After five months of rain the weather has now been relatively dry for two months, along with cool windy conditions. While the dry has been good for getting work done, there is some concern around the region over possible dry El Nino summer . Over the past month pasture growth on the Stratford Demonstration Farm has been relatively good, although it has mainly been strong ryegrass going to seed growth rather than better quality leafy grass and clover growth unless nitrogen fertiliser has been used. This is good but seedy growth has resulted in some pasture quality control challenges.
On the farm 16 per cent of the farm was harvested for silage at the end of October and a further 8 per cent is ready to be harvested this week. Crop yields were moderate-light so supplements made at this stage are only at a minimum level required. Hopefully there will be more surplus over the early summer. Some mowing of pastures ahead of the cows has been done to improve pasture quality and nitrogen is being applied with spring fertiliser to boost growth while silage paddocks are out.
The farm is currently being run as a two herd farmlet trial with one herd on all grass feeding with no supplement and the other continuing to have PKE supplement fed and higher milk production while still trying to maintain good pasture use and quality. The aim is to assess the benefit of feeding quality supplement to cows being adequately fed on pasture, looking at milk production, cow condition and mating effects. Both herds are milking 3.2 cows/ha and are currently on a 20 day grazing round which will extend up to 25 days when silage paddocks are back in. Both herds are currently eating around 15 kg DM/cow of pasture while the supplement herd is getting 2 kg PKE/cow/day on top of this. Milk production has dropped about 9 per cent from the peak to 1.62 kg and 1.8 kg ms/cow/day and 5.1 and 5.9 kg ms/ha for the control and supplements herds respectively.
This continues to be a reasonably good response to the supplement and it could improve over November while grazing some poorer quality grass and waiting for silage and mown paddocks to come back in .
The predicted effect of El Nino for Stratford is mixed. Over the past 40 years the three strongest El Nino years had one very dry summer, one average rainfall summer and one wet summer.
