Resources
Discover our agriculture and farming resources
Key benefits
- Proven to provide a hardy, long grazing season for livestock with multiple legume species to fix nitrogen
- Includes flowering species, to provide beneficial pollinators feed and shelter
- Deep penetrating roots will improve soil structure and have the ability to make the best use of the available soil nutrients, moisture and minerals
BAR GS4 mixture provides a vigorous sward, with abundant legumes and herbs, to provide habitat and food for a variety of insects and wildlife and to improve soil structure and water infiltration. It is suitable for productive cattle and sheep.
BarGS4 - Legume and herb-rich sward
3.00kg Bannfoot Hybrid Ryegrass Tetr.
3.00kg Callan Late Perennial Ryegrass Dip.
1.00kg Comer Timothy
2.00kg Bardoux Tall Fescue
0.90kg Laura Meadow Fescue
1.00kg Archibaldi Cocksfoot
2.00kg Garant Red Clover
0.50kg Sainfoin Legume
0.10kg Birdsfoot Trefoil Legume
0.10kg Alsike Legume
0.15kg Commander Chicory
0.15kg Captain Plantain
0.05kg Yarrow Herb
0.05kg Sheeps Parsley Herb
*Correct at time of creation; it is the growers responsibility to check the requirements of each scheme are met.
Benefits of including herb blends
The Barenbrug range of herb and clover leys are designed to bring a range of benefits to livestock health, soil health and soil fertility.
The inclusion of herbs like plantain and chicory provide minerals in the sward, helping to improve liveweight gains and increase milk production. Our herbal leys are also designed to improve soil structure due to the deep rooting nature of the different plant types.
With a range of mixtures to choose from, farmers now have short or long-term options that will extend the growing season, improve drought tolerance, provide environmental benefits and will help to reduce the worm burden in livestock.
Key benefits of herb blends
- Nitrogen fixing potential
- Anthelmintic properties of chicory can reduce the need for anthelmintics in lambs, improving liveweight gains and reducing finishing time
- Use of deep-rooted species stabilises light soils helping to reduce erosion and run-off as well as providing drought tolerant solutions for lower rainfall areas
- Improved soil quality for water and nutrient retention/flow
- Increase of trace element diversity in the diet
- Increased species diversity provides habitat/food sources for more varied insect life
As well as breeding and trialling grass varieties, we trial biodiversity mixtures at our research site, Cropvale, looking to find the best herbal ley.
The aim of our biodiversity trials is to create mixtures suitable for a wide range of farms throughout the UK. With optimum blends of legumes, herbs and grasses, that will produce large volumes of high quality forage for livestock farmers and enhance farm biodiversity.
Including legumes in a biodiversity blend is one way to achieve this. Legumes have great nitrogen (N) fixing potential, which means less artificial nitrogen needs to be added to the soil to grow the crops. Deep-rooted species are also employed to improve soil structure while flowering species are utilised to help pollinating insects do their job. Due to the nature of the species involved, weed control in our biodiversity trials is very limited so we score the plots for their natural weed suppression abilities, which will add to the persistency and quality of a mixture in the field.