There’s more to mixed pastures than biomass and quality when picking viable forage options in the Mallee.
In a pasture mix trial conducted at Curyo last year, Winteroo oats predictably offered the best biomass production and feed quality however adding, Morava vetch and Bonito canola to the mix offered other benefits such as improved root disease and grass weed control, better late-season feed quality, reduced costs and reduced storage requirements.
Tom Batters, Agriculture Victoria, shared his findings in mid February at the BCG Trials Review Day.
“Where oats dominated the plant number within the crop mixture, there was early vigour and rapid biomass accumulation” Mr Batters said “and early feed tests revealed higher energy content compared with the other species.”
Adding canola or vetch to an oaten pasture, set up the pasture mixture for a ‘long feed’ with comparable biomass production to the ‘mono’ pasture of oats. This mixture had the added benefit of high crude protein and metabolisable energy in the early October assessments.
However, the canola and vetch alone allowed for greater grass weed and root disease control during the pasture phase in comparison to mixtures with oats.
Another consideration was the opportunity cost of storing larger sized seed.
“Storing and retaining seed for forage production can be costly when the storage space could be used for storing and marketing higher value grains such lentil and chickpea grain” he said.
Canola was by far the best seed for biomass production per kg of seed sown.
“These results, combined with the relatively good feed tests show some potential for canola to be a viable option where seed storage space is a premium,” Mr Batters highlighted.
With pros and cons for each pasture mixture option, Mr Batters suggested the answer didn’t lie in one paddock.
“Monoculture oats could be grown in one set of pasture paddocks to provide rapid early forage and terminated early once feed quality declines to prevent seed-set of grass weeds,”
Mr Batters shared some other options by saying vetch and canola could be grown in another set to provide high quality feed later in the season, and with good in-crop grass weed control could be terminated later or not at all to allow grazing later into spring.
