Relationship Management: Perennial ryegrass + white clover

[Music] Hi, you're with the Alan Juddy Show and this is Relationship Management, a guide to achieving harmony for your pasture plants. Don't let your forage mixes end in separation. As they say, "If plants are happy, cows aren't crappy." And here, to help with this relationship is our very own forage relationship expert, Alistair Morehead. Hi Al, in which relationship are we going to talk about today? Thanks, Glenn. Today, we're going to talk about a very iconic relationship for New Zealand farmers and that is the relationship between ryegrass, particularly perennial ryegrass and white clover. Ryegrass and white cl- iconic. I agree with you. So, in terms of ryegrass and white clover, what do you think good looks like? What's a good relationship? Well, that's a great question and as we all know, it's not always obvious on the surface what a good relationship looks like. But in the case of this ryegrass white clover, as we have this, how would you describe it tension between a ryegrass plant that excels in the cool and a clover plant that excels in the warm. And here we are trying to get the best out of those relationships. And I think good looks like a bit of white clover in a pasture all year round. And then for periods of time when the pasture is starting to come under pressure for quality, particularly in the late spring and early summer, we see clover contents rise to greater than 20%. Regally in literature, it's been quoted as 30% as an iconic sort of bigger for sheep and beef, particularly sheep production systems. And in dairy, I believe it, again, a target would be a 20% of total production. And I know that the industry struggles and hence this podcast. And so the first thing that I take from that is the fact that the what good looks like is not the same all year round. No, because again, this is you coming into a relationship with different expectations. And if you have this expectation that it's going to be happy and fun and everything's going to be the same all the time. In the case of pastures, that is not the case. Temperate ryegrass excels in cool conditions. White clover excels at and it's prime at 20 degree air temperatures. And when you're in a temperate landscape, the gap that is under 20 degrees air temperature is quite large. And so the gap when ryegrass is in its prime versus clover when it excels is very large. And so it is about having an expectation of the role of each of those species and recognize that we value white clover for other traits other than its quality traits. And that's nitrogen cycling. But to have a realistic expectation is to understand it is very hard to make white clover something that it's not. And growing excessive amounts of total dry matter when the air temperature is low is very, very tough. So the other question in it kind of relates to this is do you think in a past you can have too much white clover in your ryegrass white clover sword. Again, because this is a mixture and it's a relationship. The answer to that is that one of the, we have a primary component of the relationship. And all across grasslands of the world, grass is the dominant ecological steady state grassland component. And then your dikeots sit into other proportions within those pastures and white clover is a dikeye. And then it fills a natural ecological position in a stable grassland. So it is to have a scenario where you have too much clover, the reality is your grass is either thinned out, is dying, or is under attack from an insect that is attacking grass specifically, which allows clover to express itself over and above grass. So in those situations, I guess what I'm trying to get to is in those situations from a pastoral situation, the consequence of that is yes, we may have a very high clover content, but in fact, we may pay the penalty in terms of yield, for example. Oh, sustainable yield and cold conditions, openness of pasture, the more open your pasture, when your clover cycles down in cooler conditions, other cool species will start to explode into those spaces that the rye grass is left. So the discussion is the relationship needs to be in harmony. No one should not acknowledge that rye grass are particularly and grass in general is the dominant species of a grassland. Yes. Not legume. We manipulate this relationship to keep it in the agricultural optimum zone of which we've discussed anywhere between 10 and 20%, 20 and 30%, where possible, particularly in the summer when rye grass, particularly its quality declines and its performance declines with temperature. But at the heart and soul of it, rye grass is a dominant partner in a grassland. So if that's what good looks like and we're driving for clover contents in that range and we know that we're going to get a cycling up and down depending on the environment, what are the other things? So obviously environment is one, but what are the other things that other factors that impact that relationship in terms of trying to get as close to good as we possibly can? Absolutely. And I feel it's a journey of the start of the relationship and that sets the foundation for what your potentials can be immediately because after the start you actually, if you get it wrong, you actually have a long journey to get to the happier place in relation to it. And you could say for a lot of relationships, you don't start off so well. Absolutely. Take a while. So it really does start to site and paddock preparation. It comes back to soil testing, understanding limitations of existing landscapes and we've discussed this in pasture renovation, podcasts in the past. But there is no question that paddock fertility is a major driver of the success of legumes. And the majority of our our drive for pasture fertility is actually to provide an environment that is in favor of getting the best out of clover that we can. So we get an elevated nitrogen cycling process and then we actually get a bit of grassland because of that. So our parameters for phosphate use in New Zealand are all driven at a target to get more legume. We can have lower phosphate. Rhygrus will be okay but we won't get the legume contents that we're looking for and therefore available phosphate is a big deal. And in doing that, you're looking at pH, drainage, many soil characteristics that you're trying to fix and improve so we can actually get a healthy environment for, set the foundation for what clover to be successful in the relationship. However, that is the prep that is us doing soil tests, checking pH, looking at phosphate levels, probably keeping one eye on things like micronutrients as well. But the real a sulfur, phosphate, potassium, pH, all of these things are really key nutrients for setting the foundation for future success with the white clover. And then we come to sowing. And what we have with these two plants is a clover that is actually capable of germinating and at first emerging at quite a fast pace and very competitive with Rhygrus. But your tend to find with clover is white clover is that it's a taproot of plant and that goes from a seedling that it germinates very fast to a plant that virtually stops while it's pumping more reserves down into that taproot to form a bigger initial root structure where the Rhygrus germinates and then it actually continues to push up and then continues to push up with more tillers. And therefore it is actually a species that once it starts establishing doesn't really stop it just pushes on creates tillers, creates density. Meanwhile to get the success of the establishment we have to look at a couple of things and one of them is soil preparation or patch or paddock preparation. So if it's cultivation, it's firm and fine, if it's direct drilling, it's free of thatches and dense, dense material left on top of the ground. And in the case of cultivation, the firm and fine means that we get uniform placement, gives us the opportunity to consider broadcasting, roller drilling, or in the case of drilling, gives us the ability to place at about one centimeter of depth. This is a happy place for both clover and grass. Grass can tolerate being deeper, clover cannot. And so what you're doing is trying to find the happy place when you're not running the edge of that margin, which for example might be two centimeters deep for grass, but beyond two centimeters the amount of clover seed you put in the ground that germinates gets less and less very fast. So that prep is big, then looking at paddock preparation for drick drilling, having too much thatch on top of the ground in a direct drilling program is literally a landscape for slugs. And legumes are highly vulnerable to slugs during the establishment phase. And so the more trash we leave in a paddock that we'd start to to trick through the more vulnerable your legumes are to them. that also direct drilling has, it can have issues with depth control. And so again, conditions at drilling are really vital for the operator to understand where they're placing that seed because again targeting one centimeter in a direct drill program is quite tricky. And in a direct drilling world you may have a lot of more variability around the depth. So I guess one thing that's a bit of an elephant in the room and I'll get a comment from you is I think the preparation of the soil is going into and the process of drilling it's really important. What's your coming on on sewing right? Is there, I mean there's some general thoughts out there, but give us an idea of the way that you approach that. Well that's a great question and for me it is very, very simple. We have thousands of hectares a year so in and pasture and the highest principle that exists and that I must portray in this moment when we're trying to create balance is that we're also trying to elevate reliability. Yes. We are trying to achieve the first aim and first goal which was basically get our pasture established and not to have it fail. Also get it through to a grazing parameter as fast and as efficiently as the individual farm system demands. So for example there are any number of farm practices that the first established new pasture is also an important start of their winter feed program. So you are looking to sow seed and then move it into a winter grazing system almost immediately. Not a great practice but for dry land environments what you sow in the autumn becomes super valuable for grazing in the winter. For dairy and more extensive beef country you are still looking at getting to a first yield in a fast and efficient way. So initially for first and second grazing sowing rate does two things. When you have a sowing rate of rye grass at pretty much industry recommended rates. The purpose of those rates is to have a high level of reliability and a genuine speed to first grazing that is an intensive and efficient way. So we're aiming to get the greatest amount of success across the whitest landscape. You then come to me and say I really value white clover and I want to invest in getting a pasture with more white clover in it. And what we do is we back right off those industry recommended rates for the rye grass. Absolutely for the rye grass and we can come back down almost to half the rates. Now this is incredibly functional, absolutely doable but what you are doing is you are creating a much more open environment and in doing that you are giving up a little bit of initial yield and in that initial yield you have to acknowledge it from the start but what you are allowing is all that clover to get established and not get shaded out within a very short space of time. So then what moves forward is that pasture will normalise and by the following season you'll have a very very normal pasture but if you have insects you have slugs you have poor establishment conditions you don't have a lot of tolerance to exactly what happens. Also if you have a lot of weeds you don't have a lot of competition for the weeds that it might be getting established so you may be forced into using chemistry. So it is absolutely something I absolutely support which is a lowering of the rye grass sowing rate to get an elevated white clover content initially. Would you elevate the white clover sowing rate to get more white clover or that condition you could but relatively speaking you have still manipulated the bigger constraint which is the speed of rye grass tillering. Which is a really important point here because I think if you think about it logically or probably what springs to mind what you would say is if I want more clover there I just increase the clover rate but actually what you have described very well actually is to get more clover there you actually have to deal with the competing species not the clover. Correct. So the one seed one plant but the rules change with white clover because it spends its whole life sending out star lawns running away from its original taproot, spreading into space everywhere. So the prerequisite to having consistency of clover is to have space and that is the tension between what happens if you are in a world full of thistles. What happens if you are in a cold climate and suddenly that space just ends up being a lack of productivity and winter which could have been rye grass as an example. So these conflicts are there but it does move on very quickly to how do I do any of those practices and still maintain it because believe it or not that lower sowing rate of rye grass within 10 months will have almost the same density as the higher sowing rate. And so rye grass will keep developing, it will keep tillering and again will become an aggressive and dense plant that will continue to shade out and compete for space with white clover. And we will unpack that a little bit more because I think that is really important going that relationship is going to change over time and so these very or if we are driving for quite high clover content that maybe only we can sustain that for a period of time. Absolutely. And the other point that kind of floats in my head now is if we have got these very, if the desire is to have these very high clover rates and they may very well be for the reasons that we like high clover rate, we get good nitrogen cycling, we get good graze out of pastures, it's very useful for that from a fair quality point of view at the same digestibility, we get a much more energy out of those so the more energy efficient so that they're very good to have higher intake for example, they're very good to have in a sword. But in some environments where you might want a high clover content and some environments that's actually quite hard to, for the reasons that you've outlined, is quite hard to generate because you might be in a very cold environment and therefore high clover content is actually almost impossible to generate. Correct. And you've ignored the first part of the whole conversation. That is not the natural state. Yes, and that's not natural state. And therefore the relationship that is not actually the true natural long term relationship. And therefore if you are in one of those environments and you seek that, it's going to be very hard to generate. And sustain the relationship beyond a certain point of time. It's easy to do research on this topic in the 18 months, easy to do it in two years. Having a look at what that same sword and pastures looks like in a perennial pasture in five years will be very, very different to the glory days of the artificially manipulated structure that we are always trying to achieve in modern agriculture because we absolutely want to get the best for our farm system out of every phase. But the only judgment of whether you've got it right is what is your pasture look like at year three to five. And so you've talked a lot about the establishment phase and getting that in the sword at start. What are some of the things that can undermine that relationship from a management point of you going forward? And I think we've discussed dropping some rate as a tool. My attitude is a little bit along the lines that the reason that's important is openness and space and light. That clover thrives with light. Will light stimulate stone on development. And the reality is with an upright, densely tillered and very aggressive autumn and winter growing species. The reality for ryegrass is it absolutely takes all the light off the ground. That's why well established ryegrass pasture with time, you have a lot of pressure on even having weeds getting established. They are often clean and they stay clean once the primary weed species are taken out. And that's because they compete for light over time and fill in space. So in this case the reality for me is we look after our grass too much quite regularly. We value high yields regularly. Long periods of high yields are very, very shading to the base of the pasture. It's even tough on ryegrass at times. Stopps d'autéle is continuing to develop with light because you've literally shaded them. So the higher the covers you maintain, which we often do, we go from autumn sowing as an example to first grays and then a winter deferred pasture for a spring, late winter early spring grazing in a dairy system. And a sheep and beef system will go from an autumn sow, might do a quick nap off at the top which I highly recommend. But then we will shut it up to a higher cover because it's a young vigorous pasture and it will develop the mass that we can then use for a wintering system. So we go from establishment to wintering. To have wintering you have cover. Having cover is shading and that is what is torsing the biggest harm. I feel what we've got to acknowledge is some of the best practices is consistent regular return grazing and not high covers. Even the dairy type high covers are too great to maintain stability and going a little bit faster in winter, taking the top off more regularly, keeping things more open through the winter months. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a little bit of the same thing. So we're going to do a little bit of the same thing. grazing, not being afraid of low residuals in that first three to four months of establishment, low residuals are actually your friend at that time. Those residuals are definitely going to build up come springtime, but the reality is where you keep it open, white clover will flourish. Do you think there's a problem, and you talk about shading, are some of their late heading grasses that hold that density for much later in the season? Do you think they are harder for clover to flourish? I think our experience with these sort of grasses that are highly productive, they are highly resilient to grazing, but it still comes back to the probably the farm system, where we love to have covers. And it's the covers that are the issue, not the grasses. So the bigger point is the longer you hold high covers, the more you feel with young pasture particularly, you're worried about hitting target residuals. If those residuals are thick and dense, you can go lower. Those grasses that are thick and dense have been designed to graze lower. And they will bounce back and they will recover, but most importantly, if there's light after your grazing residual, there's opportunity for clover to actually stay present. So this is the challenge we have with actual residuals. It's a management structure built for everything, but actually there's certain types you have just described, one, the dense sort of late flaring types that can be quite frank, are designed to be grazed quite intensely. And I wonder, get a comment from you here, the timing of that, right? So you can imagine that early in the season when things are still quite cool, the timing of those lower grazings may not be quasi as effective as later when the temperatures are warmer and the clover is active, making sure that we are giving some space at that time, would make clover more successful. Yeah, exactly. So you're getting in a tight spring rotation once you get to balance day using the dairy analogy. If you keep a tight rotation, good utilization figure, hitting residuals, which I think is going to be harder and harder in the dairy sector is to continue to hit your residuals. But you hit those residuals, you give that spring conditions with light coming in, you're giving that clover a chance to start building up mass that when the temperatures, the air temperatures are hitting your 20 degree air temperatures, it is present and it's got my momentum to keep growing. With our whites just putting in perspective, that's why we're sort of valuing that autumn winter elevator growth phase. Relatively speaking, it's a small numeric figure. It doesn't add a lot to its total yield, but if it's actively genetically trying to grow in winter, at least it's there for spring. One other comment and it's one that gets asked a lot here, and I think when we're talking about covers and shading, that it's an interesting add-on, or it should be in that same conversation, the use of nitrogen, and it's often described as nitrogen, is not very good for clover. Yeah, correct. I guess take me through the what's actually happening there in terms of the application of nitrogen and clover content. Yeah, right. There's two baseline philosophies that's sitting with the nitrogen legume part of that relationship, and that we value the weight clover for its nitrogen fixation potential. We identify that the use of nitrogen may make the clover plant, remember the rhizobia is not the clover plant, the rhizobia is free living, and it is taking aerial nitrogen into committing to plant available nitrogen in a symbiotic relationship. However, the plant can actually certainly navigate the rhizobia, and actually go and get its own nitrogen, and therefore reduce the draw on the rows so it would be a two-beer's active. That's okay. It is what it is. That's not the bigger issue. The bigger issue is actually, I'm now growing more pasture. It is as simple as that. The harm with nitrogen use is as simple as, am I eating everything I grow effectively in a timely manner? So if you eat it and hit your residuals and even come back in a faster rotation because you're using nitrogen, it is much less an issue on weight clover content that is projected. We focus on the inefficiency of the clover nitrogen fixation, but the reality is we put nitrogen on to grow more pasture, and that it becomes a weakness when you don't convert it and you don't eat it. Yeah, so actually, nitrogen in the system is a good thing for clover as long as that doesn't result in an increased-- In shading. In shading. Correct. And quite often, just putting in the perspective, you then go into a silage system or a hay system, and you watch what bounces back first after a huge drawdown of nutrient to create a really large, high-quality silage paddock. You watch what bounces back first. It is literally the clover's because you've just taken a huge amount of nutrient, often that big silage or a hay event, and the clover's have all the light exposed, and if they're still there in present, they bounce first because that ryegrass has just been depleted. The legume now has been triggered back into its advantage where it's got the really made nitrogen coming into it, and it explains on that sort of horizontal leaf coming out of a post-silage cut, you just need the clover to be there to start with. So in terms of a bit of summary now, being a fascinating discussion, let's just bring us back to those key points, and those are around, first of all, what does good look like? And we're saying, well, good is probably in that range of sort of 20 to 30% clover in a swad. If we've got more than that, we're going to pay some penalty in terms of yield, and it's actually quite difficult to live there just because of the biological system that it is. And we didn't mention that, but yeah, typically you find legume cycles go on at like a three-year rolling roller coaster where you can go into a nitrogen-deficient landscape, grass growth drops. This is an apprenial state. Grass growth slows down on the shoulders because the nitrogen landscape declines. That gives the advantage to the white clover, and then for a period of one to two years, that clover content continues to build up in the pasture. It peaks at year three, and then it's cycled so much nitrogen, it cycles grass production up again, which then impacts clover content over time. And so you see in the long-term ecological state, you get a three-year curvy system where nitrogen content in the general grassland builds up with excess of, you know, with clover being successful, but that success leads to the grass partners success, which then constrains the clover success, and then cycles that up and down phase in nitrogen. We're trying to manipulate that in dairy, particularly with nutrient use. So coming back to the, if we are deciding that we are in environment, we are in a system where we are looking for increases in clover, let's just run through those things in terms of establishment and management that are going to lead us to these higher concentrations of clover. First things first, look at the nutrient profile of your paddock. The majority of the nutrients we focus on are actually being applied to give us the best chance of getting a good relationship with white clover in our pasture. It's actually not for the grass. Nine times out of ten, it's for the clover. So all that effort at the start, all our capital fertiliser, all our watching soul for levels, pHs, is focusing on creating an ideal environment that we can make white clover thrive in the relationship. I think that is the starting point. The first point is to still go and acknowledge what great looks like. Great looks like that 20 to 30% at the key time of year, which is where white clover can do that, which is not all year in the relationship, because it just doesn't thrive in a relationship when cool conditions, it thrives in the hot times, not the cool times, or the warm times. And so what good looks like is getting a 20 to 30% white clover content right when you need it most, which is November to December, maybe January, and then summer will define exactly what happens. It likes it warm, when it's really hot, who knows. And then we keep coming back, get the soil conditions right, then it's the delivery of the seed, recognising that white clover and rye grass are delivered as a partnership in seed, but they're not an equal partnership in the way they establish. And therefore you need to be thoughtful with the way you place the white clover, which is vulnerable to depth, you also need to be thoughtful about the landscape you driftrill into, because slugs are absolutely devastating for legume establishment. And so you need to think about that. And then sowing rate in that combination, it can, if it is an absolute passion project to get lower, higher clover content initially, looking at the sowing rate of the rye grass is something, but you give up a little bit, you create vulnerability, you actually put yourself in a position where you may need to use herbicide because of the lack of competition. And these are all things that may impact you in later date with your clover content. So you do need to acknowledge all those things. And then it becomes the journey is simply don't store feed if you want clover content in young pasture. Use your feed, rely on the genetics to regrow, try to keep your pasture as open as possible for as long as possible in that first 10 months, because in that window of time your clover needs a light to continue to develop and create itself in that pasture. Big tool pasture fits our feed systems and our animal grazing requirements. And that is the tension between the relationships outcome for the farm system. and how those two plants work together in young past year. - Well, I don't know whether we should be actually giving out too much relationship advice. - I think I was to think so, Jody. - But actually, that I think's a pretty good recipe for a long and stable relationship between ryegrass and clover. So I think we've picked that part pretty well. I think this session of relationship management is now over and I think it's we know how that relationship now hangs together. So thanks for your advice. - Thank you, you're welcome. - To find out more about this relationship and others, please contact your local agricom representative or visit agricom.co.nz. (upbeat music)