A kale crop on the paddocks of Gelantipy drew significant interest last Friday, with more than 60 people walking through the leafy green crop to see heifers being strip grazed, as well as a freshly dug pit that showed the soil structure underneath.
A love of figures and the drive to improve them has seen Amy Rogers and Alfred Hackett, of Bayrook Pastoral, take part in several projects recently, including the Focus on Weighty Weaners project, as well as genomic testing of their breeding heifers.
Bayrook Pastoral is a 930ha beef and sheep farming system located near Gelantipy, East Gippsland. The farm currently runs 300 Hereford/ Shorthorn breeding cows and 1400 first-cross ewes.
“Our biggest takeaway from the day was how much potential we are missing out on due to the huge amount of nutrients that are locked up in our soil,” Amy said.
Peter Norwood, Full Circle Nutrition, Seaspray, was impressed at the depth of the topsoil but said aluminium was a limiting factor, “We need to remove the constraints of the soil,” Peter said.
“We need to resolve the tie-ups without creating more.”
He suggested using things like gypsum and silicone to capture the aluminium.
The kale crop’s figures were available in a booklet, with the total cost of the crop per hectare coming in at $1077.88.
That figure included items like cultivation, knockdown, lime at 2.5t/ha, Bombardier kale seed at 5kg/ha equating to $87.50, two applications of insecticide, plus the drone spray application of foliar fertiliser.
The dry matter costs were calculated right down to the day, including the straw bales that provide roughage and came out at 91cents per day, per head.
The booklet also showed soil tests and plant tissue tests, which people tried to read as the ice-cold Gelantipy breeze reminded them they were high up in the mountains.
Guest speakers in the paddock included Elders Bairnsdale agronomist, Olivia Betts, and Full Circle Nutrition’s Peter Norwood, who stood in the pit Alfred had dug to show the depth of the soil, local Bairnsdale farmer Kane Stewart and Barenbrug research agronomist, Damien Adcock.
Other representatives included most of East Gippsland’s local agronomists and Food and Fibre Gippsland.
Later in the day, Herd Solutions vet, Chelsea Hair, spoke about the Weighty Weaners project, which is supported by Meat and Livestock Australia.
To optimise profitability and productivity, the Bayrook operation is transitioning from an Autumn calving herd to spring calving.
Instead of selling steers and heifers at local calf sales and joining heifers as two-year-olds to calve as three-year-olds, the new model aims to sell cattle at feeder and kill weights, with heifers calving down as two-year-olds to improve their maternal productivity.
Chelsea said the system changes meant that consistent, sustainable weight gains in young stock had to be prioritised to grow stock out efficiently and ensure heifers met critical mating weights by joining at 14 months of age.
Last year’s data showed the heifers were infested with liver fluke, and the feed testing
indicated that feed quality was not adequate for weight gains of 1kg/day, as the feeds available lacked energy density.
Traditionally, heifers were grazed on native pasture following weaning, as growth was not prioritised due to a delay in joining until two years of age.
Several management changes have been implemented, with the most significant being the change in feed base to better support the heifers through winter, as well as a more proactive parasite management program based on the 2025 results.
Chelsea said so far, the results had been extremely promising with the heifers growing an average of 0.89kg/head/day since the first weigh-in in early February.
“The Weighty Weaners project has also been a massive learning curve around the things that have been blocking our weaner growth in the past,” Amy said.
“With the changes we are making I hope to unlock the genetic potential of my weaners.”
