Biological Crops for Lamb Finishing

Returns for arable crops like grass seed, peas, wheat etc have remained fairly static in recent years while costs have risen. In Canterbury many arable farms have converted to dairy and quadrupled their income per hectare. Don Hart has resisted the temptation to go dairying and instead has diversified into growing pasture for silage both as a cash crop and to feed to the large number of store lambs that he finishes over winter. A succession of seed and forage crops also provide high quality lamb feed. Don’s regime would not be sustainable without biological fertilisers and compost applications to improve soil and enhance nodulation on the legumes he grows to the extent that he can reduce N inputs substantially.

A winner of environmental awards in the past, he now leaves the day-to-day running of the farm to one son and acts as an adviser to other biological farmers, and makes compost and several biological nutrients. He is also a pilot, and another son runs an aerial topdressing business from the property.

Don and Sandy Hart own a 330ha intensively farmed arable property between Methven and Ashburton. Crops include feed and milling wheat, AR31 and AR37 grasses, and peas and radishes for seed. He also grows pasture for silage, and rape and kale for lamb finishing.

“We generally sow about 60 ha of feed wheat and 50 ha of milling wheat if the price is right, but we are pretty flexible because prices are not always good and we need to add value to the things that we do,” says Don.

“Cropping farmers have really been suffering financially compared with other farm types that enjoy firm commodity prices. Worldwide there has been a bit of a glut in grain and grass seed and although we are coming out of it now the prices we receive give us no encouragement to remain in the arable sector.”

For Don, the wheels fell off the arable wagon about eight years ago. He felt that he had run into a brick wall as far as production was concerned. While fertilisers like superphosphate and urea had been responsible for dramatic increases, yields had plateaued and costs had continued to rise.

“We kept being told to put more on, and so we called it the moron approach. To get bigger yields we had to put more on but when we did that we found that we got more diseases, but they had a chemical that we could buy to fix that, so we put that on and then we needed a straw shortener because the crops were falling over and they had a chemical for that as well,” he says.

“And then we got insects because we had high nitrites and guess what, they had a chemical for that too. Very quickly the expenses got higher but the returns remained the same for 15 years, so we felt there had to be a different way.”

Don looked at alternatives, put on calcium in various forms and saw some improvements but didn’t understand why. So he went to the United States to look at biological farming and started to understand its concepts. For the past seven years he has been researching and applying biological techniques with the aim of improving soil productivity by increasing its carbon content.

“I started to feed the soil biology by incorporating straw, producing and applying compost and doing everything I could to build the humus content,” says Don.

“Along with that I used the Albrecht base saturation approach to bring soil nutrients into balance and once we did that we saw some dramatic improvements. The number of worms increased, straw broke down more easily and the soil became easier to work.”

Don’s next step was to look at trace elements. Prior to this, rhizobium nodules were virtually non-existent on his clover and pea crops but this year has seen a dramatic improvement – vigorous growth of roots that are “full of nodules”. Growing green manure crops, incorporating straw from other crops and grazing stock have been successful in reducing the requirement for artificial nitrogen.

“Throughout the world growing a tonne of cereal wheat requires about 25 to 27 kg of nitrogen, but we have been able now to reduce our purchases to about 12 or 15 kg,” says Don.

“That is really good news because when you produce nitrogen in a biological form it doesn’t leach and it is readily plant available. When you put on soluble N fertiliser only about a quarter reaches the plant and the rest is either volatilised or leaches out of the soil.”

Grazing stock has become an integral part of the nitrogen cycle on the farm and an important element in diversification to increase revenue. This year the farm will finish around 6500 lambs over winter. In recent years Don has grown grass as a cash crop for selling to other farmers as silage. However, this removes considerable amounts of nutrients from the soil, which have to be replaced. Finishing lambs on grass and silage is an excellent alternative that returns nutrients and provides income.

The farm is 260m above sea level and prone to winter snow so the silage is a very good feed reserve to have on hand. Three years ago they had to feed 6000 lambs on top of snow for 29 days, and none lost weight.

Both pasture and silage are of very high quality as are the other feed crops, says Don.

“They are really well balanced and high in nutrients so the lambs grow very quickly. Other than being drenched when they first come onto the property we spend very little on animal health,” he says.

“Some reach the target range of 20 to 22 kg within 8 to 10 weeks, and once they get up to weight they go, we don’t wait for markets to rise.”

Lambs are needed to control grass crops until the end of October because if they become rank the seed yield is reduced. A carefully chosen succession of other crops is also grown as lamb fodder.

“After the grass seed is harvested the grass is still growing and big mobs of lambs can graze it. Once the peas are harvested we direct drill rape along with a balanced fertiliser application, and we get 6 – 7000 kg of feed from that. It is really healthy and it doesn’t need to be sprayed for aphids or have any artificial nitrogen put on after drilling,” says Don.

“After a couple of crops of silage we grow kale for the lambs, and after that finishes, we sow a spring crop of wheat. We enjoy growing wheat but the prices are not good enough and neither are the prices we get for ryegrass.”

Don’s pet peeves are the low prices for arable commodities and the lack of recognition for the high nutritional quality and low disease status of his crops be they wheat, peas, silage or lambs. All around him other farmers have voted with their gumboots, making permanent changes that mean the whole arable seed market will soon be totally different, says Don.

“Everybody is going dairying and you can’t blame them. In this area there are very good water supplies, and once you’ve spent money on the infrastructure to bring the water to the farm and then irrigate it, built your cowshed and bought Fonterra shares then you are unlikely to change because the only thing that can support that financial commitment is dairying,” he says.

“It’s very sad. I have been trying for many years to purchase more land because we have good skills, I have sons who want to be involved, we have all machinery necessary and the capital involved needs to be spread over a larger area, but really it doesn’t stack up. The simple fact of life is that we are competing with dairying with all their financial structures and high returns.”

But rather than become a cow cocky Don and his sons have diversified. Son Andrew has taken over day-to-day management of the complex arable crop/lamb finishing operation and Don has set up a business advising other biological farmers. He also makes several thousand tonnes compost from wheat straw and manure from the Five Star Feedlot, and several other biological nutrients.

Don is also a pilot and while he still flies it is son Duncan who is now running the Skyfarmer aerial topdressing business and is busy throughout the year.

“So it’s not all bad,” he says, “but we are still a little envious of the returns our dairyfarming neighbours are making.”