As a part-time vet and part-time beef farmer, Panmure’s Stephen Warth is seeing the animal health benefits that flow from a diverse multispecies feed offering.
This year the farm’s multispecies pastures have been a “blessing in disguise” as the traditional ryegrass paddocks have failed to take hold.
Stephen has benefited from grants to fence-off and revegetate 1.5km of his farm to create a wildlife corridor along the Mt Emu Creek and to direct seed the eastern and western boundaries of the family farm as part of a carbon offset project and has planted trees through other parts of the property over the past four years to encourage diversity.
Now he’s encouraging other farmers to consider applying for a new round of LandLife Southwest funding to increase vegetation cover and adopt regenerative agricultural practices to help repair the local environment.
LandLife Southwest — a revegetation and regenerative agriculture program developed by Warrnambool Coastcare Landcare Network and designed to create a climate and drought-resilient agricultural industry — is now inviting expressions of interest from local landholders.
Stephen and his wife Kate purchased the farm from her parents four years ago.
Originally from Zimbabwe, he has come to the area with no pre-conceived ideas of what can or can’t be done.
He’s found from experience over the past four years that revegetation and the shift to multispecies have been beneficial.
“I can’t say to clients that I think this is what you should do for animal health reasons, if I haven’t done it myself,” he said.
“I want to know that it is beneficial and now I know that it is and the cows love it.
“This year the multispecies has been a blessing in disguise. We have predominantly ryegrass paddocks and just nothing came up.”
While he can’t tie up every paddock with freshly-sown plants, this year the percentage of multispecies has skyrocketed to 30 per cent of the farm, with Stephen wanting to spread the system across every paddock.
“The benefit to me is a healthier animal,” he said.
“We direct market our beef so we want it to be as good as we can make it. A healthier animal is our primary goal but this last year has shown the vulnerability of ryegrass on its own.
“It would be nice not to have to spend so much money to establish it, but diversity is always going to be the winner in the long-run.”
Other than boxthorn and hawthorn, the farm has little shelter and is benefiting from the riverbank and other revegetation works.
“There are benefits other than shelter from having that structure as it also attracts birdlife and insects and means carbon is getting injected deeper into the soil,” Stephen said.
Warrnambool Coastcare Landcare Network Senior Landcare Facilitator Geoff Rollinson said LandLife would help landholders to cope with the hotter and drier conditions that are now severely impacting south-west Victoria.
“We need to help landholders to build resilience on the farm and ideally head towards drought-proofing their enterprise,” Geoff said.
“Revegetation will provide shelter and shade for stock, multispecies pastures with deeper roots will help soil moisture retention at greater depth.
“Multispecies will also reduce the need for feed by doubling if not tripling pasture yields and volumes.
“Ryegrass is yielding at most 1.5 tonnes per hectare whereas multispecies is somewhere between four and 10 tonnes per hectare.”
Landholders can email Geoff Rollinson at facilitator@wcln.org.au for an Expression of Interest form. EOIs close Tuesday, September 30.
For further information, contact Geoff Rollinson on 0409 925 772 or facilitator@wcln.org.au