So, you’ve indexed your fields. Now what?
Congratulations. By indexing your fields, you’ve taken the first step towards making the grass greener on your side of the fence, writes Janet Montgomery, Barenbrug’s Agriculture Product Manager.
But the clue’s in the wording: the first step. Once you’ve indexed, what comes next?
By using grass indexing, you’re effectively getting your fields to open up and share their secrets with you. The trick is in being able to interpret what they’re telling you.
Let’s recap. If you’ve followed the Barenbrug grassland index guide, then you’ll have visually inspected your fields – scoring on the species you observe, occurrence of bare patches, and how many weeds you find. And for each field you’ve indexed, you’ll have a ‘Grassland Index’ of between 1-5, where GI1 is poor and GI5 is excellent.
It’s important to treat indexing not as a one-off task, but as something you should do regularly through the year. What it does is to provide you with a data-driven decision-support system that will help you identify not just which of your fields needs attention, but also with what priority.
Importantly, grassland indexing can help you challenge what you might think is already set in stone – your reseeding plan.
That’s because indexing can sometimes spring a different result. Some fields naturally perform better than others – soil type and drainage often being key determinants – so there will be times when a five-year-old ley might still sport an index of GI5. Naturally, there are considerable savings to be made if you can stretch a reseed further, with minimal or no drop-off in performance.
But another area where indexing comes into its own is in helping you to identify any underlying reasons for poor performance. Again, every field reacts differently to grazing, and to adverse weather conditions. Many fields will indeed have limiting factors on their performance, which in many cases will act as a bar.
You may have to acknowledge that some fields will never index above a GI3, for example, because of limitations placed upon them by soil, access by machinery, drainage, nutrient retention and so on. It’s not a reflection of your farming ability; indeed, it’s a better reflection of farming ability to know that you’re already doing all you can in pursuit of efficient use of resources.
With indexing helping you to understand the individual nature of each of your fields, it allows you to create a ranking system that acts as a form of priority. While you may be tempted to try to coax a GI3 field to a 4, you may in fact get a better overall return on your investment by raising the GI1 and GI2 fields instead.
Grass experts agree that a reseeding rate – by area of grass – of around 10% is enough to ‘maintain’ grass productivity across the holding. Up that rate to 15% and you’re likely to see a significant improvement. With regular indexing, you can prioritise the fields that will benefit most from this fractional approach, by identifying those with the greatest capacity for improvement.
Remember, we’re not farming from a can anymore. Grassland indexing is a sure-fire way to ensure we’re working with the soil, with the field, with the resources we’ve got, to develop a bespoke plan – rather than the ‘one size fits all’ approach we might have been encouraged to adopt in the past.
That sort of mindset is particularly beneficial for folks faced with making a change in short order: taking on new land, adopting a new management approach, or changing your farming system. It can sometimes be a little overwhelming, knowing where to start in those circumstances.
But by using the grassland indexing to make those appropriate pasture assessments, you can usefully deploy the individual knowledge you’re gaining from each field to make that priority list. And with that priority list, guess what? Suddenly you don’t have to do everything at once.
Not only does it ease the labour headache, but it also gets you better grass.
We’ve put together a series of videos to guide you through using our grassland field indexing system effectively. These resources will help you optimise your reseeding programme and boost your profits with healthier, high-quality grass!
Click the links to watch our series:
Grassland Index 1 Field – https://youtu.be/F0R0Fkwo-uc
Grassland Index 2 Field - https://youtu.be/WeewaC5_b3Q
Grassland Index 3 Field - https://youtu.be/FMaPhhVeGxQ
Grassland Index 4 Field - https://youtu.be/UE101PHlGI8
Grassland Index 5 Field - https://youtu.be/DvI2TY6roHE
