FARM VISIT ▶▶▶
Improving home-grown feed on the farm
Australian dairy farmer Will Russell is working on higher milk production per cow. Pasture management and better feeding practices have already led to many improvements on the farm.
BY RENÉ GROENEVELD, AUSTRALIA CORRESPONDENT W Profile
Farm: Will (pictured) and his father, Rob, run 300 Illawarra dairy cows on their 130 ha milking platform. Location: Bega Valley of New South Wales. Feed: Will also started to use smart irrigation technology to grow more feed and increase his herd size. He grows 15 ha of corn for silage each year. With grazed feed the family has decreased the proportion of kikuyu grass on the farm. They have replaced it with annual ryegrass, Italian ryegrass and perennial ryegrass. Early planting of ryegrass helps to increase the winter feed.
ill and his father, Rob, run 300 Illawarra dairy cows on their 130 ha milking platform near Jellat Jellat, in the Bega Valley of New South Wales. Will is a sixth-generation farmer. He
returned to the family farm three years ago. “When I was back at the farm, we did a farm analysis as part of a workshop by Dairy Australia,” Will explains. “We went through the farm’s data over the last few years and found that our cows could probably be fed a bit better.” Will decided to focus on improving his pasture management and irrigation knowledge. “Feeding the cows better gets us
more milk from them. We knew we wanted to use home- grown feed rather than buying it in. We also realised we were feeding them too much silage. You never get as good a prod- uct in silage as you do out in the paddock with grazing.” The New South Wales farmer first reduced the number of paddocks on the farm from 30 to 21, to offer his cows better feed availability. Will: “It improved our grazing management. We were able to give the cows higher quality feed. Bigger paddocks gave us more accurate pasture allocation, resulting in better post-grazing residuals, between 4 cm and 6 cm.”
Right amount of water Will also started to use smart irrigation technology to grow more feed and increase his herd size. “Irrigation is a huge part of how we grow feed,” he says. Technology like soil moisture probes with real-time telemetry has become an integral tool for Will. Using technology to monitor soil moisture also ties in with Will’s studies in mechanical engineering. For Will, the key to reading the probe data is to ensure a pas- ture’s soil moisture stays within the readily available water (RAW) zone. Maintaining soil moisture within the RAW zone enables plants to most easily access water and use saved energy to develop. Getting the right amount of water into the soil is an important part of Will’s farm management. He was a partner in the Smarter Irrigation for Profit Phase 2 program. “It helped us to make better watering decisions,” he points out. “We have every different type of irrigation system you can think of, including a 25 ha centre pivot. Up until now, one of our biggest irrigation challenges has been getting the timing of start-up right, but with the soil moisture data this has become a lot easier.” Before installing the probes, Will says, he was always pushing out irrigating until it was sometimes too late and the soil moisture had depleted too much. “The technology we’re now using tells us in black and white: ‘We need to irrigate now’,” he emphasises.
Will is a sixth-generation farmer. 22 ▶ DAIRY GLOBAL | Volume 9, No. 3, 2022
Producing more feed Having this information for varying soil types is important as the responses can be different. For example, lighter soils will lose moisture more readily, and heavier soils may become saturated under the same irrigation management. Will says accurately monitoring the soil moisture for different
PHOTO’S: WILL RUSSELL
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