Call for more money into pasture dieback research

Ben Hughes said they first noticed pasture dieback about five years ago and it came pretty quick in the first year when no-one knew much about it.

"For some years it hasn't been very bad at all, but it's generally the wet, humid years that are the worst. We did try controlling it with organic sprays originally, but they weren't effective."

Like a lot of other cattle producers, there are not many options for the Hughes family to control the problem, except to burn.

Mr Hughes said there was about 3000 acres (1214 hectares) affected this year, with a lot of dieback in their breeder paddocks.

"A lot of the areas where we have our bullocks and fattening country aren't too bad because they're on the flats and we can keep them slashed," he said.

"As I said, if you keep your grass down a bit in our country it doesn't seem to be affected as much when it gets rain and when it gets high.

"If it hadn't been for the El Nino prediction last year, we would have burnt more country last spring which may have alleviated our current problem of dieback."

Mr Hughes said their cattle would pick through the dieback pastures, but it was unknown how it affected production at this stage.

He said the majority of producers around Biggenden would be affected to a degree and some had burnt their affected grass and lost all their grass growth from summer.

Mr Hughes said they had not had dieback on Malarga as bad as they had it this year, even though it had been coming back every year since 2019.

"Our understanding of it is that the bugs come in after the fungus - it's some sort of fungal infection that the grass gets and then the mealy bugs come in and attack the crown root of the plant and kill it," he said.

"It's certainly getting worse and, I think, a lot more money should be going into research and trials - so many different grass species are affected by it, there's a few natives that aren't, but practically all introduced grass species are - and legumes aren't."

Mr Hughes said the expense and logistics of re-pasturing their paddocks was not an option, nor was locking up affected paddocks an option.

He said they had a lot of agronomists come out early on and they went to a lot of people's places to see what their issues were, but there was no solution yet.

"At the moment, we're just living with it," he said.

"If we get good rain in September, 75-100ml, we'll try to burn all this (dieback) grass to get it back to a clean slate and, hopefully, this area this time next year won't be affected because it's had a fire through it.

"But, you can't burn all your country every year because it's not good for the land."

Malarga is a 16,000 acre (6474 hectare) breeding and fattening operation that runs about 3500 head of Brahman cross cattle.

At a workshop on pasture dieback in Roma in January, DAF Rockhampton pasture agronomist Stuart Buck said that at this stage of their knowledge, prevention was not possible and eradication was not cost-effective.

"Multiple sprays will marginally reduce (mealybug) numbers, but you can never afford it," he said. "The only solution is to manage it, that's where I'm sitting at the moment."

DAF has produced a fact sheet to help graziers identify and manage the condition which causes the death of otherwise healthy pastures.

The fact sheet, which is available at www.futurebeef.com.au, outlines four management options based on eight years of research.

MLA says pasture dieback reduces the productivity of affected properties and has been observed in a range of soil types and plant species across Queensland and northern NSW.

Suspected pasture dieback should be reported through the Pasture Dieback App, which can be downloaded for free from the App Store or Google Play, or by calling DAF on 13 25 23.