A LOT of ingenuity has been invested in suppressing grasslands in order to grow a crop. Trangie, NSW, farmer Bruce Maynard instead applied some innovative thinking to a cropping method that boosts grassland productivity.
In the years before 1996, Mr Maynard had begun studying global trends and arrived at some unsettling conclusions about peak oil, water and fertiliser, and climate change, before these issues had hit the international agenda.
He began questioning how he could build resilience against these trends into “Willydah”, the 1500 hectare property farmed by five generations of Maynards—a family that pioneered the growing of wheat west of Dubbo.
In 1994, he introduced time-controlled grazing, and made rapid progress in improving pasture quantity and diversity while observing long-standing animal issues, like bloat and pulpy kidney, disappear.
What he calls “no-kill cropping” was born of his frustration at having to destroy the perennial grasslands he was building in order to crop the paddock. At the time, he was spending $30,000 to $40,000 a year on chemical, much of it to spray out pasture.
Experimenting in January 1996, he hung double-disc coulters from an old combine and, keen to test the unit out, sowed a few hundred acres of oats into dry mid-summer grasslands.
At the autumn break, he did another grassland sowing, this time into moist soil.
To his surprise and curiosity, the dry-sown oats shot away to comprehensively out-perform the wet-sown area. It was, Mr Maynard said, an “aha!” moment.
When crop seed is sown into moist soil, usually days after a rain event, grass and weed seeds already in the soil have a head start on germination. In the ensuing race for moisture, nutrient and light, the crop seed is a week or more behind its compeition.
Dry sowing, no-kill style, puts all seeds on an equal handicap. In addition, machinery doesn’t compact the dry soil.
The need to minimise competition led to another no-kill cropping principle: minimal sowing disturbance.
Soil disturbance kills existing plants and triggers the growth of weeds, natural colonisers of newly-disturbed niches.
For this reason, Mr Maynard advocates no tines, only disc coulters set to run in a straight line. The discs cut a narrow slot into the ground that the seed is deposited into, and following presswheels push the slot closed.
Discs, especially straight-running discs, are also far more energy-efficient, Mr Maynard found. He quickly realised that his no-disturbance combine could be easily pulled by his ute, which gave a fuel saving over his tractor of up to 80 per cent.
No-kill cropping uses no fertilisers, herbicides or pesticides. All these inputs add costs while simplifying biodiversity, Mr Maynard says, and that’s the reverse of the trends he’s seeking.
He instead points to research and personal experience which shows that the more diverse a plant ecosystem, the greater the diversity of nutrients drawn from the soil to build vegetation, which in turn is cycled back to the root zone by grazing animals and decay processes.
Plants diversity also supplies its own insect checks and balances. Many plant species hosting many different pests and their predators ensures that one population of insects doesn’t grow to plague proportions.
In Mr Maynard’s grasslands, plant diversity and nutrient cycling is managed by time-controlled livestock grazing. Livestock are “more movers than removers of nutrient”, in his view.
Short pulses of grazing encourage livestock to eat across all edible plant species, including the 400,000 saltbush shrubs the Maynards have planted since 1990. Trained to eat broadly, the cattle are not repeatedly grazing down a few highly palatable perennial grasses, leaving less edible species to flourish.
The effect of integrating all these ideas has been a farm that is more robust in every direction, Mr Maynard says.
The grasslands are more diverse, and they are producing more biomass. Animal health issues have vanished. The option of capitalising on high grain prices is still there, if used only occasionally.
The Maynards may not have made lots of money through a run of historically tough seasons, but they didn’t dig a financial hole either—and the land was set up to capitalise on this year’s stunning opening.
And instead of being tied to the farm, Mr Maynard has more time with his wife, Roz, and their three children; as well as the freedom to frequently hit the road to teach his landscape management principles in Australia and the United States.
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