Summer Pastures

Wow. What a summer it has been so far here in country Victoria. Between the heat and the fires and now the beautiful temperate weather with a decent bit of rain, it has been a really weird summer full of stress and uncertainty. We have been very lucky here at Pine Hill to escape direct fire threat, though it looked bad for a few days there, and we are very mindful of our friends and communities around us that are doing it tough right now. Summer is not over, though, so we are not relaxing just yet! To be honest, it feels like we'll never be relaxed again.

But on to more blog-relevant things! I thought I would do a post about managing pastures in the hot dry of summer. When I say 'pasture' I mean the grass that is growing in your paddocks, I don't mean the 'improved' green stuff that farmers/croppers grow for hay or cattle. I specifically want to talk about the mix of mainly native with some introduced species of grasses we have actively encouraged on our property. This mix of grasses seems optimal for horses and we have never had a case of laminitis, obesity or colic in our horses while grazing on this kind of pasture.

The following two pics are from late spring. We obviously had OK rain (still below average but far better than our friends in NSW and QLD) and we made a really concerted effort to rest paddocks for a number of weeks to give spring grass the opportunity to grow. We have found the number one thing we do that makes a big difference to grass coverage and quality is spelling. When grasses have a decent opportunity to recover, they do it with a vengeance. All the fertiliser, foliant and soil conditioner in the world won't do squat if the stocking rate is static and your grass never gets a chance to grow.

This paddock had a good 10 weeks' rest. You can see the green shorter grass and longer yellow grasses in there. Both are natives - I think the yellow is 'hairy panic' (I shit you not, that's its name!) and the green is either kangaroo or wallaby grass. I talk more about this paddock further down as its taken a lot of work to get it to this point!







The paddock on the right (featuring the gorgeous Irish girls Annie and Rose), had a big spell of about 4 or 5 months over winter. This paddock is a bit of challenge because of the stand of radiata pines that grows on the top of the hill off to the left of this photo. This species of pine, commonly used in plantations for decking and playgrounds, really acidifies the soil. Nothing but weeds grow beneath these trees, unlike the native pines that grow around our place. So, I sprayed this paddock for flatweed in the autumn and left it. It's already quite improved. That black rock is granite and there is a lot of sub-surface water in this area. Don't be fooled by the green strip - that's flatweed I missed! The whole paddock looked like that.

The second big thing that affects our pasture is when the dung beetles really kick off. The manure on the left has been 'dung beetled' and you can see the flattened, chewed up appearance of the dung. The beetles have essentially processed the manure, sucking the water out of it and burying it in the soil underneath in a series of holes, some up to 10cm deep. This obviously conditions the soil over time and provides much-needed organic matter. We LOVE our dung beetles.

A by-product of dung beetles is the protection it gives the soil and grasses underneath the dung from the drying heat of sun and wind. You can see the green grass shoots pushing up through the manure and around the dung pile itself. Yes, some of this is nutrient-driven, but the manure acts as a mulch, too, and I think this has quite a positive effect over summer.

Good for our native birds, but not so good for the dung beetles, but the beetles are a great source of protein! The magpies, along with the water birds that flocked to our place this summer because of the drought to the north, liked picking through manure for the beetles. Bummer, but hey, I can't speak ill of the maggies. They are wonderful birds and they didn't do much damage to the beetles population!

The dung beetles were really late and a bit patchy this summer. I heard from other dung beetle monitors that the beetles were not at usual levels by December, and it was interesting that we had a really high number of E. fulvus but very few of our other, more common species, like O. aygulus, O. binodis and O. taurus. However, by mid-January, O. fulvus was on the definite decline (or at least back to more usual levels) and the other three species were in much more abundant numbers. Not sure what to make of that. We had a couple of very cold nights quite late in the year (November) and some very hot days very early in the summer (40 degrees plus), so that may have affected the breeding and emergence of some of the beetles.

 These next two photos show the grass cover we've managed to maintain this summer. You can see the smoke haze in the distance - this was before the big fires really took off to our south and we couldn't even see those hills in the distance! This paddock had been spelled for about two months and had received about 10mm of rain in that time.

The diversity of grasses is pretty clear in this lower photo. This is a different paddock, one that has been pretty difficult to get to this point (this is the paddock I mentioned at the start of the photos). Situated on a big open slope, with no mature trees to date, this paddock was just choking with flat weed. I have sprayed it at least four times over two years with MCPA, mainly to knock out the flatweed, but also twice in spring as stork's bill really took off.

There is a big soak running through this paddock and I planted five trees when we first arrived, all of which are now established and three feet tall now. The big black lump is a granite rock and you can see the gully we are now fencing off and rehabilitating off in the distance at the top of the photo. Because of the water within the soil, I have had to be very careful about timing of the herbicide application. Too wet and it will contaminate the water course, too dry and the dying weeds will just leave big bare patches of dirt that will either blow away or be colonised by other weeds.

The take home message here is that, once summer hits its really too late to do much to improve the grasses you have. Summer is not the time to be putting down fertiliser or trying to grow grasses. Unless it rains a lot! But putting the work in during the Autumn to Spring seasons planting trees, spelling paddocks, applying soil conditioner or foliant, moving away from chemical wormers to encourage dung beetles, all of this will vastly improve your likelihood of maintaining grass cover over summer. Drought is a whole other thing, but there is now an expanding area of research into approaches like natural sequence farming that essentially drought-proof your property. That's our next holy grail!