We have seen some cattle chewing bones this week. This is typically a sign of Phosphorus deficiency. If you’re in southern Qld or western NSW this mightn’t be that noteworthy, but it’s happening in areas that aren’t known to be Phosphorus deficient. Areas like Coonamble, Tottenham and Hillston - and it’s happened all of a sudden. Weird, right?
A feed test we received yesterday from a native pasture at Coonamble post-rain found that the NDF was 59%, the Energy was 8.85MJ/kg DM, the Crude Protein was 7.5% and the Phosphorus was 0.19%.
Reasonably digestible, reasonable energy but low protein, and marginally low phosphorus for lactating cows. I have a theory about the P.
This year, we had a tough summer. Poor summer grass growth, people fed or destocked, paddocks got bare. Less summer leaf drop, less phosphorus deposition in the soil. Then May happened. Heaps of rain, big medic season, green everywhere. High phosphorus utilisation by the P loving legumes. Which brings us to now, when maybe the P has run a little low due to the series of seasonal events this year.
So what do we do about it?
I know some people are reaching for the fertiliser. And if it is a very broken beautiful circle because of constant inappropriate high stocking rates at key times of the year then yes, this might be your agronomist’s recommendation. But if it’s just a little bit broken, could we fix it? What if we lay off the heavy grass grazing this summer and let it drop its leaf and let it restore the natural cycle?
And if we buy into the southern grazing mentality of high feed utilisation and high stocking rates, are we just going to ruin the beautiful cycle even more? Feed quality, fertile soil with low need for fertiliser and individual animal performance are key profit drivers in our environment, so don’t go indiscriminately chasing stocking rate at the cost of these things.
Talk to your agronomist about your pastures, but if you’d like to feed test the grass we can help with that, just call in and grab a feed test bag, or we can post you one.
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