Rubber vine that “sheltered” recalcitrant cattle only a memory

Whenever Bristow Hughes inspects a particular paddock at Strathalbyn, he is visited by a vivid memory of how it used to be.

Standing in that 4000ha paddock, he told the 80-plus crowd at an NQ Dry Tropics field day, he could not forget how difficult it once was to run cattle there. And that degree of difficulty soared towards impossible when the time came to get them back.

“We had a massive, massive rubber vine infestation and if there were 600 to 800 cows in the paddock, we would miss 50 to 60 every time we mustered,” Mr Hughes said.

“I remember, in 2014, mustering here with two bikes, a helicopter and Dad (Richard) rattling through the rubber vine in the D6 dozer trying to flush them out.

“Thankfully we don’t need that sort of caper anymore.”

A lot of work has gone into making that change happen.

The area was virtually inaccessible when they started. There was a black soil gully with sides so steep, even motorbikes could not find a way through it.

“Of the 4000ha, I would say more than 800ha of that was rubber vine,” Mr Hughes said.

Bellyache bush only added to the problem.

Three years ago, Bristow and his team set to work.

Using a D6 fitted with an Ellrott plough, they were able to plough out the rubber vine, at the same time, battering down the sides of the gully.

They spread a pasture mix that included silk sorghum, sugar drip sorghum, desmanthus, butterfly pea, buffel, bambasti green panic, Gatton panic and Rhodes grass.

“It was the only way we could keep on top of the rubber vine reinfestation after ploughing it, because the sorghum (about 30 per cent of the pasture mix) out-competed it,” Mr Hughes said.

“We did some follow-up spraying and [first time through] we only had to spray about 10 per cent of what was there originally.”

Mr Hughes said although it was a fairly expensive operation, there clearly was value in doing it.

He said there was still plenty of sorghum in the paddock six years after the work was done and cattle continued to spread it to new areas, particularly on the hillsides.

Even though the rubber vine had been removed from the rich black soil, Mr Hughes said the paddock was still managed based on the condition of the 20 per cent of it that was black soil.

“The cattle are always going to come back to this part here, so that’s what we have to keep an eye on,” he said.

Mr Hughes said everybody working on Strathalbyn was constantly monitoring the amount of pasture in each paddock.

He said everybody had learnt to use the STAC (Sole, Toe, Ankle, Calf) fodder budgeting method as promoted by grazing consultant Dick Richardson.

Mr Richardson said he had developed the method after seeing officers in the Department of Agriculture in the north-east of the United States using a walking stick with a drop plate to estimate feed.

“I thought it was good, but if you needed a tool to be able to do it, it would not get done,” Mr Richardson said.

“If it’s just a matter of looking at your boot as you walk across the paddock and adding up the scores as you go, there’s no excuse.”

Mr Richardson said it was important to remember the STAC calculation returned the amount of fodder available to grazing animals, not the quantity of dry matter.

“The STAC method does not count the ground cover that has to be left in the paddock at the end of the dry season,” he said.

“That’s not grazable feed.”

Grazing consultant Dick Richardson, Nature’s Equity explains the STAC (Sole,Toe,Ankle,Calf) method of estimating available fodder.