Friday, March 29, 2024

Groups align to improve NZ pastures

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Industry groups have joined forces to help improve New Zealand pastures through improved forages and good grazing management.
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The forage strategy steering group includes representatives from Beef + Lamb New Zealand, DairyNZ, the Foundation for Arable Research, the Fertiliser Association of NZ, commercial interests through the NZ Plant Breeding and Research Association, and government via AgResearch and the Ministry for Primary Industries.

It will produce a 20-year vision for NZ forages to ensure forage-based grazed farm systems are more sustainable and profitable in the future.

Pastoral farming is a huge earner for this country and was worth more than $23 billion in export revenues last year.

Forages – the grasses and other plants grazed by farm animals – are a critical part of pastoral farming systems.

Steering group chairman Richard Green said one of the lessons from the previous Forage Review Strategy in 2011 was the power of aligning the sector’s resources by involving all the organisations that supported farmers.

“In lean times it is particularly vital to have good forages and good grazing management.

“Good times for dairy farming up until recently have diminished the sharp focus on pasture and contributed to overall higher production costs. In the current environment, those higher costs are neither profitable nor sustainable.

“However, for many sheep and beef farming systems, tight economic conditions have been a fact of farming for decades.

"For these systems there may be chronic under-investment in both soils and pastures that could also be proving unsustainable, and has arguably lead to under-investment from agribusiness as well.

“While the issues might be different across the pastoral sector, the underlying theme is that the stakeholders all need to be better aligned,” Green said.

James Morrison, who managed the 2011 review will also manage this project. The project will develop a five-year action plan by September.

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