentages measured.
Table 1. Results of the PGG Seeds Muswellbrook trial. Yield % (relative to Crusader = 100)
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Crusader was equal to or better than new varieties and breeding lines for autumn establishment and winter growth.
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Recent market-releases bred in the northern hemisphere were slower (44-46%) to establish, and demonstrated less winter growth (7-21%) than Crusader, however they tended to have a higher production peak in spring.
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Over the full growing season, Crusader produced 22% (3000kg DM/ha) more dry matter than the lowest yielding variety Tetila annual ryegrass - providing a $600 advantage per hectare over Tetila based on a value of 20c/kg DM for off-farm supplementary feed.
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