It seems that we have lost sight of what a good clover-based pasture looks like and have forgotten the skills to grow and manage it, says Doug Edmeades.
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High-performing hill country farmers love fertiliser.
Cameron Burnell
High-performing hill country farmers love fertiliser.
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A two-day symposium on hill country was held recently in Rotorua. It was well attended by 300 farmers, consultants and agricultural scientists. Clearly, there is a thirst for innovation, new technologies and knowledge in this sector.
The aim of the meeting was explicit: "What does a profitable and resilient future for our hill country farming look like?" And, "What do we, collectively and as individuals, do to achieve this future?"
The output of the symposium, and hence, one hopes, the answers to these questions, is to be formally captured in a "position paper". More on that after the paper comes out.
In the meantime my contribution to these questions was a paper, An assessment of the current fertiliser practices in New Zealand hill country.
The conclusion of the paper is blunt: A large amount of untapped potential in our hill country is due to poor, sub-optimal soil fertility.
There are several threads supporting this conclusion. My experience over the last decade sheds some light. For example in the last four years only two of the 760 farms we (agKnowledge Ltd) have visited presented with no nutrient limitations.
In other words, a large majority of hill country farms are underperforming because of deficiencies of one or a number of nutrients.In order of decreasing frequency the culprits are K, S and Mo.
In the paper we presented four real-life case studies. The actual or predicted increases in production from optimising the soil fertility on these farms were about 20 per cent.
More convincing, we have clients whose production is two to three times greater than the average – did you catch that – 200 to 300 per cent better!
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Why? They have one thing in common – they love fertiliser. No excuses, no mucking around! These farmers fertilise their farms to their full biological and economic potential. As one of these farmers told me; he learnt about fertiliser by watching the dairy farmers.
This attitude is manifest in not just their profitability but also in their pastures, which provide proof to my catch-cry, clover is a weed given the right soil fertility.
Serendipitously this can be seen in most districts. As dairy farming has expanded onto what was dry-stock country, suddenly the pastures are green and full of vigorous clover and ryegrass. Duh?
It seems that we have lost sight of what a good clover-based pasture looks like and have forgotten the skills to grow and manage it.
This problem has been insidiously creeping up on us over the last few decades or so. I can suggest some reasons for this.
There have been very few fertiliser field trials in the last 20-30 years and hence farmers no longer have a reference point - a mental image - of what a good clover-based pasture looks like.
Also, farmers have been given many reasons, other than soil fertility, for the decline in pasture and clover production: the flea, root weevil, poor pasture persistence, lack of pasture renewal and of course weather extremes.
These have become, in my view, excuses which have masked the real reason for poor clover growth – suboptimal soil fertility.
There are exacerbating institutional reasons too. Government policy since the mid-1980s has focused the two large fertiliser co-operatives to pursue market share, sales and profits.
Consequently, the fertiliser industry has placed less and less emphasis and time on providing sound technical advice to famers, assisting them to optimise soil fertility and hence pasture production, at the least cost.
Furthermore, the agricultural universities are no longer teaching courses in the basics of soil fertility and pasture nutrition and the CRIs are diverting their soil science resources into the important environmental-issues space.
There is currently no research on soil fertility and pasture nutrition in the CRIs, and hence there is no need for them to teach and retain the relevant skills in this area.
So how do we break this vicious cycle - my farm only carries 10su/ha and hence I can only afford $X on fertilisers and because I can only afford $X dollars on fertiliser I can only run 10su/ha!
We need, I believe, to upgrade our approach. Gone are the days where the fertiliser policy was set by one or a combination of such fiscally advanced reasons like: Do what we did last year – we got through okay, didn't we? Adjust the fert spend up or down to fit the budget – my God, the accountant will be impressed. Do what the neighbour did last year – he's a good bloke and his farm always looks green, right? Do what the salesman says – get away from the nasty chemical fertilisers and in any case what he sold me cost less than last year…. yeah right!
We now have the tools - the science and the software - to develop for a given farm fertiliser polices based on economic outcome.
The steps are simply stated: Establish the biological potential of the farm; establish the current nutrient status of the farm (soil and pasture tests); develop a fertiliser plan (ie the nutrient inputs and the least-cost fertiliser inputs) to get the soil nutrient levels into the optimal ranges such that profitably is maximised in the long term.
This is how I see "a profitable and resilient future for our hill country farming".
What am I doing it about it? agKnowledge, with funding from Agmardt, is currently testing a beta version of a new econometric fertiliser model for this purpose.
Dr Doug Edmeades, MNZM, is an independent soil scientist and managing director of agKnowledge. He was Federated Farmers' Agriculture Personality of the Year in 2012 and is a former Landcorp Agricultural Communicator of the Year.
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