1. Sheep production from tedera in medium and high rainfall environments in Western Australia
Project B.PBE.0027
Dr. Daniel Real
DAFWA

2. What we did
Grazing pure stands of tedera in winter, spring, summer and autumn at Dandaragan.
Grazing tedera in mixtures with annual species at Kojonup.
Production and persistence of tedera through winter and early spring with or without competition of annual pasture based on plot studies.
Grazing trial during summer and autumn at Dandaragan 2014/15, Dandaragan 2016 and Kojonup 2016.
Calibration of Near Infrared Spectrophotometry (NIRS) for measuring tedera’s forage quality.

3. What we found
Live weight for the continuously (solid lines) and rotationally (dashed lines) grazed sheep for Dandaragan 2014/15 (squares), Dandaragan 2016 (triangles) and Kojonup 2016 (circles). The average l.s.d. for comparing between grazing methods is 1.8, 1.0 and 1.4 kg respectively. The solid circle in mid-April is the average live weight of 30 sheep drawn at random from the source flock after typical summer-autumn management by the farmer.

4. Key messages
Regional field evaluations since 2006 have shown that tedera remains green all year round and most importantly from summer to early winter in Mediterranean-like regions.
Tedera can be sown and harvested with commercial machinery.
A series of duty-of-care animal trials have found that there is no health issues in ruminants by grazing tedera.
Grazing trials have shown that tedera is a high quality and palatable legume that is readily grazed.
Whole-farm bio-economic linear programming model (MIDAS) analysis indicated that tedera offers the potential to significantly increase farm profit by savings in supplementary feeding, higher stocking rate and reduction in labour.
Tedera can be continuously or rotationally grazed to fill the summer and autumn feed gap with no need for supplementary feeding.
Seednet/Landmark is the commercial partner for tedera’s first cultivar.

5. Economic / Environmental on farm benefits
Assumptions:
Tedera’s annual production set to 80% of lucerne production.
Transferability of forage production between different growing periods is set to 80%.
Tedera remains green all-year-round including late summer and autumn with good forage quality.

6. Economic / Environmental on farm benefits
Previous analyses (Young et al. 2004) have shown that high quality out of season green feed is most valuable if used to increase meat production and this is likely the case with tedera. Tedera experimental results indicate that it can be utilized as:
a substitute for grain as a maintenance feed for stock from mid-summer to late-autumn
a production feed during early-summer to either finish prime lambs, flush ewes in the lead up to joining or achieve weight gain for twin bearing ewes in late pregnancy to increase twin lamb survival.
a combination of production feeding of lambs and maintenance feeding of older animals. The selective grazing of tedera from leaf to stem provides an opportunity to utilise the feed as both a feed to gain weight and a feed to maintain weight if a follower flock is used in a rotation grazing system.

7. Unanswered questions Agronomy package for first cultivar of tedera
Time of sowing
Rates, spacing and depth of sowing
Fertilization requirements
Herbicide tolerance
Recruitment management
Defoliation management
Hard seed softening
Regional adaptation to marginal conditions
Mixtures with grasses and other legumes

8. Thanks