Managing Pastures for Long-Term Success with Cam Nicholson

Looking to level up your pasture and crop management? This week’s guest is Cam Nicholson of Nicon Rural, an agronomist with four decades of experience. He breaks down the essentials of soil fertility, grazing management and the big impact of getting these right. Cam and Ferg chat about the benefits of grazing cereals, managing animal weight on stubble and the real cost of picture-perfect pastures. Tune in for practical tips on balancing perennials and annuals, matching species to the environment and using tools like Pasture Picker to boost productivity.

- Tips on grazing cereals and animal weight management on stubbles.
- How to balance lush pastures with a solid bank balance.
- Matching species to the environment for better pasture persistence.
- Practical tools and resources for evaluating and managing pasture options.

Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited.

We help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best: info@nextgenagri.com.

Thanks to our sponsors at MSD Animal Health and Allflex, Heiniger Australia and New Zealand, and ProWay Livestock Equipment. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.

Check out the MSD range HERE

Check out Allflex products HERE

Check out Heiniger's product range HERE

Check out ProWay's product range HERE

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:03

Welcome to Head Shepherd Cam Nicholson from Nikon Rural Services Morning.

Speaker 2 0:07

Mark, how are you?

Speaker 1 0:08

Great mate, awesome to have you along. We had a few technicalities this morning, but we're here now, which is the main thing. Cam, I think I first bumped into you back a million years ago when I was a cadet with the department, I reckon which is a long time ago now, but anyway, I think that was true. But yeah, I think you've probably forgotten more about agronomy than most of us know. Just run us through a bit of your background and the work you do now at Nikon Rural.

Speaker 2 0:32

Yeah, okay. Well, I've been in agronomy I suppose close to 40 years, Started in the palm in the bank. It might have been where I first met you, Bart, but I don't know if you're that old I am, unfortunately. So I was involved in salinities and soil and that sort of stuff and then I sort of moved out privately but was involved in a number of programs. So people may have heard things like the Triple P Program, Sustainable Grazing Systems Program, so heavily involved in those and really learned, I suppose, what I call the power of optimum soil fertility, soil conditions and grazing management. That's really where that sort of stuff was embedded.

Speaker 2 1:14

Then I spent close to 17 years involved with the Grown and Graze Program, which was mixed farming program, so grazing crops, stubbles as well as pastures, so that sort of mixed farming system type stuff. Spent a fair bit of time in land careers well, on a catchment project for about 25 years and we ended up sowing hundreds of paddocks and manipulating hundreds and hundreds of paddocks. So I learned a lot from just getting out there doing and then seeing the results of it. And more recently I've been doing a bit of stuff with MLA, Got into the sort of carbon space recently more out of people's questions rather than a necessary desire to be there. But just trying to have the answers to some of those sort of things or help guide people in that Do a bit of lecturing at. Marcus Oldham Still got my own private clients, and my wife and I also run a farm just out of Geelong, so we've got fine wool merinos and Angus cattle in self-replacing operation.

Speaker 1 2:03

Excellent. So, yeah, so clearly busy and passionate about plants there. Yeah, I think anyone who's heard you speak knows that you sort of like to run a few trials at home there as well and test different things, and the beauty of being immersed in it day to day means you get to do that.

Speaker 2 2:17

Yeah, well, you've got to practise what you preach. That's right. And it becomes really important when you're spending money. You're recommending other people to do certain things basically means you're telling, recommending other people how to spend their money. Um, you want to do the same thing yourself and feel comfortable and confident that it works. So, um, yeah, the farm's a real good test ground for that, and so I'm sort of really comfortable with the sort of things I recommend, because I've convinced myself that's the right thing to do. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 2:47

I guess turning plants into animal products is the purpose of a grazing enterprise. It obviously sounds pretty simple, but as the cost-price squeeze continues, to make sure you can continue to do that in a profitable way, it takes some good strategy plus good sort of tactical decision-making.

Speaker 2 3:04

Yeah, it does. But you know, over 40 years the fundamentals of what makes a good pasture haven't changed. You know, and if you think what we spend money on and I'm a bit of a fan I look at the Victoria Monitor Farm project which, for people that are familiar with it, has been like a benchmarking project. That started in 1970. And if you look back, say the last 25 years of that, that data set, we spend about 70 percent of all of our pasture costs are in fertilizer, and so fertilizer and lime and the rest of it's, you know, sprays and resewing and that sort of stuff. And so if we're spending that's majority place where we spend our money, we've got to get that part of it right. You know we've got to optimize with the right rate of fertilizer on and the right type of fertilizer on to be able to achieve that, and so you've got to get those optimum soil conditions if you want to run a good system.

Speaker 2 3:55

And we've got some really good science to back that up. You know we're not making this stuff up. It does actually work, it does, and you see the results, you see the, the responses that fit what the science is suggesting to us. So there's a lot of you know. I've got a lot of confidence in that, particularly around the soil testing side of it. I think we we underestimate how much we should be soil testing. I look at our place at home and and we soil test every paddock about 40 paddocks on the place. We soil test every paddock every three years and have for the last 30-odd years and when I've worked it out, it's about 2% of our total fertiliser budget goes in soil testing. But the soil testing gives us such a good guide on what to put on each paddock so every paddock generally gets something slightly different and we've got a well-trained spreading contractor now and he's very good at being able to put on what we want and where we want it.

Speaker 1 4:48

He must be his favourite client, I'm sure, mate.

Speaker 2 4:50

Well, yeah, he likes the maps and all the things that we send him and he does a really good job at it.

Speaker 2 4:55

But no, getting those soil conditions at their optimum is a critical one, because, if you think about it for I use a coin expression fertilizer grows fat leaves, not fast leaves. And so if you want to maximize your, your pasture growth, you've got to be able to get good leaves on the plants and you've got to allow them to grow big. And that's where the second part of what I think are the fundamentals, which is the grazing management side of it, becomes important to go hand in hand. You can't do one without the other to get the optimum. So grazing then allows plants to recover, to grow leaf and then have the optimum fertility to make each of those leaves fat is what is fundamentally driving it and has for the last. You know, the whole time I've been in agronomy, that's the basis of it and, yeah, that hasn't changed. It's an essential part of it. It and you can still make good money even with increasing costs if you adhere to those sort of getting those things right.

Speaker 1 5:53

Yeah, awesome and yeah, completely reiterate those words around fertiliser and obviously I don't know about obviously, but I had the opportunity to spend some time down at Hamilton so I was there when I think the long-term phosphate tri-motor finished John Cayley's days of just walking through those different pastures or different grazing regimes mixed with different fertilizer, and the species there and the production that was there was just insanely different and that was you don't need any more. I mean, obviously everyone can see on their own enterprises, but that was a very stark demonstration which I think led to Triple P.

Speaker 2 6:28

Yeah, absolutely, and I've repeated that hundreds of times. You know, and it's not a magic fix, you don't do it in six months' time. Oh look, hey, this is magic. But if you keep those fundamentals going and applying those fundamental principles, then over time your pasture looks better and gets better. And I've got well, we've got pastures at home, but I've got clients of pastures that have been sown 30 years ago and they're virtually as good as the day they were sown. So there's no reason that you know, if you get these fundamentals right, that you can't have that long-term sustained sort of pasture production.

Speaker 1 7:05

Yeah, great, we'll start off. You mentioned grain and graze, so we'll start off sort of grazing cereals, which many mixed farmers would list that as one of the big game changers over the last decade, I think, between containment and grazing wheat. So grazing cereals has really absolutely shifted the dial in terms of how we handle two tight periods, one being summer, one being winter. Talk us through the opportunities to get both grazing and grain from cereal crops.

Grazing Strategies for Mixed Farming

Speaker 2 7:29

Yeah, look, it's a great opportunity to add to the feed base, particularly in the modelling, and the work that we did really showed that when you can preserve that pasture leaf area going into the time when leaf growth is slower because it's driven by soil temperature and moisture and we lose temperature going into winter, just preserving that a bit more, being able to maintain more leaf area for even just a short period of time two, three, four weeks and then you know, as I said, if your soil conditions are right, then you maximise how big those leaves become. You have a fundamental shift in the profitability of your business because you've just got feed in front of you and then the animal performance sort of reflects that. So I think it has got great opportunity. And, look, there's a few moving parts to make that integrate well into a mixed farming system. But a bit like the pastures, there's a couple of fundamental things that if you're wanting to graze a crop and then maximise grain yield at the end of it, that we do know that if you stick to those you get it 80% or 90% right, and those two is if you want to preserve your grain yield, then once you've grazed it, your plants have got to have enough time to be able to recover the biomass. So basically, grow leaf back again, because at the end of the day it's the energy that's stored, in simple terms, the energy that's stored in the leaf and the stem that fills the grain. And if you don't have enough leaf then that becomes limiting to maximising your yield, when really what we want is to have either moisture or nitrogen in most cases for a cereal to be the limiting factor. We run out of those before we run out of biomass in the energy in the plant to fill the grain. So if you graze too late or in some cases graze too hard and then you get a tight period after that and the plant doesn't have the opportunity to fully recover and regrow those leaves again, then it'll cost you in grain yield. So earlier grazing in places like western australia and some of the lower rainfall zones, clip grazing, where you don't graze it as hard into the ground sowing early obviously helps that and, yeah, being able to manage that is one of those.

Speaker 2 9:43

The second one is that in a cereal crop it grows for a period of time and tillers and that's a safe time to be grazing it because the ear, the embryonic ear that actually forms the grain head. It's actually formed and sitting in the base of the plant and it starts migrating up each of those tillers or each of those stems after a certain period of time and a certain trigger which for some of the winter cereals where we're growing is based on either photo period, so day length, or vernalisation, how cold a cold period they experience. If that ear has started migrating up the plant and then we graze it, we damage that ear and that ear is never replaced. So we lose yield simply because we damage what is going to be the grain head coming up. So earlier grazing before what we call growth stage 30, which is where the plant flicks from being vegetative and growing leaf to wanting to go reproductive and put up a seed head. As long as we can complete grazing before or at that stage, we're usually pretty safe. So if you get the two things right of being able to allow enough opportunity for the biomass to regrow and graze that earlier, then it can be a very profitable combination in a mixed farming system.

Speaker 2 11:05

There's a few other things that sort of then are associated with that. If you're grazing crops it does delay plant maturity, so it just slows it down. So sometimes that can be good because it takes you out of a frost window, but in other times because it pushes the growing season out. You run out of moisture You've got. If you can't graze a paddock evenly, because then you get uneven maturity patterns in it, some part of the crops needs time to head it. In other times the crops not mature. A few animal health issues we've got changes, stubble mass. So if you were looking to then lock it up and cut it for hay or something, you will reduce your grain yield. So there are a few other sort of subtle things, but those two fundamentals of enough energy to regrow, enough biomass to regrow and fill the grain and grazing before growth stage 30 are just the fundamentals.

Speaker 1 12:00

Yeah, perfect and yeah, obviously that kind of coincides with generally when is the tightest period of pasture growth anyway, like when you actually need to feed? Is that early winter, Not necessarily later, when it might be starting to go reproductive? There's a couple of sort of metabolic issues to watch whether you're grazing cereals to the ground as a straight fodder crop or whether you're grazing them to get grain off. What are those?

Speaker 2 12:20

Yeah. So I don't think we fully understand the whole issue around grazing cereals. It if you just take a straight feed test and look at it, it's rocket fuel. It's actually better than any of your pastures that you'd be grazing that. We don't see that always translate into rocket fuel. Animal performance and they seem to be. There are some metabolic issues. So we've been talking a bit about mineral imbalances, that sometimes they get so salt and cause mag. A lot of people sort of use that as just a bit of a preventative thing. It's a fairly cheap preventative thing Now where people put hay in the paddock just to give a bit more fibre from a grazing point of view, avoiding, say, ewes that are heavily pregnant in the last few weeks before lambing, because we seem to get some metabolic issues there.

Stubble Grazing Thresholds and Pasture Trade-Offs

Speaker 2 13:10

And we did some work on cattle with some accelerometers on their heads and looking at the way they were grazing and followed them through coming off pasture, then into a cereal crop and then into pasture again and blood tested them and weighed them and all that stuff and the performance on the cereal was pretty poor when we thought it should have been really good. And as soon as they went back into the pasture they kicked up again, and so there's a few things in that that we haven't quite understood the full ramifications of it. It certainly gives you feed. They certainly have a full belly, but maybe their performance isn't quite what we'd expect. But you do get that benefit. You've parked them somewhere else. They're being fed something somewhere else while your pastures are getting away. So we do get those, those benefits yeah, no, excellent, I guess.

Speaker 1 13:55

If we just quickly switch to the other end of the season, which is probably the more traditional integration of cropping and livestock, where we sort of or traditionally at least used to chuck the sheep on the stubble, get them out of of sight, out of mind, and go to Christmas, how do we make sure I think I was listening to a talk you gave a while back around sort of animals are either gaining or rapidly gaining or rapidly losing weight in stubble. They don't stay stable for very long. How do we make sure they're gaining weight on the stubble, or what's a good stubble versus a bad stubble?

Speaker 2 14:22

yeah, yeah, yeah, we did a fair bit of work on this and I suppose the bottom line is that every stubble is different and and that really is a partly a reflection of, say, things like the weed control during the year, the late season rainfall that we get and what green might be coming up underneath that, and then just the harvest efficiency and that varies quite a bit, just the way on people have got their machines set up when they're harvesting and how much grain is blowing out the back and moisture and all of those sort of things. So to make sort of blanket recommendations is pretty tricky. We did a lot of monitoring of stock and then looked at the different components in the different stubbles that we were grazing and it was very hard to actually predict what their performance would be. But, as you alluded to, what we did find repeatedly is that there's a rapid gain when the animals are able to select more than what their maintenance is out of as they're grazing. Then it seemed to hit a point or a threshold and then there was a rapid loss. There was. We virtually even within a week, could not see a levelling out of animal performance or live weight change. It's either going up or going down.

Speaker 2 15:37

Quite often people put them in. They go in at 60 kilos. Probably three or four weeks after that they might be 64, 65 kilos and then they'll drop back to 60 again and they've gone. Oh, they've done it right, they've maintained their condition, but in fact they've been on a roller coaster in that period that they've been in there. So what we focused on is could we in that period that they've been in there? So what we focused on is could we try and pick that threshold? So you'd be able to walk out into a stubble and go if the parameters are like this, then they've probably hit that threshold and they're now on the losing weight bit. And that doesn't matter whether you say, okay, they're losing weight, now I'm happy for them to lose a bit of weight, or you say, all, now I'm going to supplement your feed to keep them on a rising weight plane or whatever else.

Speaker 2 16:18

But I was looking for that threshold and it sort of, let's say, surprised us what the numbers were. But it seemed to be pretty robust and those numbers were it's about the amount of green pick that they can find and the amount of grain that they can find. And the simple threshold that we had is, if you can imagine, 0.1 of a square metre. Now, for most blokes that's about their boot length. So if you put your two boots at 90 degrees to each other and imagine that as a little square there, if you can count about 16 to 20 grains, say wheat or barley grains on the ground say wheat or barley grains on the ground within that space. If there's anything above that, they'll be gaining weight Once you get below that and there's less of those.

Speaker 2 17:04

Then we found that they were on that declining weight plane and a bit the same with the green. It was around about 40 kilos of green pick is all they needed, and so what they were doing is they were harvesting the high energy stuff and then they're using the gut fill with the trash and the stem that was about in the cereals, which was providing nothing, virtually nothing from an energy point of view, but giving them gut fill, and as long as they're able to wander around and pick up that amount of green pick, they seem to do all right, which was surprising, but it was remarkably robust in how it worked. We'd go and do another year and we'd use the same thresholds and we'd find the same results of the animal weight. So useful guy doesn't say, oh, put these animals in here for three weeks and they'll gain five kilos. We couldn't get that level of precision, but we did at least find that sort of tip-over point.

Speaker 1 17:59

Yeah righto, 40 kilos is not much, but I guess it's pretty available, isn't it? Like it's upright most of it? Yeah, well, it's tipped up yeah.

Speaker 2 18:05

Yeah, unlike a pasture that you think, oh, that's nothing, when you actually looked at it. You only need looking in the little square, you know. You find six or eight little green shoots coming up from, let's say, rain that you've had and grain that's been dropped on the ground and it's got a couple of leaves on it and they go around and pick that off Because of the height of it. They actually get quite a lot, even though when you cut it in our traditional sort of pasture measurements you go, oh, that's nothing.

Speaker 1 18:30

You've got half an envelope full.

Speaker 2 18:31

And that's what surprised us. We thought there's no way they can be gaining weight with only that there, but it was highly repeatable.

Speaker 1 18:38

Yeah, right on, excellent If we switch gears and head to, I guess, more specialist pastures rather than grazing cereals. I was there at Ballarat and enjoyed your talk at Best Will, best Lamb. It was sort of you were trying to trade off, I guess, good-looking pastures versus good-looking bank balance and how you sort of walk that tightrope. How have I summarised that?

Pasture Management Strategies for Profitability

Speaker 2 19:00

Yeah, sort of. I reckon that the key message for me was around this I think there's a compromise in the grazing system that we need to be aware of and we need to work hard to try and minimise those negative impacts. And so my message there was that we know a lot about what animals need to perform in a certain way and we readily see the impact of that either lambing percentages being lower, weight gains aren't right, don't feed them right, you get a break in the wool. If it's cattle, they don't get in first or second cycle. But so we see the impact of that and we often, you know, supplementary feed to top that up to make sure we don't see those impacts. Um, and we can do all the calculations on that. We also know, from a pasture point of view, exactly what a pasture wants, you know, and how it should be treated, and there are times when we shouldn't graze it and there are times when we shouldn't do this and shouldn't do that. Bottom line is you've got to put your animal somewhere, and you mentioned containment feeding, and I think the more we understand and use containment feeding, the easier it makes this bit of the system. But irrespective of that, there are times when you can't have animals in containment, and this year, certainly in southwest Victoria, a lot of people have encountered that. We're at a point of lambing and they've been in containment up until then, but because we haven't had rain, we haven't grown much feed to actually put them out on and so ideally, from a pasture point of view, you wouldn't graze that pasture. But necessity is that you do need to graze that pasture. So we know it's not the right thing by the plant. We know that will set the plant back.

Speaker 2 20:38

My key message out of all of that sort of introduction was that when we get the opportunities to do the right things by our pastures, we need to be proactive. Right, and I think too often we just go phew, now we're growing some feed, isn't that good, and we just let them go. You know when, in fact, we should be thinking how do I maximise the recovery of these plants to make them the most robust plant for the next time? I've got to hit them pretty hard and do what they don't like. Yeah, and I think that's a part of the grazing system we haven't quite nailed yet being proactive in that Now, even things like when I'm thinking we're lambing at home, you know we don't move our ewes around when they're lambing, so you know they'll stay in a paddock six, seven, eight weeks before we move them.

Speaker 2 21:25

Now I know at that time of year that's not ideal for the pasture because a plant, when its leaf gets bitten off, it dips into its reserves in its crown or the base of the plant and its roots to regrow another leaf and then you nip it off again and you don't give that plant a chance to recover. I know that's not right, but we've got to park the animal somewhere and I know the cost from an animal performance point of view if we try moving. You know lambing ewes so we don't do it. So then the real important thing is that once we finish that and those ewes go out, what do I do afterwards and how do I manage that to maximise that recovery?

Speaker 2 22:03

Because most of the pastures I see that fail or degrade over time is that when we've done something wrong to them, we don't give them a chance to recover. And as I say to people, a once-off what do you say wrong thing done to the pasture is not going to kill a pasture out. It's that repeated, it's a cumulative sort of effect. Didn't get it right this time, didn't get a chance to recover. I'll bugger it. I've done it again, I've done it again, I've done it again. But all of a sudden you go gee, this pasture's really thinned out, thinned out. You know, it's because of the multiple hits on the head that actually caused the problem, not just the ones, and so I think there's a fair bit that we can do.

Speaker 1 22:42

You know, being proactive in that phase is pretty important, yeah, and I guess I don't know, maybe this might be an assumption, but those with a bit of loosen around kind of sort of know that intuitively that if you bash it in autumn and knock its crown and root around, you're going to have an impact on its persistence and they probably are better at managing that specialist crop. When you look at your sort of more mixed pastures, you just treat them like they're treat them a bit meaner than that generally.

Speaker 2 23:08

Yes, yeah, and that's exactly right. We've got some species who go oh, they're really sensitive to that. I can't do that and you actually proactively work not to do that. But I suppose at the end of the day you've got to put them somewhere, you've got to put the animal somewhere and a lot of our pastures just get flogged. And because it's quite often a gradual decline, like if you get it wrong with lucerne, you can lose it very quickly where most of our pastures, if you get a higher percentage of a bit of barley grass coming into it or a bit of brown grass or a bit more capeweed, it's sort of a slow sort of change and you don't quite appreciate it. The same as geomelucine's gone.

Speaker 1 23:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah, excellent, I guess, depending on where you are in the world. There's sort of two holy grails that exist in my life anyway. One is a perennial pasture that lives forever and you sort of meet into high rainfall zones and then I guess, growing up in the Mallee it was kind of always trying to get a self-setting annual that would stay there and be happy, and I guess that's what we want in livestock business. Is there a set of rules that sort of determine which is the most profitable? As you get into, as you sort of go through the divide and go north and shift and, I guess, other areas this is a long-winded question, but are there other areas where, like you see people who just sort of basically put the cedar over the entire farm every year in dry areas and just give up on annuals that are going to reseed and just put fodder in? Basically, have you got decision rules through that or ways that you sort of would determine what's the most profitable path you'd have?

Speaker 2 24:36

Yeah, no, I don't really have a set of rules and you know, because I operate more in that medium-high rainfall zone, the focus is a bit more on the perennials. But, having said that, our mainstay for our nitrogen is sub-clover, which is an annual, and so we've got to make that seed. So there are certainly, if we well, let's take the perennial bit first, certainly, you know, matching the right species to your environment is the obvious starting point. What are the conditions and then what are the species that best suit that? And trying to put square pegs in round holes never works. Sometimes you get away with it for a few years and then you get the wrong set of conditions and you'll lose them. But there's a lot we can do as we become more what do you say? Marginal, a bit more risky, in that of this idea, as I talked about before, of being more proactive about their management and knowing that, gee, you know we're on the edge on this one. We've really got to treat it like lucerne in that sort of management idea that you mentioned and that will certainly keep your perennials. You know, because if you think of your perennials, the key things that are going to keep those plants alive or keep those plants persisting year after year after year is tiller set. So if you think of a crown of a perennial plant that's been there even three years, those tillers or those shoots that the leaves are growing off from, are not the original ones that started when the plant was there. We replace them and they live for short periods only a couple of months, in some cases up to a couple of years. So we've constantly got to be replacing those tillers and there's active management that we do, depending on the species type, to maximize that tiller set. Okay, and a lot of people don't sort of recognize that and the key times of that. So you know what we do in springtime is reflected next autumn in the number of tillers that fire up. So you know, six months ago is the effect that we're now seeing in our pastures the next autumn break, um and and so recognizing those sort of things. So I've been able to thicken up pretty average pastures just by active management of those um. What's critical, though, with not only managing the, the tiller set part of it, is making sure it's got good plant reserves and good access to nitrogen. So I think nitrogen, good plant reserves and getting the right grazing management, particularly in spring, maximises that tiller set, which then is what you see come through in your next bit of pasture. And we're constantly doing that.

Speaker 2 27:09

It's not a set and forget. We've got to keep managing that from a perennial point of view, and the more marginal you get, the more? Um you've got to be on the on the money with that, otherwise you can lose them. Um, if we're talking about annual annuals though, then it's, it's simply a seed set thing. We have to maximize seed set.

Speaker 2 27:30

Now, depending on what plant it is, there are different ways we can manipulate how much seed set you get and if we think you know, the backbone is our sub clover, whether it's a short season variety or a cultivar or a longer season cultivar.

Speaker 2 27:43

It's about seed set. Now, seed set in sub clover is influenced by how we graze over winter. So we set up our flowering points and the ability for that plant to set seed over winter and with our grazing management over winter. And the real challenge is that that grazing is actually hard, grazing below a thousand kilos over that winter period if you want to maximize flower points, which then maximize the seed set in somelover, which is the exact opposite of what we want to do to our grasses. So again, this is this compromise and this being proactive to manage a species, knowing that it's not best for the other species. But then the next year I'll flip that over and do something else. The beauty about subclover is because it has a degree of hard seededness. You can do that once and build a seed bank up that will last multiple years.

Speaker 1 28:37

Yeah and yeah. You see lots of subclava getting bashed through winter, and not necessarily to encourage flowers more just because that's not Because you need the flowers, that's right.

Speaker 2 28:46

But then you know, you look at that and go, well, that's not the best for the grasses and if you do that, year after year your grasses thin out. Year your grasses thin out. Yeah, um, yeah it's. It's being that, understanding the fundamentals and then being proactive, and and when you get the opportunity. There are times when, even at home with us, we just got to do things I don't like doing to the pastures. But bad luck, it's got to happen because that's the way the you know, the system is uh and we've got to compromise that, but it's when you get the opportunity, conditions are looking good. How do I manage those different pastures in a way that maximises their recovery?

Speaker 1 29:19

Yeah, and I guess just quickly I mean taking that through to autumn. The other way that you can screw your subclover up is to have too much dry matter on top of it when it's trying to germinate in autumn. So yeah, make sure you manage that.

Speaker 2 29:33

Yeah, so dry season management particularly so to have, yeah, make sure you manage that. Yeah so, so dry season management particular. Well, so, sub clover all plants that have that set seed have a dormancy built into that seed when that first drops and there are different mechanisms that break that dormancy. For something like sub clover it's fluctuations in soil temperature, particularly in that feb march period, so cooler nights, warmer days, or warm days, cooler nights. That fluctuation temperature breaks the coating which sets them up to germinate.

Speaker 2 30:02

If you've got a lot of dry material left there, it acts like emulsion. You don't get that fluctuation. Therefore you don't get that germination. The second bit with a lot of dry material, particularly if it's been created by reproductive tillers on perennial grasses, is that those old reproductive tillers act like a handbrake. So you may have set tillers in springtime but they don't fire up next autumn because this handbrake's still on. Which is that old dry material in a way that removes enough of it but doesn't overexpose the soil is, you know, just another part of that whole grazing system we've got to get right.

Speaker 1 30:42

Yeah, exactly, and that's where the good old days of having merino weathers that you could belt through that stuff are mostly gone. So that's one of the challenges of having heaps of reproductive animals on your place is that you kind of haven't got any sacrifice animals to bash that stuff down as much as we used to, at least.

Speaker 2 30:59

Yes, yeah, and look at home. I ended up buying an old topping mower from a dairy farmer in Colac and we've just got some paddocks and I just put the nephew on and he goes around in circles for a few days and mows a few paddocks just to help manage that, because I know that the difference in early perennial grass growth can be 30% 40% going into winter and that's huge, that's huge, and that's huge, that's huge.

Speaker 1 31:27

And that's just because those tillers are literally still sitting there rather than being cut off and being replaced.

Speaker 2 31:33

Well, yeah, they're sitting there, but, if you like, they're dormant. And that's why I call it the handbrake effect. You're trying to grow the parts with the handbrake on. Put the handbrake off and all of a sudden you'll get another 10 of those tillers fire up and each of those tillers grows leaves. And if those leaves are allowed to grow big and fat with good fertiliser, then all of a sudden you get this extra growth, you know, and that takes you through into winter.

Speaker 1 31:54

Excellent If we flick again to. So we've gone through grazing crops now around the pasture. Now we go to sort of, I guess how do we handle that late summer or the early summer period, late spring, which is in some areas is summer for crops they can have a big impact. What sort of species and systems are you using these days? I know over time these things have changed and I heard a talk about some of the canolas which you can sort of stop from senescing by the way they've been bred, and that seems a pretty good opportunity to handle some of that if we do get late seasonseason rain or can save some late-season subsodium moisture.

Speaker 2 32:28

Yeah, yeah, so we've got a range of options. There's quite a bit of work we did in the later phase of grain and graze on some of the canolas that have a high level of what they call winter activity, so need to experience that cold period, extended cold period before they flower and because they're in brassica, it allows us to sow them earlier in that sort of September, october sort of period, and if you've got moisture you just treat them like a brassica crop and then you lock them up and take them through for grain. The characteristics of the plant does change a little bit and the root system changes a bit because of that, and so that's a possibility. But you've got to have in a sense fallow, ready-to-go paddocks in that sort of September, october, november period when most you know quite often you don't. So it's got a bit of a niche there, but certainly a possibility Still, using a bit of the annual fodders, and I find the annual fodders can be very useful in a renovation phase as a help in a clean-up and grow you some feed as well.

Speaker 2 33:31

I suppose what I've seen, I reckon, in the last 20 years, is a greater degree of variability over summer as far as rainfall and moisture goes and if you look at the climate predictions, where well, in our part of the world anyway, we're likely to get more sporadic summer rain, which has sort of got to change our thinking a little bit sporadic summer rain which has sort of got to change our thinking a little bit. I do like the short-term summer sort of fodders, like some of the herbs, the plantains and the chicories, and even mixing in with a bit of lucerne. The longevity of that's a bit of a challenge, I think, at times. But if you're looking at it as maybe only a three or four-year thing before it maybe goes back into a crop rotation and you get the opportunity there to to, um, you know, get a bit of weed control and build a bit more organic matter and stuff like that, then that may, may have a place as well. So I think it's a it's a mixed bag as far as that goes.

Speaker 2 34:19

It's got to suit what your bigger picture is with your farm system. You know, know, we've had herbs at home. We've got paddocks of lucerne. I mean, they're fantastic for wiener animals. They're just, you know, so much better than feeding grain to them. You can get them to harvest a bit of green pick in a paddock, it's just gold to them. But making that work in a system, yeah, can be a little bit hit and miss.

Speaker 1 34:45

Yeah, I guess one of the challenges with you see a little bit with some of these fodders is that you shift an animal onto it, they have to adapt their room, but if you've only got kind of one small area of it, they kind of spend most of the time adapting on and then the rest of the time adapting off and then you've kind of got nothing in between. So it's a bit of a scale effect as well.

Speaker 2 35:03

Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. It's got to fit your system. Yeah, and then what if we just bang this in, as you said, and they get two weeks grazing? Then you know there's a limited animal performance value out of that.

Speaker 1 35:15

Yeah, it feels good, though putting it onto something green? Yeah it does. You're right. I mean we've just covered this is a really quick cook's tour of all things grazing stuff but it's a really complex space, particularly if you sort of go to any field day and you talk to 10 different seed reps and they'll try and sell you some different pasture. Is there any good tools that people can use to sort of evaluate maybe not the varieties, but evaluate that sort of macro level of what should go where on a farm?

Speaker 2 35:45

Look there's a couple of them. There's a tool called Pasture Picker. Now it hasn't been updated for a number of years but some of the base sort of fundamental information about the different characteristics of different species forget about individual varieties within that or cultivars within that but the basic fundamentals of the sort of plants that might fit the environment and suit your grazing system then that's a useful resource and it just allows you to zone in on your area and basically what it does is you zone in on your area and you start describing things like the soil texture and how often it gets waterlogged and what your rainfall is like the soil texture and how often it gets waterlogged and what your rainfall is. It narrows down the number of plant types which can be a useful starter so you don't just read the blurb and think that's the way to do it. The pasture trial network that has in the last few years been focused very much on higher rainfall type stuff and perennial ryegrass in particular, but that's been expanded in the last few years. I know Southern Farming Systems are doing a lot of work in the more moderate rainfall sort of zones now and putting some of the less included species in there. So that's useful just to see how other varieties are tracking, independently of, maybe, what the seed reps are doing.

Speaker 2 37:05

But a lot of the seed rep stuff is pretty good in the right conditions. It's just you've got to be wary that they're not going to show you something that keeps bombing out all the time. But that's what you want to know from a risk point of view, that it only works under these conditions, and so I like some of the stuff, some of the farming groups that have got a bit more of the livestock-y side of things and some of the trial work that they're doing. But my number one thing is neighbours and a good agro that's going around, and that's really what made me was seeing hundreds of paddocks and drawing your conclusions from that In your environment, under these conditions, under this management. This is how it works, this is how robust it is. So I'd just say to individuals if you can see someone else, one of your neighbours, that's trying it and having a go, ask them how it's working.

Speaker 1 37:58

Yeah, and I'm sure the extended benefits of things like lifetime year management or other opportunities like Triple P and stuff where you've got on different properties and have a look around. It's the things you learn while you're having smoker or while you're driving across the paddock to look at some sheep. But actually the past you're driving through becomes a learning from the day?

Speaker 2 38:15

Absolutely yeah. And just asking those questions how have you found it? As I said, that was the making of me. I just had this brilliant opportunity to see hundreds and hundreds of paddocks and we'd try this and I'd go back and observe and see how it worked and once off, isn't it? But when you hear it time and time again, you start to build your own knowledge of what works and what doesn't.

Speaker 1 38:38

Yeah, excellent Cam, it's been really great to share your knowledge.

Speaker 2 38:42

The last question may or may not be the hardest but what is the last thing you change your mind about? Oh, I'll change your mind all the time. Um, I mentioned at the start I'm doing a little bit in that in the carbon space. Um, and when I first started I thought that the opportunity of pasture improvement to build soil carbon you know whether we sell that you know and make money out of, because there was a whole lot of stuff about how we can go carbon farming and make all this money. I think there's much less opportunity in that than what's being talked about.

Carbon Trading and Productivity Discussion

Speaker 2 39:12

If you've been running a good pasture system for a good period of time because it is accumulation of soil carbon is so heavily dependent on rainfall Rainfall If you've been running a good system, you're near the top of what you can achieve anyway, and so I thought I was going to play Mary Hill and we're all going to make heaps of money out of this stuff. I've come to the conclusion that for most people, I don't think there's a huge opportunity in there. So focus on it from a productivity point of view, not from making money out of carbon.

Speaker 1 39:44

Yeah, good point. If you'd sold your soil carbon in the Western District of Victoria and the bank came looking for it right now in dry period, it'd be not so pretty. Yes, you'd be hiding. Yeah, excellent, cam, really appreciate your time. If people want to get in touch with you, I assume you're happy to take on new clients at Nikon Rural.

Speaker 2 40:07

Yeah, I've got a pretty full book at the moment, but happy to have general sort of discussions and talks and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 40:13

So yeah, yeah, yeah, Excellent. So best place to find you is your website or somewhere Raw.

Speaker 2 40:19

No, people, just Google me, they'll find me.

Speaker 1 40:23

I found you, so they can too. Yeah, excellent, we'll put your details in the show notes anyway, but yeah, no, thanks very much for your time and all the best. Hopefully we get a very wet spring in your part of the world.

Speaker 2 40:35

Yes, let's hope so. A bit tight in Western Victoria in parts at the moment.

Speaker 1 40:40

Excellent, thanks, mate.

Speaker 2 40:42

Okay, thanks, Mark.