No more gaps with superior shrub systems

Nutritional gaps present a large production cost to grass-fed woolgrowers due to suboptimal ruminant production and conservative whole-farm stocking rates. Drought tolerant shrubs provide nutrients to complement, and thereby improve, the feed conversion ratio of crop and pasture residues during summer/autumn. These shrubs lift farm profitability by reducing supplementation requirements, allowing deferred grazing of regenerating pastures and buffering between-season variation in forage supply. The up-front cost of establishment, uncertainty about agronomic and grazing management and a lack of on-farm data quantifying benefits are all barriers to adoption. This project will work with six producer groups to collect paddock scale productivity and economic data to confirm that sheep and cattle can utilise adjacent shrubs to improve conversion ratios of crop residue, quantify the benefits arising from using fertilisers and/or adapted annual legumes within systems nd investigate opportunities to halve establishment costs.