Nyora farmer counts cost of beetle plague

Nyora farmer Claude Giorlando was hit hard by the African black beetle in autumn this year and estimates it cost his business over $100,000.

“In my 28 years of dairy farming I have never seen the damage to this extent,” he said.

“We spent over $50,000 on resowing and spraying because a total area of around 100Ha was over sown with most paddocks done three times.

“We also had to buy in vetch hay as we had no homegrown feed and that was an extra cost of about $100,000.

“It has set us back dramatically. Financially and emotionally.”

Mr Giorlando milks 400 cows on about 200 hectares and believes any information or tools to help raise the awareness more would be very worthwhile.

“To have the ability to be more proactive and deal with the situation better than we did earlier this year would be helpful,” Claude said.

“There are a million questions we need answers and information around.”

Insect pests cost Gippsland dairy farmers time and money, but new research is now being conducted to shed greater light on the problem.

To date, the challenge has been the variable nature across farms, regions and seasons. Even the types of insect pests change from year to year.

This in turn makes it extremely hard for farmers to determine the best approach, making it a costly exercise to sort out.

The research, supported by Dairy Australia, will work to pinpoint the insects damaging dairy pastures across all of Victoria, southern NSW, South Australia and Tasmania and lead to more accurate methods to combat the pests.

Dairy Australia program manager Richard Romano said an online survey had been developed as part of the research in order to improve our understanding of the type, distribution and frequency of major insect pests of perennial pastures across the south east Australia dairy regions.

“To ensure the research is as detailed as possible to quantify the situation and to find the best cost-saving measures, we are encouraging as many Gippsland dairy farmers as possible to complete the short survey,” he said.

“The survey work will also be used to help target R&D in the future.”

The survey can be found at www.surveymonkey.com/r/AUInsects

Meeniyan dairy farmer Brendon Martelli has had his fair share of insect infestations in the past 12 months – from black beetles and diamondback beetles to the lucerne flea more recently.

“We had black beetles take out 25 per cent of our autumn pastures, we always have problems with diamondback beetles on our crops and now we’ve just sprayed for lucerne flea,” Brendan said.

“We didn’t get the strikes in the autumn we normally do. The weather was a big player and it bought the black beetles. They definitely

did some damage.”

Brendan, who milks 300 cows on 120ha, said while there is a lot of information on insect pests available for farmers, it would be helpful to have access to something which helped identify each bug easier and quicker. Richard said he had heard from a number of farmers across Gippsland about different insect pests and the damage they were causing across the region.

“The dry conditions late last year and early this year were perfect for a variety of insects to come in and deplete thousands of hecatres of pasture from underground,” he said.

“And it looks to be another dry spell coming up, so we need to be more prepared to deal with them to minimise the costs.”