A three-year Meat & Livestock Australia-funded producer demonstration site in the Upper South East is tackling the costly problem of grass seeds in lambs.
Producers can be slapped with $1 a kilogram or more discounts for seed-infested carcases and just one grass seed can threaten a processor’s export licence.
So the Mackillop Farm Management Group and Sherwood Precision Management Solutions Group are assessing alternative forage species to enable lambs to be finished on grass-free paddocks in spring.
A trial site with seven species including ryecorn, Mundah and Moby barley and those with Clearfield herbicide technologies, such as Scope barley and Grenade wheat, was sown on the Bartlett family’s Tolcairn property at Sherwood in June. Pasture cuts have been taken to measure dry matter production.
Site host Rodney Bartlett is hoping the results of the Seed Free Lamb project will give growers the confidence to lamb later and reduce the amount of ewes needing supplementary feeding in late pregnancy and lactation.
Tolcairn’s crossbred lambs are dropped in March with the aim to turn them off before silver grass, brome grass, barley grass and geranium become a problem in October.
But Mr Bartlett said he would like to lamb in June.
“Feeding lambing ewes has been a costly exercise the past couple of years,” he said. “And in years like this, there is a lot of feed, but we can’t utilise it.”
Grass seeds in their wool is also a concern, forcing them to shear in September.
“It would be good to not lamb with so much wool on them,” he said.
Mr Bartlett says lucerne is king in their deep sandy soils, so the emphasis is on finding forage species to oversow into lucerne stands which will outcompete grass seeds. There is also a need to rotate herbicide group use, where Intervix for Clearfield varieties may come into its own.
“You can put it (lucerne) in and get 10-15 years out of it but you have to control the grasses,” Mr Bartlett said.
MFMG project manager Felicity Turner hopes the forage species can provide higher growth rates for quicker lamb turn-off earlier in the season, and the Clearfield cereals will provide a grass-free environment later in the season enabling lambs to be carried through until stubbles become available.
“The area has had a bad rap for grass seeds but we want to show industry that producers are actively seeking ways to address the issue,” she said.
- Details: mfmg.org.au