Matching feed requirements of the dairy herd with home-grown pastures every year requires careful, long-term planning. This will ensure a consistent supply of good-quality feed to meet seasonal demand from milking and dry stock while ensuring surplus feed for conserving as silage or hay.
A combination of summer and winter growing pastures or fodder crops is required to ensure that risk is spread to overcome droughts, floods and the seasonal extremes of temperature that are a regular feature of dairying in most districts. Deficits of pasture or crops can be supplemented by bought concentrates, hay or silage or from fodder reserves. The need for careful planning increases as stocking rates rise.
Matching herd feed requirements with paddock feed can be simplified by using FEED PLAN, a computer program available from NSW Agriculture as part of the Milkonomics package. Ask your local advisory officer for information. FEED PLAN calculates the feed supply needed to meet feed demand for the farm. There are two parts to the process.
First, a preliminary feed budget calculates the feed surplus or deficit for various times of the year based on the feed supply from permanent pastures and the feed requirements of the herd. Pasture production is predicted from growth rates for each district (see tables). This budget indicates the feed deficits that must be met by sowing crops and pastures. Depending on the balance of permanent pastures, the deficits will occur at various times of the year. FEED PLAN allows selection from a range of tropical and temperate forage crops and fertiliser options to fill some or all of the feed shortfalls left by permanent pastures.
The final plan includes the net extra feed production from the management alternatives chosen to prevent feed deficiencies and maximise the use of surplus feed. The net benefits of the management alternatives are the differences between the growth rates of the sown species and the replaced base pasture species. A range of alternatives can easily be examined so that the pasture system best suited to a particular farm can be designed. FEED PLAN allows quick and simple calculation of budgets, and produces graphs that conveniently illustrate the sufficiency or deficiency of the feed supply from the proposed pasture system. If a deficit remains after several sowing or fertilisation options have been tested, it may have to be met by supplementary feeding.
When you have chosen the combin¬ation of pastures or crops to meet herd requirements, you need to plan ahead:
- Identify areas for cultivation or direct- drilling.
- Decide timing of the operation.
- Assess the need for a fallow to increase soil moisture before sowing.
- Consider planting a break crop to reduce serious weed burdens, break the disease cycle and control the build-up of soil-borne pests.
- Control weed species that are likely to set seed and invade the new pasture in the first year after sowing.
- Concentrate stock to remove excess groundcover before ploughing, direct- drilling or using a herbicide before direct-drilling.
- Decide the need for pretreatment for hard-to-kill grass species such as Afric¬an lovegrass or giant Parramatta grass.
