Preparing autumn pastures

What a fantastic season Victorian beef producers have had so far, enormous spring pasture growth, grain, hay and silage surplus, not to mention the cattle market prices.

With all these ducks lined up let’s not take the eye off the target.

It’s important to get paddocks ready now so that your pastures have every chance to kick off with the autumn break.

A few simple steps, these being: keep pastures vegetative, remove the dry trash, renovate problem paddocks or areas that have been damaged, and most of all keep cattle well fed.

With the current prices you want your cattle growing as every kilogram of extra live weight is valuable in the market, or gets your stock to market faster, improves conception rates and/or better calf growth.

Good autumn growth sets up the farm for a good winter: stronger plant establishment, deeper root system and a more resilient pasture that grows more feed for your autumn pasture wedge for winter, confusing? Not really, just follow a few simple steps; Rest your productive paddocks. These are the paddocks that have carried the stock through summer, have short green feed and a more responsive pasture base for any late summer rainfall or an early autumn break.

Start grazing those heavy trash paddocks that have residual pasture left over from spring, or stubble paddocks, if you are a grain grower.

This may not be the most nutritious feed for your cattle but if rotated through, or better still, strip grazed, stock will take the best out of the paddock and trample the other dry stems and seed to ground level.

This gives a good mulch layer for seed germination and protection of the emerging plants.

Keep the rotation going on these paddocks until the autumn break arrives, then rest these paddocks for six weeks to establish the pasture.

By this time those green summer paddocks will have accumulated some feed base that you can also maintain a grazing rotation.

A slow rotation is best for pasture, therefore, feed some hay or silage.

This will ensure the cattle do not overgraze or complete the rotation too fast.

A 35 day rotation would be ideal after the autumn rain arrives and if supplemented with hay or silage will keep your cattle well fed.

If you are concerned about pastures being damaged or do not have the paddocks to hold stock back on, consider a sacrifice paddock, which could be one or two of those paddocks with the excess trash.

Once again, feeding some quality hay or silage balances up the protein and energy with the fibre from the dry pasture, you will be surprised how well the stock perform.

For every day you are able to feed the stock in autumn it will save you two days feed in winter.

As you know, the warm autumn days grows pasture faster than the cold winter days.

Give it a try and see how you go, what do you have to lose?

Now for those poor pastures, or as one of my BetterBeef group farmers calls it, the areas which are a bit “threadbare”.

Just run around the area (not the whole paddock) with a smudger followed by a seeder or even a spinner dragging some mesh behind to cover the seedwill work wonders on those areas that have been damaged and need reseeding.

Mid-march is the best time to sow the pasture seed, even sow into dry soil if you have to, just get it done before the soil temperature drops.

Rest these areas for six weeks and they will be productive in no time.

If you need the paddock to graze put an electric wire to exclude the stock from that area until the new pasture is established.

The final tip is to set your rotation by leaf growth stage of the grass species, three leaves for ryegrass, four leaves for phalaris and five leaves for cocksfoot.