Perennial pastures provide environmental benefits such as increased water use, which reduces waterlogging and groundwater recharge. Reducing recharge then helps prevent or delay the onset of dryland salinity.
Perennial pastures can reduce the risk of soil erosion by maintaining plant cover during summer. They can also indirectly reduce soil erosion on annual pasture paddocks by enabling stock to be moved off these paddocks during summer and autumn.
Management considerations:
To integrate perennial pastures successfully into the farm there are a number of management issues to consider. Perennial pastures create different management challenges from annual pasture systems.
Grazing management:
Farmers who have integrated perennial pastures successfully into their farming systems have found it is important to use some form of rotational grazing to provide adequate recovery periods from grazing. A successful rotational grazing strategy may require subdivision of large paddocks, with additional fencing and water points and regular movement of livestock.
This shift towards more intensive grazing management will involve extra costs and time, although the need for hand feeding should be less.
Cash flow:
Perennial pastures generally cost more to establish than annual pastures. In the longer term they may reduce the cost of production, but in the short-term farmers need to have the financial capacity to carry the initial debt. Farmers who successfully grow perennial pastures have identified the cost of establishment as a barrier to the rapid conversion from annual to perennial based pastures.
The impact of the higher establishment costs may be exacerbated by the time-lag until the first grazing. In general, perennial pasture species are slower to establish than annual pastures so it will take longer before they can be grazed, although this time-lag varies widely between species and with seasonal conditions.
There is a higher risk of establishment failure with perennial pastures than with annual pastures because they can be more difficult to establish and farmers have less experience growing perennials than annual crops and pastures.
Re-establishment after a failure adds to the cost and the time until first grazing. The cost of establishment and extra infrastructure along with the longer establishment time, mean it can be several years before the investment breaks even. A study of a number of producers who had adopted lucerne into their grazing systems found that the pay-back period ranged from one to five years.
Rotations:
To maintain a desired mix of cropping and grazing, rotations on other soil types may also need to change. The areas which are suited to different enterprises need to be identified and changes made accordingly.
The transition from an annual pasture system to a perennial-based system may involve several changes and for financial (and risk) reasons may need to be spread over a number of years.
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