For quite some time, farm grown feed has been a big priority for Owl Farm, a Waikato dairy farm joint venture between St Peters School in Cambridge and Lincoln University.
Two of the key business partners, PGG Wrightson Seeds and Farm Source work corroboratively with the management team to help achieve two of the farm pasture performance goals:
- A pasture and crop harvesting target of 15tDM/ha/year
- Maximising kilograms of milk solids prior to christmas.
Demonstration manager Jo Sheridan says the farm is good at growing pastures and crops during Spring but dries out in Summer. To capture this spring growth we calve early and focus on producing as much milk as we can while it's cheap to do so with farmgrown feed. Then they have flexibility in summer depending on what it gives.
Choice of seed gives the business resilience. Jo says, “A risk to our business is that we don't have feed when we need it, and then become dependent on brought in feed. To overcome some of that risk, we look for what kind of seed in-ground will give us the most likely chance of growing good quality forage throughout the year, allowing our cows to keep producing."
Jo is supported by Greg Zeuren, a Waikato based PGG Wrightson Seeds Sales Agronomist, for decisions around seed choice. Their pasture renovation programme begins with a summer fed brassica, Cleancrop™ Toto Turnips. The short maturing summer turnip has high leaf and bulb yield potential and is a valuable addition to the diet of milking cows during the summer months. It also offers excellent pre-emerge weed control with Telar® herbicide, having a cleaner turnip paddock makes it an ideal lead for new perennial pasture in autumn.
Pasture seed at Owl Farm is carefully selected to match the farms soil type and climate. "What I like most about our pasture management strategy is figuring out what it takes to have the most successful pastures," says Jo. When selecting a ryegrass cultivar, Owl Farm focuses on characteristics that enhances summer quality such as low aftermath heading and rust tolerance, improving the availability of green leaf for the cows, which in turn leads to improved quality and utilisation of pasture. They tend to find later heading date grasses have a good fit for their pasture management system with the goal of growing as much quality pasture during the summer for milk production.
Vast perennial ryegrass, the latest tetraploid from PGG Wrightson Seeds has fit these criteria perfectly. Greg says, "Vast has performed exceptionally well at Owl Farm. It’s a grass that is in aleague of its own with an extremely late heading date of 36 days later than Nui and a tiller density more like a diploid ryegrass. It has a unique advantage of improved spring and summer dry matter (DM), excellent rust tolerance and low levels of aftermath seed heading, meaning quality feed, for longer.”
Owl Farm are now seeing and validating the on-farm benefits of Vast including both extremely late flowering and short period of seed head production. Delivering a leafy sward that has a significant, positive impact on summer pasture growth and quality, that puts more milk into the vat produced from farm grown feed!
Visit your local Farm Source store or contact your TSR to find outmore about Vast AR37 this autumn.
Article supplied by PGG Wrightson Seeds.