The Australian Farmer

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the australian farmer

So how can farmers minimise these hidden losses? Well, like anything hidden, trying to unhide them would be a good place to start! Clearly if the losses were measurable and quantifiable, it would be a lot easier to do something about them. This is what we are doing with P1a project of Dairy UP, a large collaborative program for the NSW dairy industry led by the University of Sydney’s Dairy Research Foundation and co-delivered together with the NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Dairy Australia, and Scibus. The project is exploring new management options using advanced remote sensing technologies and monitoring systems to ‘unlock’ the potential of Kikuyu-based pastures, dominant in NSW and Queensland pasture-based dairy systems. By measuring pasture remotely and working alongside 15 dairy farmers, at Dairy UP we’ve been able to monitor grazing management closely and estimate hidden losses of pasture utilisation.

slower the regrowth. From the eyes of the farmer, the paddock just took longer to be ready for the next grazing. A hidden loss, and a big one. Do this 2 to 3 times per year and there go, easily, 2-3 tonnes of dry matter per hectare of pasture that could have been grown, but were not. An example of poor utilisation is in waiting too long to start grazing (i.e. accumulating excessive pasture cover or biomass before grazing), which is the most direct path to also get and excessive residual post-grazing! Monitoring residual is important, but most of the time the answer of a poor residual is in the previous management: the greater the pre-grazing biomass, the harder it is to graze it down to an adequate level, without ‘forcing’ the cows to graze down and reducing their milk yield. This is quickly noticeable in a dairy farm given the ‘thermometer’ of the daily milk yield in the vat! The advantage dairy farmers have over other livestock production systems!