Productivity driven sheep profits are hitting a ceiling in traditional mixed farm (sheep/crop) enterprises. The autumn winter feed gap is a period of the year that limits stocking rates and per head growth rates, due to lack of available feed. Current practice is to hand feed, with lower stocking rates.
Crop grazing is something farmers tend to fear and avoid due to lack of knowledge or confidence in the method. This is due to some having played with crop grazing and not understood its place, or how to limit its impact on crop yields, which has led to bad experiences and results. There is also a lack of quantifiable evidence of the impact of crop grazing on whole-farm profitability, which contributes to this low confidence. Running demonstration sites on several properties in different situations and seasons allows the producers to see unbiased and objective results for themselves and understand how grazing crops can work for them.
Current common practice to address this feed gap is to lower stocking rates from summer until late winter, in order to reduce expensive hand feeding costs. This can involve selling off lighter store sheep early and having fewer wethers on farm or just running a lighter stocking rate all year round. This can result in sub-optimal stocking rates during the growing season. Crop grazing can rectify this by providing an alternative feed source to reduce hand feeding and potentially increase stocking rates.
Accessing the crop area of the farm as a feed source at this time of year unlocks potential to increase stocking rate, as well as allowing high value animals such as twin bearing ewes and lambs access to easily accessible high value feed as shown in the MMPIG producer research site project. To quantify this, there is potentially a 10-20% increase in stocking rate opportunity, due to unlocking the area and a 20-30% increase in growth rates opportunity, from accessing the higher value, easily accessible feed. During the period while stock crop graze, pasture can be deferred, leading to greater pasture growth and allowing lambing ewes to lamb onto higher FOO levels. This can be directly correlated with higher lambing percentages.