Teagasc: Making money by watching the grass grow

If there are two things Ireland has no shortage of, they are grass and rain. It is not for nothing that the country is known throughout the world as the Emerald Isle but sadly this clean, green image is inextricably bound to our fairly damp weather.

And those who would swap a few extra days of sunshine for a little less grass should pause for a moment to consider the impact this could have on the national economy both now and in the future.

Exports of Irish food and drink are worth more than €9 billion each year with roughly two thirds of this made up of meat, dairy and other products, which are directly dependent on our grasslands for their production.

And the sector is set to increase in importance in the coming years with the government's Food Harvest 2020 plan setting a range of ambitious targets including a 50 per cent increase in milk production along with an increase in the output value of beef by 40 per cent and sheep by 20per cent by 2020. And with Irish livestock and dairy production mainly pasture-based, achieving greater efficiency in grass production will be critical to achieving these targets.

"We have a natural advantage in terms of cost and environmental efficiency in terms of our grass-based production and we see increased grass production as one of the main drivers towards achieving the Food Harvest targets," says Teagasc research scientist Laurence Shalloo. "This will require the development of new grassland technologies which can lead to greater efficiency in grass utilisation and we have created a new decision support software tool, Pasture Base Ireland (PBI), to assist in the development of those technologies."

Teagasc Walsh research fellow Vincent Griffith explains the need for the PBI. "The reason we developed it is because there is a lot of data on grass growth being produced on farms but not being used for industry gain. There is no central database for it and the goal of Pasture Base Ireland is to collate all of this information together."

Farmers using the system use web-based software to store grassland measurements for different areas of their farms. This will allow the quantification of grass growth across different farms, grassland management systems, regions and soil types using a common measurement protocol and methodology.

Benchmarking
Grass measurements are recorded on a regular basis and reports are automatically generated for management purposes. The reports are developed in a format that allows individual farms to be benchmarked with other farmers. The background data such as paddock soil fertility, aspect, altitude, reseeding history, soil type, drainage characteristics and fertiliser applications are also recorded.

And weather is also included of course. All farms on PBI are attached to their nearest Met Éireann weather station to allow the linkage between meteorological conditions and grass growth to be established.

The main aim is to build up a database over time which will give farmers the information they need to tackle underperforming areas of their farms. “The way it works is that farmers will examine grass growth in each paddock on their farms each week and record information on growth and whatever measures they have used to address poor growth. Over time this will build into a database of the key factors driving grass growth which the farmers will be able to use in future,” says Shalloo.

For example, a farm with heavy soil would have withstood this year’s drought better than one with lighter soil which doesn’t retain moisture quite so well while the reverse would have been true in last year’s much wetter conditions.

And the benefits to individual farmers can be very significant. Pasture Base Ireland has been under development for more than four years, but 2013 marked its first year in commercial use and the results from an initial sample of 40 farms studied has already revealed some very interesting information. While it was to be expected that there would be variations in grass production between different farms it was the correlation between variations on individual farms and overall production that was most striking.

“We noticed a big variation in what individual paddocks on the same farm were producing,” Griffith notes. “A high producing farm had a small range between the best and the lowest producing paddocks, while lower producing farms had much higher variations between higher and lower yielding paddocks.”

This mightn’t mean a lot were it not for the financial impact. “We put some economic analysis on this and found that farmers with lower yields are losing significant amounts of money due to lower producing paddocks.

"For example, the difference between two farms where one is producing 13 tonnes of dry matter per hectare and the other is producing 11 tonnes is almost €10,000 in extra profit each year."

Teagasc targets
According to Shalloo, a 13-tonne level is the overall target set by Teagasc. "Better farmers are achieving 13 tonnes per hectare utilisation while others are only getting 7 tonnes. Our aim is to get that level up to 12 or 13 tonnes. This will help those farmers expand production in the years ahead and will cut their feed costs enormously.

"At present bought-in feed costs a farmer about three and a half times as much as grass. Grass is environmentally friendly as well and this is very important. According to an EU study in 2010, Irish agriculture is the most efficient in Europe for greenhouse gas emissions and this will be of growing importance for our exports in future."

While the historical information which will be gathered by the Pasture Base Ireland database will be very useful to farmers in improving grass yields, it also has the potential to help them see into the future in the form of a grass growth forecast which will be issued to farmers in the same way as a weather forecast. “We hope to develop a grass growth model to predict growth for up to eight or 10 days ahead. This will be very useful to farmers who will be able to use it to address issues before they actually become problems for them,” Shalloo adds.