Finishing Cattle on Chicory

The “Finished by 20 Months” project is a Beef + Lamb NZ project supported by the MPI Sustainable Farming Fund and the Hine Rangi Trust. This project focused on how Northland beef farmers might improve farm profitability and sustainability through growing cattle faster and finishing them at a younger age.

John, Lurline and Peter Blackwell (who also owns a large fencing business) farm 345ha of rolling to medium hill country at Okahu south of Dargaville. The main component of their business is finishing 500 Friesian bulls a year. The calves are brought in at weights of 100kg or more and sometimes the bulls are only on the farm for four months before they are sold. The Blackwells also run a breeding ewe flock of 500 ewes. Almost 1000 lambs are produced on the farm each year including lambs from the hoggets.

The farm is intensively subdivided. The paddocks are three to four ha in size and then subdivided into 0.4ha units with a technosystem using polywire and fibreglass rods.

John participates in many off-farm activities, mostly on a volunteer basis, so he and Lurline run the farm very efficiently from a labour point of view. They can drive over the fences, pull wires along with the bike, and get their stock work – shifting up to 17 mobs of bulls – done in an hour in the morning. “We can cruise along at 50km an hour on our races.”

They have more paddocks than ha on the farm and three quarters of the bulls are shifted daily.

The Blackwells have been growing chicory since 2000, and some of their paddocks still have chicory in them from this time. They have 80ha which are chicory rich, although John says the first year is always the best year.

In Northland chicory has a much longer growing season than further south in the country. “It grows a bit like kikuyu and only slows down in July,” John says. “We are running our ewe replacements on chicory, sometimes from weaning to get them up and running. We get more than 100% docking from our ewe hoggets, and not many people can say that. It is related to the chicory.

Overall we get a 20% advantage in keeping our ewe hoggets off ryegrass pastures, which is related to the endophytes in the ryegrass.

We looked at the thistles and chicory problem here. Chicory is a close relation to thistles, and you have to be careful with chemicals. What we do is put sheep in to graze the chicory paddocks, then take them out and go back and broadcast MCPB chemical to control the thistles.

The chicory stays in the pasture because we have removed its leaves by grazing. I had a scientist here who looked at some strips of thistles I had left in my chicory paddocks because I had not overlapped the rows of spraying. He counted the chicory plant numbers under the thistles and there were the same number of plants under the thistles as where the thistles had been sprayed, so we hadn’t lost any plants through spraying.”

Young cattle achieved more than 1kg liveweight gain a day during summer and autumn when grazing chicory. Cattle grazing chicory attained slaughter weights at a younger age than cattle on ryegrass based pastures. With good establishment and management, chicory can be profitable within a beef system.

The results of the study show that chicory grew three to four times the dry matter compared with existing ryegrass based pastures during summer and autumn. Both herbage types showed similar growth during winter and spring in Northland.

Chicory carried twice the number of stock during summer and autumn compared to ryegrass based pastures.

Chicory herbage had significantly higher quality than ryegrass based herbage during summer and autumn at an average of 11.3MJME/kgDM, compared with 9.7 for ryegrass.

By May autumn born bull calves grazing chicory for four months were 44kg heavier than bulls on ryegrass based pastures.

By June spring born bull calves that had grazed chicory for five months were 76kg heavier than bull calves on ryegrass based pastures.

Bulls slaughtered off chicory showed heavier weights and better carcass yield.

Approximately half the liveweight advantage gained by grazing chicory was lost after bulls had been back on ryegrass based pastures for six months.

Farm systems modelling shows that establishing 7% of the farm area in chicory which lasts 2.5 years could result in an increase in farm profit of approximately $200/ha.

As well as participating in the Beef + Lamb trials, John has a long list of off-farm roles including:

• Kaipara Federated Farmers chairman
• 13 years on the Ruawai College board including 8 as chairman
• Two years as Kaipara District councillor
• First chair of the Northland Beef + Lamb council
• Judge for local Balance Farm Environment Awards
• Judge for Young Farmers Regional final
• On a local lake catchment group with the Northland Regional Council
• The farm was a case study farm for Beef + Lamb during the drought
• The farm is also used by the Beef + Lamb economic service for data collection.