Investment

The Dryland Legume Pasture Systems project successfully achieved its goal of discovering and commercialising new legume pastures for mixed farms in low and medium rainfall areas that can be enabled by innovative management methods.

The project has developed three elite hard seeded legume (HSLs) cultivars, one that has been commercialised (French serradella cv. Fran2o) and the others which should follow. These provide growers with low-cost pasture options because seed can be produced "on farm" and "summer sown", to overcome several barriers to adoption of pasture legumes throughout southern Australia. With the release of these cultivars, the research project is well on its way to accomplishing the target of adoption of 0.5 M hectares of innovative new legume pastures by 2026. Outstandingly, the new cultivars provide "legumes on demand" which regenerate from a hard seed "bank" in the soil, after variable sequences of cropping. This is possible because the hard seed break-down patterns of the cultivars regulate optimal plant numbers that germinate over the seasons, allowing the farmer to choose in which season he wishes to allow his regenerating legume pasture to grow. There are many lasting benefits of this, including increased flexibility in decision making, increased nitrogen fixation in the farming system, higher grain proteins in cereals (up to 30%), and highly nutritional forage that boosts livestock productivity with the potential to reduce methane emissions for meat and wool production systems. Key findings were that novel HSLs increased farm profit by about $100/ha, and up to $26/ha more than with baseline sub clover pastures in phases with cropping (assuming prior 5-year average input costs and commodity prices, and a productive livestock system).