Saturday, March 30, 2024

Challenge to keep pastures resilient

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Commercial plant breeders are united in efforts to help deliver New Zealand farmers better options when it comes to selecting for more resilient pastures in years to come.
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Head of Barenbrug’s plant breeding team Courtney Inch says the challenge in NZ, being a relatively small market on a global scale, is having enough capital to invest in developing commercially viable pastures for our market.

This is complicated by NZ being a relatively complex pastoral system, with climatic conditions in Southland for example quite dissimilar to those in Waikato, often requiring different feed types for a relatively small pastoral zone.

“But it is to the industry’s credit we are seeing some really good collaborative work being done now in this area of developing more resilient pastures,” he said.

He pointed to the PG+ programme comprising AgResearch, Barenbrug, Grasslands Innovation, DairyNZ, Beef + Lamb NZ, Dairy Australia, MBIE and DEEResearch.

The Pastoral Genomics (PG+) research consortium aims to deliver sustainable forages to NZ farms using plant bio-technologies to improve productivity, sustainability and quality of NZ forage feeds. 

Tolerance to drought and greater persistence are two particularly climate sensitive traits the project has been working on.

“We all want the same thing and having the country’s two biggest seed companies there means it is in both our interests to get the full leverage of the industry through this,” he said.

Inch says the challenge to breeding more resilient ryegrass in NZ was the inevitable trade off between productivity (yield) and persistence.

“You will find farmers want a pasture that will grow them good amounts at the right times of the year, but also one that lasts forever and it makes plant breeding here challenging,” he said.

Then there is the inevitable climatic variation along the length of this long skinny country to allow for.

“A drought, for example, is really quite different when it occurs in Otago versus Canterbury versus Waikato. So, we have to look at drought within a cultivar of a species and look at persistence versus productivity and split the cultivars in each species into each of those outcomes,” he said.

He points to Barenbrug’s Rohan variety of ryegrass, which has over time undergone trials across multiple sites around NZ, often under tough conditions. 

Through traditional breeding and expansion of the population, suitable cultivars have been selected. Like Jim Crush of AgResearch (see Farmers Weekly, September 14), Inch agrees we are likely to witness more regionalising of plant types to cope with climatic change.

“But it does come down to logistics and how narrowly you can define a region. Do you split north Waikato from south, for example, and sheep and beef farms can be even more divided within the farms themselves,” he said.

Clover selection for climate resilience is also being boosted using genomic research, helping identify suitable traits without the lengthy breeding process, and similar to what breeding companies do to identify suitable bulls for future breeding.

One promising clover type is Trifolium uniflorum with a thick tap root and improved water conserving properties.

“We find that we are building a toolbox of technology, including DNA markers to help speed up the identification of new traits,” he said.

Inch says clover and ryegrass are likely to remain the staples of a more resilient pasture in coming years, given their ability to provide good protein and dry matter content, albeit with some hybrid modifications.

When it came to gene editing, often touted as a rapid solution for creating more suitable cultivars, Inch says the company has to operate within the confines of NZ regulations. 

This was no different to the European company’s experiences in the EU, where, if anything, controls were even tighter.

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