Rethinking grazing foundations to offer better yields with Lydney Park Farms

Forage for Knowledge contributors Lydney Park Farms has been on a constant journey of change as it strives to find the most profitable way of operating.

The change was made, many years ago, from a fully housed system to a low-input grazing system. This has suited staff and the land as well as returning increased profits.

The team still questions what’s right for them and has been challenged to develop a robust set of key performance indicators and specific profit targets.

As one of our newer Strategic Dairy Farms, the farm has been working with Dr Brendan Horan from Teagasc to delve deeper into understanding the farming business and set business goals.

One of the key parts of the discussion with Brendan and the steering group is centered around the amount of soil nutrients, as well as forage currently grown.

Brendan and the steering group helped the team at Lydney Park to understand their business better, creating an in-detail report to highlight strengths and offer areas of opportunity. The work also generated some KPIs which will assist with ongoing monitoring.

“One of our key strengths is the large milking platform. We’ve reached high yields off the pasture before, often exceeding 15 t DM/ha.

"However, in more recent years, due to wetter winters and drier summers, our pasture production has reduced,” says Gavin Green, farm manager.

“An area we would like to work on is increasing forage yields while reducing milk production costs on the farm.”

After analysing Lydney Park’s data, Brendan suggested that the farm should focus on reseeding underproductive swards and improving soil fertility by incorporating clover and plantain. This has been split into several actions for the farm to work on over time.

“One of the ways we are going to increase our forage production is through reseeding 15% of the milking platform per year to perennial ryegrass (PRG) and medium leaf sized white clover mixes.

"While many of the steering group members discussed the possibility of a more diverse seed mixture incorporating grasses, clovers and herbs (primarily plantain and chicory), we agreed that the establishment of pastures containing PRG and clover will be most effective at reducing our dependence on nitrogen (N) fertiliser,” explains Keith Davis, retained farm consultant at Lydney Park.

“We are also currently looking into whether we can use a min-till cultivation approach to improve soil health, and therefore yields.

“The long-term objective for the farm should be to achieve swards with a mean annual weighted contribution of 75:25 from ryegrass and clover and to reduce artificial N fertiliser usage levels to less than 100kg N/ha per year on these swards,” explain Keith.

“In addition to saving costs on bought in fertiliser, recent research indicates that the incorporation of clovers within ryegrass pastures can increase animal performance (+10%), thereby increasing net farm profitability by £450 per hectare per year; a substantial short-term economic return to the farm.”