One of the glories of an annual crop like rice is that you can choose not to grow it when there is no water, hence only 5% of our rice growers are growing it this year. For those rice growers without water we focus on other farm enterprises until the water becomes available. For me it is sheep.
I don’t know what its like at your place but we are having an exceptional Autumn here at Murrami. The ewes are lambing with a vengeance directly on to green feed with multiple births common; a complete contrast to some of the disappointing autumns that we have had to put up with in recent years.
April last year saw me travelling to Cootamundra once a month to undertake a short course in holistic grazing management. There we were told of the importance of ground cover, how to reduce overgrazing by increasing stock density and at the same time increase our profit.
Applying this new information to our individual enterprise was our homework. With the aid of a grazing calendar/chart displaying individual paddocks against the days of the week, overlaid with our own information including;
- Key management practices (shearing, joining, lambing etc.);
- Personal and family activities (holidays, meetings, etc,);
- Planned cropping.
One can set time for grazing in certain paddocks, in a sequence that is able to take advantage of paddock conditions and/or flock management events. Knowing which paddock to focus on for fence repairs was also an advantage as the stock pressure on these does increase with the higher stocking rate.
We are now in the third week of lambing (first week of April) and the progression from paddock to paddock has ground to a halt due to the risk of miss-mothering lambs, luckily its not a bad paddock for them to be in and with the rain, the feed should continue to grow and if supplementary feeding is required it wouldn't be any different to previous seasons. So I sympathise with the chaser bin drivers if it gets a bit wet underfoot, but the sheep have got to eat as well.
Scott Williams,
President Yanco RGA Branch