Monto graziers looking to cut production costs through soil and pasture improvement

As part of a Burnett Catchment Cares Local Property Tour last week organised by co-ordinator Hayley Webster, 23 graziers looked at multi-species pastures and talked about their experiences using plants and animals to activate natural biological cycles.

The day was led by John Moor of Growmoor Biological and had input from Tony Hodges of Williams Seed.

Graham McInnes of Cedar Creek Grazing said one of the main things involved in rejuvenating soils was the use of multi-species pasture.

"The philosophy behind your multi-species pasture is planting a mix of up to 12 to 15 different species at one time, " he said.

"What you're doing there is you're basically supplying a food source to all your different classes of beneficial bacteria and fungi in your soil because if you have a big number of species you're more likely to stimulate the microbial activity in your soil.

"More people are becoming aware of the importance these days of the microbial soil life underneath the ground as far as making nutrients more available to plants."

Mr McInnes said higher soil organic matter also improved water infiltration and soil water-holding capacity which in turn meant less irrigation was required for the same end result.

He said input costs had really skyrocketed over the last few months for a number of reasons including the Ukraine crisis.

Mr McInnes said he could not put a figure on what savings he had made as it was only early days, but it was all about trying to make their business more profitable.

"Most people on the land have a vision of trying to leave the country in a better state than they found it so at my age there's that aspect of it too," he said.

"But definitely more people are coming on board as we are facing a dramatic downturn in store prices at present and we've just had an increase in our electricity prices in irrigating in the order of 25 per cent plus for the particular tariff most people are on - and then there's the cost of fertilisers and availability of granular fertiliser so people are just trying to take on board some strategies that will help them through this period that is challenging."

The former dairy farmer said his operation covered the whole spectrum of the beef industry.

"We run breeders, we also background and we do finish cattle on grain," he said.

"We assess the market every week - grain costs, store prices and slaughter rates for cattle - so we're always looking what particular avenue we want to go down the next few months.

"Last year, for example, weaners were (selling for ) $7 to $8 a kilo live, ridiculous prices, so we actually sold weaners of our own and tried to buy back cheaper classes of stock.

"But this year, we haven't sold any of our own weaners because of the store price...we've hung on to our weaners and we will background those and carry them through to feeder weight and finish them on grain ourselves."

Mr McInnes said he and his son Lachlan had about 2000 odd acres on two irrigation farms that had been used for dairying for 90 years up until 2018.

"We mainly run Santa Angus X cattle, but we do buy in basically anything that's good value for money," he said.

"We tend to have 500 head - usually 300 backgrounders with 200 on grain at any one particular time, and a couple of hundred breeders," he said.

The 67-year-old said he did have to change his mindset a bit when looking at improving his pastures and soil, but he was looking ahead.

"As dairy farmers, we did pretty much the same thing every year - you planted your rye grass on the first week of April and you tended to use a fair bit of synthetic fertilisers to what appeared to be the best possible production from your pastures.

"So, the idea of using foliar fertiliser does offer an opportunity that is more efficient as the plants absorb it straight away through their leafs and there's less wastage and you use a lesser amount.

"It's very widely use in the horticulture industry already, but even in this irrigated pasture situation it will be adopted a bit more widely going forward."

Mr Moor, who has years of experience in regenerative farming, said this was his second visit to the Monto which he described as proactive.

"There's always a nucleus of proactive people that others feed off, so you get the early adopters and there's a couple of early adopters in this group who are really moving quickly and the rest are following and looking with interest," he said.

"I am an historical convertee of the fact that if we get the soil right first, the environment will follow (and) cattle are a huge part of that."

The summer multi-species mix that Mr McInnes uses contains forage sorghum, Siberian miller, corn, soybean, lab lab, cowpea, sunflower, sun hemp, forage brassica and turnip while the winter mix is comprised of forage oats and wheat, vetch, field pea, Persian clover, sun hemp, brassica and turnip.

Ms Webster said one of the key points of the day was the importance of farmers working out what their ultimate goal was and then determining what their country needed most to achieve that goal.