Dairy benefits from Subzero

The training centre is a low-security prison facility with a range of agricultural enterprises including fruit tree and an on-farm dairy.

The centre's custodial specialist Brenton Wood says it is milking 62 Holstein and has been buying-in most of its feed in recent years because of reduced water allocations.

"This is the first year we've used Subzero - we were looking for a large amount of feed without using a lot of water," he said.

"We rely on our irrigation water for our perennial plantings like the olive and orange trees."

After three years without green feed, and having to buy-in hay for the cows, this season presented an opportunity to plant a crop. The centre chose to put Subzero forage brassica into two paddocks totalling 3.5 hectares.

It was planted on April 8 at a rate of 6 kilograms a hectare with fertiliser at 120kg/ha. Mr Wood said the forage took off and they were able to first-graze from May 31.

An electric wire was run from one fence to the other and the cows were allowed to strip-graze the first block after milking each morning. A test conducted on the forage helped determine how much could be consumed each day and the wire was adjusted accordingly.

Mr Wood says they estimated each cow was consuming between 7 and 9kg of dry matter from Subzero each day.

"One reason we chose Subzero was to get bulk feed fairly quickly and we certainly got that," he said.

"We combined the Subzero with Wrangler forage wheat and Yukuri forage triticale. They were all grown separately and we used the triticale to grow hay."

The triticale produced a massive crop, with 309 1.3-metre round bales from 10ha.

"They were all very good for water use," Mr Wood said.

"We had a few good rains this year and so the crops did very well but it was good to know that if they started to get a bit stressed we could give them 10 millimetres of irrigated water.

"We didn't have to use a lot of water at all."

* Full Livestock report in Stock Journal, December 2 issue.