Legumes Field Day focused on improving pasture and production

NQ Dry Tropics and the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF) hosted a field day at Alligator Creek where experts led discussions about legumes for improving livestock production.

Decades of research has gone into developing desmanthus pastures to increase livestock productivity across northern Australia.

Agrimix Pastures in conjunction with JCU has established a trial site at Alligator Creek, south of Townsville, where different varieties of the legume have been planted to see how they tolerate the tropical conditions.

Chris Gardiner, a JCU researcher, known as the father of desmanthus in Australia, is conducting evaluation trials with more than 140 varieties of different legumes and grasses.  The trials are taking place at the Alligator Creek Agrimix Pastures Research Station.

Pasture ID, Legumes and Forage Budgeting workshop

The story of desmanthus in the north started in the 1970s when teams were sent abroad to collect seeds from plants from the Americas (North, Central and South).  This work was led by CSIRO and Department of Agriculture (DAF), in a bid to collect desmanthus to see if it would be suitable for Queensland. 

Trials were conducted in six areas around the state inducing Longreach, Blackall and Julia Creek.  A whole range of legumes like stylo, forage peanuts and butterfly pea where planted, and after a decade, in same cases, two decades, the plants that flourished was desmanthus.

Mr Gardiner collected seeds from the survivors, to continue with selective trials. The legumes at the Alligator Creek site, dubbed cultivators JCU 1-9 are the most resilient relatives of those earliest varieties.

From there researchers teamed up with Agrimix to go through a plant breeding process to prove the plants are different to other varieties of desmanthus and they’re stable in terms of genetics. 

The result has been the development of Progardes desmanthus, with trials showing the highly palatable source of protein delivers increased liveweight gain, increased posture productivity and in turn, increased profitability.

The long-term objective is to determine if desmanthus is an effective legume for improving livestock production in terms of increased liveweight gains, reproductive rates, and turn-off, particularly in the semi-arid clay soil regions of northern Australia, where few, if any, other herbaceous sown pasture legumes are currently adapted. 

Widespread plantings by graziers will confirm whether this potential can be realised and what contribution the legume can make to sustainability of pastures in these regions.