The Russell family grows 15 ha of corn for silage each year.


The changes in irrigation and feeding have already had a positive effect on the farm in terms of production per cow.


soil characteristics ensures that irrigation scheduling stays as efficient as necessary. “Our farm is a farm of two halves. One half is fertile river flats and the other undulating hill country that is hard to grow pasture on without a lot of water. On the flats you can use the big gun irrigators and irrigate a lot of water very quickly, and it’ll handle it. On the hills, you want systems that put on small amounts of water regularly to suit that soil type, otherwise you’ll just be wasting the water that won’t get to the plants.” The main differences Will has seen from the use of effective soil moisture monitoring is in yields and the effect on the size of the herd his farm can support. “There is no doubt in my mind that by knowing to start irrigating earlier to keep soil moisture in the RAW zone, we are producing more feed than before,” he says. The Russell family grows 15 ha of corn for silage each year. This provides them with feed in late autumn and early winter. “We have really looked into the silages we use,” Will says. “We found that the corn silage, on our block that we can’t graze, gives us a cheap silage that works well with our grazing. It gives the cows energy, while they get their protein from grazing. It’s a good fit. And our milk price in the Bega Valley is good, so it makes sense for us to intensify a little bit. It helps us to milk a few more cows.”


Proportion of grazed feed In the past few years, the family has decreased the proportion


Will and his father Rob run 300 Illawarra dairy cows on their 130 hectares milking platform near Jellat Jellat.


of kikuyu grass on the farm to 50%, from a peak of up to 80%. They have replaced it with annual ryegrass, Italian ryegrass and perennial ryegrass. Early planting of ryegrass helps to increase the winter feed. “We try to match the grass in the paddock better to the herd demand,” Will says. “We just had too much kikuyu. When it really grows in the summertime, it gets away from you. And when it grows too much, it gets stemmy and stalky because you can’t get the cows around it quick enough. Then it be- comes a straw-like product with a low nutritional value.” This also helps the Russells to keep the cows grazing during the winter months. The family is trying to increase the pro- portion of grazed feed in the diet of the cows. The grazed portion per cow has already increased and the aim is for 2.5 tonne per cow. “We would have reached 2.5 tonne this year, but New South Wales has been hit by flooding in the last three months and it really knocked us around,” Will says. He also hopes to increase his herd size up to 350 in the next couple of years. “We’ve tried to push it up to 350 cows this year. We were getting there but with all the rain and the mud on the farm recently, we had a terrible run. We had to cull numbers back to 300. We will try again in the coming years.” But the changes in irrigation and feeding have already had a positive effect on the farm in terms of production per cow, which went up from 460–470 kg of milk solids to around 490 kg per year. “Our aim is 530 kg per cow,” Will says. “ Hopefully we will hit it next season.”


▶ DAIRY GLOBAL | Volume 9, No. 3, 2022 23


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