Farming for feed security a lesson dairy farmers can teach beef producers

Terry Toohey, Padua Park via Casino, NSW, runs 300 Holstein milking cows and guarantees they each have daily access to 23 kilograms of dry matter.

At the moment that critical matter comes in a variety of products from grain and canola meal, which makes up 7.5kg of the total, combined with natural grazing on improved pastures.

This contributes seven to eight kilograms of dry matter, depending on time of year.

For instance, ryegrass paddocks have a lot more dry matter.

To provide the total nutritional levels required by the lactating herd, Mr Toohey invests in his own bunkered silage, which provides the balance right through a dry spring.

"In fact, I've now got two years' supply in front of us," said Mr Toohey, pointing to a mound of chopped and rolled biomass.

"To me this is like an insurance. If we have a bad winter we can fully feed everything on farm, including replacement heifers, to their full capacity for growth rates.

"It all comes at a cost, of course. But I've got the right feed at my fingertips where if I had to purchase in drought the quality might not be there. It's all about quality, not quantity."

Compared with best oaten hay trucked from southern districts in a dry spring, forage sorghum silage equates to one quarter the cost.

The Graze-N-Sile variety of dryland forage sorghum provides a large grain head on a slender stalk with the result that chopped crop, inoculated in the header front, ensiles nicely with good results.

The variety can also be chopped early and grazed on regrowth if managed that way.

This year's crop was planted into chocolate loam after a very dry spring at a rate of 7.5kg/ha. When it began to rain at Christmas the season never stopped giving.

Old fashioned heliothis was managed using a drone to spray paddocks two week before flowering.

New arrival fall armyworm got a treatment of Vanticore in mid February - eight weeks after sowing - at a time when the tiny grubs could be living in the growing whorl.

A final application of Alticore by drone was carried out two weeks before the header arrived to knock out FAW in the seed head.

"Planting early restricts fall armyworm development," Mr Toohey says.

"It doesn't rule it out, but does seem to help."

Last year's harvest yielded a feed that measured just one megajoule below corn at half the cost.

This year's harvest was handled by Queensland contractor Wayne Roach, of Master Chop, Warwick, and yielded 1880 tonnes off 40 hectares, or 47t/ha.

"For a header worth that much money you've got to make it work. It's unsustainable for someone like myself to own that machine," said Mr Toohey, who contracts for other farmers to do their round bale silage work, spraying and direct drilling.

"You can't do everything."

Meanwhile, what he appreciated about the sorghum silage was its ability to break down non-digestible fibre in the gut.

"The cows love it and it makes milk," he said.

Another advantage of the slender stalked grain, a variety of Sudan grass selected for seed head size, is the ease with which can be incorporated back into the soil.

"Sometimes we run a slasher over the so-called stubble but this year we'll just spray out the paddock with glyphosate and direct drill oats and rye grass," he says.

The intensively farmed black soil is double cropped annually and only out of production eight weeks a year.

As for the quality, Mr Toohey said a good silage was one that incorporated an early population of lactic-acid producing bacteria from the family of Lactobacillus, which feeds on plant sugars, kick-starting a fast fermentation that lowers pH to below 4, helping prevent spoilage.

But too much lactic acid wrecks the feed, making it unpalatable, so "improved" silage uses another strain of Lactobacillus to convert lactic acid into acetic acid, which inhibits yeast growth and subsequent spoilage.