Growing choices for forage

Product development manager for AusWest Seeds, Frank McRae, said the dry summer had a big impact on seed production, particularly with crops such as millet.

This could be a problem for livestock producers from about Dubbo north where the season had been relatively dry, and who would be “desperate” for paddock feed, he said.

However, summer forage business manager for Pacific Seeds, Maree Crawford, said the company had not been affected by the seed shortage because all its seed production was done under irrigation in Western Australia’s Ord River.

Pacific Seeds, along with DuPont Pioneer and Nuseed, are among the leaders in production of summer forage crop varieties in Australia, with Heritage Seeds also becoming a more prominent player.

These companies have new varieties of forage sorghum and maize on the market with more are on the way.

Pioneer this year made a full commercial release of its forage sorghum-Sudan hybrid, SSS, which stands for Super Sweet Sudan.

The company’s sorghum breeder, Ivan Calvert, said SSS was suited for both intensive grazing and haymaking.

He said it was a high-tillering line which recovered well from grazing and grew best in high rainfall area anywhere from Queensland’s Darling Downs, the NSW North Coast and into northern Victoria.

“It yields very well and you can graze it multiple times, or do multiple cuts for hay,” Mr Calvert said.

He said, however, the variety needed more specialised management particularly in relation to seed bed preparation.

“It’s important to plant into good moisture but seed-soil contact is also very important.”

Mr Calvert said this meant farmers needed either to use seed press wheels at sowing or come back after sowing and roll the paddock.

He said Pioneer had other forage sorghum types in the pipeline

Nuseed Pty Ltd has a new Dudan hybrid, called Nudan, which features among other things a very fine stem which gives it a high leaf to stem ratio and allows it to dry much more quickly when baled.

Sales manager for northern NSW and Queensland, Neil Weier, said it was a robust and leafy line well suited for round bales but not so much for pit silage.

“It is also good for free range grazing, especially for sheep,” Mr Weier said.

In the past year Nuseed had also taken over the HSR range of forage sorghums

Northern grain crop manager for Heritage Seeds, Todd Jones, said companies such as Pioneer had “set the bar pretty high” for forage crops but Heritage was starting to produce material that was competitive.

Last year the company had released two new maize hybrids, HM102 and HM114, suited for silage production for dairy and beef cattle industries.

Mr Jones said HM102 was suited to anywhere from the Atherton Tablelands in Queensland down the coast to the Hunter Valley, and HM114 was a quicker maturing line, and both were suited to more intensive beef and dairy operations and irrigation, but for dryland areas forage sorghums were the “fallback”.

He said Heritage’s new forage sorghum line, Stargrazer, was a quick maturing line continued to impress and did well under intensive management and needed to be grown on fairly small areas.

The company also had other sorghum varieties, including some longer season lines, due for release in the next 18 months to two years.

Northern NSW territory manager for Heritage, Tony Stewart, said a cowpea line called Ebony, bred by the CSIRO about 15 years ago and featuring resistance to Phytopthora root rot, was still increasing in popularity.

This year Pacific Seeds has its new forage sorghum-Sudan cross, Ninja, on the market.

The company rates it as highly suited for dairy and beef cattle and for silage production, and suited for hay making and grazing by sheep.

It has high dry matter production and is highly suited to areas where corn is a high risk crop.

SUMMER forage crops play an important role in the diverse operation of Casino district farmer, Paul Gooley.

Mr Gooley with his wife Susan run two properties totalling 242 hectares – one to the east of the town and the other north-west.

They are known respectively by their locality names, as “The Clovass property” and “The “Dyraaba property”.

Mr Gooley’s operation includes growing and baling forage crops and they sell 2000 to 3000 bales a year.

They also background trade cattle for feedlots, running up to 500 head at any one time, as well as growing maize for the gritting and feed markets, soybeans, and do some contract baling and land levelling.

“For our forage production we try to focus on a quality product,” Mr Gooley said.

“We fertilise pretty heavily and we irrigate from the Richmond River using travelling irrigators.”

Last year Mr Gooley trialled the forage sorghum variety SSS (Super Sweet Sudan) developed by DuPont Pioneer.

The performance of SSS had been exceptional, in a season when conditions had been “just too dry” for the millet, said Mr Gooley, pictured right with BGA AgriServices agronomist at Casino, Dom Hogg, inspecting one of the Gooley’s paddocks of SSS.

Because of the high value of fodder last summer, he had baled and sold the crop, rather than graze his cattle on it.

“We’ll definitely plant it again, in fact we’ll probably consider replacing the millet with this,” he said.