Weaner to yearling production pays off

Summary

This project will demonstrate if high quality forage crop and perennial pasture systems can be utilised to meet target weights for finishing steers on the Monaro and increase overall farm profit relative to the traditional base selling enterprise system.

Objectives

By December 2021, in the Monaro region of Southern NSW:

1. Seven (7) producer demonstration sites will validate / ground truth the modelling projections demonstrating the relative profitability of the following (7) finishing pasture systems in beef enterprises;

   (a) Improved grass pasture (phalaris and rye grass based) – 2 sites

   (b) Wheat (with pellet supplements) – 1 site

   (c)Oats / Cereals – 3 sites

   (d) Control / baseline (permanent pasture) – already documented in Grassgro® modelling paper – 1 site

2. Validate on-farm the following metrics for each of the six (6) demonstration systems;

   (a) Dry Matter Production (kg DM/ha/year)

   (b) Feed quality (DMD, ME etc)

   (c) Steer live-weight gains (g/hd/day)

   (d) Percentage (%) of farm area (ha) required for finishing steers to target weights

   (e) Soil fertility (phosphorus, sulphur, PBI, K, Ca, Na, Mg, Al, CEC, EC, pH)

3. Conduct a cost benefit analysis to determine the overall profitability of each system in context of whole farm profit compared to the traditional base weaner selling system. Key performance indicators to include;

   (a) income ($/DSE) and income/HA

   (b) enterprise expenses ($/DSE) and per HA

   (c) gross margin ($/DSE) and per HA

   (d) net profit ($/DSE)

4. Demonstrate the value of EID cattle tags to monitor performance of the treatment groups.

5. Collate five years of comparative analysis data for Monaro beef enterprises for11 farm businesses participating in the MFS benchmarking group. (These 11 businesses includes 4 of the core farm businesses hosting sites).

6. Deliver a series of educational, training and information activities to upskill 71 core farm businesses to increase confidence, awareness and capacity to adopt and integrate steer finishing systems into their farm enterprise. Estimated 65% of these businesses will learn new knowledge and skills resulting in 35% adopting (or intention to adopt) new finishing practices on-farm.

Progress

Monaro beef systems traditionally target weaner production with all steer weaners sold before their first winter. With recent price trends producers are starting to retain some of these steers over their first winter in order to attain higher sale weights and take advantage of spring surpluses of pasture.

Modelling has shown retaining steers through their first winter on a specialist high quality forage to be profitable. This PDS gathered real farm data from 10 different monitor paddocks representing a range of locations, soil types and crop/pasture types to validate model outputs and the decision to retain steers to heavier weights and to demonstrate the achievable winter steer growth rates for a range of forage crops and pastures.

For each paddock, herbage mass and quality were measured at the start of periods of grazing by steers as well as herbage mass at the end. Steers were weighed into and out of the monitor paddock in order to calculate steer growth rates. These data were used as inputs to the GrazFeed model to validate the prediction of liveweight gain by the model. Other data provided by the core farmers included any additional grazing the paddocks sustained as well as costs of pasture / crop establishment and management of retained stock.

This data was used to determine the profitability of the higher productivity forages as compared to the average farm profit. All but one system tested maintained steer growth rate above 1 kg/h/d during the winter period and most forage systems tested gave an increase in whole farm profit of between 7% and 14% representing $25,000 to $50,000 greater profit across a 1000ha farm.

These results along with ever stronger beef prices have given Monaro producers the confidence to make changes to their farm systems to retain more steer weaners through the winter and then grow them on to heavier weights.