Cut the Crop!
A grower guide to cocksfoot seed production
Welcome to Cut the Crop, keeping you in the know about everything you grow. Researchers, growers and other interesting folk delivering insights and information on topics ranging from agronomy to profitability brought to you by the Foundation for Arable Research. Hello and welcome. My name's Alison Stewart and I'm your host of the session of Cut the Crop. And today we have Richard Chenoweth with us, and Richard is our senior herbage seed researcher, welcome Richard. Morning. Okay, so we're going to talk about Cox food today and because FAD has been pulling together a grower management booklet for Cox food and we thought it was a good idea to just talk about the range of work that we've been doing over the years and what's going to be in this booklet. But before we do that, maybe let's just give us a little bit of a background on Cox food as a crop for growers in New Zealand and what kind of acreage do we grow and why do we grow it? Yes, on average we probably average about 1,500 hectares per growing season, fluctuates from about 1,000 to 2,000 hectares depending on the market generally the overseas market. And yeah, probably half of that has grown just purely for multiplication and re-export. So the main production area would be Canterbury. Traditionally, Canterbury has been the heavier soils and Canterbury have been quite good for growing Cox food without irrigation, prior to that there's quite a bit of Cox food being grown in Southland. Actually, Cox food was one of the first herbage species grown in New Zealand with quite a big industry on Banks Peninsula. So there was 20 to 30 years of Cox food being grown there and there's one cold of a acre rower. It was a natural selection of Banks Peninsula that was marketed for a long time and actually re-exported back around the world in the early 1900s and that sort of tradition has shifted off Banks Peninsula onto the Canterbury Plains with mechanisation and then further abroad from there and that's carried on through to the current day where we re-export quite a lot of a Cox food seed to Australia and back to Europe and North America. So planted twin, harvested twin and what kind of yields do we get? So planting can happen anytime from the autumn, sorry spring through to autumn. We tend to be moving away a little bit from spring establishment which was really common to establish in the spring, get nice big plants, commonly was under sewn under barley or linseed or a nurse crop of some description and then harvested sort of 12, 16 months later. Now we tend to plant a lot in the autumn and harvest it the following summer. I think growers are probably expecting 12 to 1,500 kilos of Cox food seed per hectare at the moment. That's increased from the 1990s, 600 kilos would have been quite acceptable but not the last days. And from a profitability point of view, does it stack up compared to some of the other seed crops? Yeah it does because it can be grown for I think certified for six seasons. So you can once it's established you can grow as long as there's a market for the cultivar which is the overriding limitation in some cases. You can grow it for five, six seasons without establishment costs. You can get good grazing through the autumn timeframe and depending on the season, you can be looking at about $5 a kilos, that puts it into the same realm as as many other crops without some of the establishment costs for the season. So obviously it's not a huge acreage crop and so far has to be careful about how much money we invest in smaller crops. But we have been doing little bits of work on Cox food for quite a few years and we've been drip feeding out the results from that research but now we decided that we would pull all of that together into a grower booklet to make it easier to be able to see everything to do with how to optimize management. So when did you start preparing the book and what are the key things that are going to be in the book? So I guess it conceptually it started probably three years ago when we really started pulling the grower handouts for a field days and then actually you start finding what far has actually done in the past and there's been little bits of work for 20 plus years and some of that work hasn't actually made it into an update or been any further than the field day handout. So that was where the idea was sort of born to bring everything together. Obviously there's a whole lot more there than I would have given it credit for so we've got obviously ultimately at the moment we've been talking about Downey Milgewe and the fungicide programs for the last sort of five years that's been the big topic with growers but actually prior to that there was some fungicide work in about 2008 to 2010 that focused on rusts then we had a phase of focusing on PGRs so there's about nine psychosaline modus troll results that need to be summarized into one data set and inside there's been a few other little things we've done some herbicide herbicide work there's about five herbicide trolls on on Coxford focusing on grass weed control predominantly we looked at that across a range of different cultivars so there was some some genetic diversity work because Coxford of all the grasses is actually quite diverse in its genetic makeup so there's lots of assumptions that are made that all Coxfords actually act the same whereas yeah they're like in the same and tall fescue there's some Mediterranean genetics which are some of dormant and there's some continental genetics which are winter dormant and they can act quite differently to some of those responses so the booklet was really to try and pull all of that information together in one place and sort of hopefully for someone who wants to who's new to growing Coxford can pick it up and get a pretty good idea as to what they're going to have to do for this season or for the coming yeah coming season to have a successful crop I mean obviously some of the research that we did you know 10 15 years ago may no longer be relevant so are you providing the historical context of the changes that have occurred in the management around you know whether it's fungicides or whether it's nitrogen or whatever yeah definitely the fungicide one's probably the most topical and where that sort of older work may not be applicable but it still is applicable because rust is still here and it's still a major disease when it gets going at the moment we just haven't seen a lot of steam rust or leaf rust on on Coxford predominantly because we've been putting lots of product on to try and control something else yeah any mildew the downy mildew so that was actually quite a big program of work because it was actually seriously undermining the crop so maybe just a little bit of history and what happened there yeah so that started with can't remember the year it's about five years ago be five years of work that's been undertaken to try and first of all identify what we were dealing with because growers don't often report you know yields that are in the vicinity of one to two hundred kilos when they're expecting one to one and a half thousand kilos yeah and that's quite a shock to pack up and then it actually took us three seasons just to work out and then by chance that downy mildew was the was the likely cause every time because we did some disease surveys of crops that that had been affected and we could find take all and fusariums and a whole lot of root other root pathogens and then we could find bacterial blight and a whole lot of other things on the on the seed head so that was quite a journey every time we had a sample we thought was showing symptoms that would come back with bacteria so we would put copper and more copper and into the into the system but actually that didn't help us and it took us it was actually the graph field day where Mark Braithwa identified some symptoms he didn't know what they were and talking back to the lab and that was when we first discovered downy mildew and from there but we're still applying the fungicide program for rusts that we were applying prior to that but we've had to integrate some oomocytes specific chemistry to to target downy mildew and it's been successful it's been successful the risk at the moment is that you know we could generate resistance and we just don't know anything about this pathogen so that's the way we're currently looking is to try and understand the pathogen and it's it's risk of resistance because if it is like some other downy mildew pathogens could generate resistance in two to ten years so that's our next major concern on that one yeah so what would be the other key challenges then like and I mean obviously diseases and but from agronomic point of view what are the other key challenges to growing cocks foot right at the moment diseases are hot on everyone's mind but um grass weed control so controlling grass weeds is is especially in the establishment phase is always a challenge wild oats can be particularly challenging especially spring germinating wild oats so there's a you know we've got section in there where we've looked at the the user curve recently but also a whole lot of range of other potential products that that people can use for for grass weed control and everyone has their own issues like ryegrass in cocks foot is is a potential major problem yeah so actually if you're going to grow cocks foot it's it's understanding that two to five years out you might not want ryegrass in that pattern and and if you're some some growers only grow ryegrass in part of the farm in cocks foot in a totally separate part of the farm yeah it's having some of those um principal or some of those philosophies in place um at the start um the other other things are all the the key grass seed management so it's it's getting the the PGR timing and and rates right uh we have seen over years quite severe burning uh of leaves from the use of some PGRs and some growers believe that that we can get a reduction in in seed yield from that we've got nine different PGR trials and we don't see those reductions in the in the machine dressed yields at the end of the season yeah so burning is in similar to ryegrass isn't necessarily a problem it looks bad but yeah how you integrate that with an irrigation program can be yeah um yeah can be the difference between whether it works or not I guess so burn the leaves off in a dry land scenario can be really detrimental compared with a um an irrigated scenario so there's so we've got chapters you know sort of on all of these different things on nitrogen management herbicides fungicides um sort of what else closing dates irrigation um anything that is I guess front of mind at the moment that we're doing research but we haven't yet finished that is not going to be in this booklet uh the key things at the moment are that aren't going to be in the book that would be understanding the downy mildew sort of of uh the actual pathogen so we've got uh one PhD student at Lincoln that we're funding that's actually looking purely at the life cycle and where we might be able to intervene with management techniques to limit its build up or maybe keep it out completely of of different crops there's also a second student looking at biological control of of the pathogen so there's there's uh there's work there that won't make it into the yeah into this this booklet um there's potentially or there's some other new weed control uh trolls that won't necessarily make it either so those are looking at post-harvest management um so what you do after harvest while setting the crop up for the next season so there's some some interesting and some uh potentially exciting herbicide auctions in that space that that won't necessarily that that won't make it into this booklet but the good thing is that once this booklet's out you can just do little updates and so that you know the growers will have one source of truth you know that they can sort of hopefully and sort of work from and if we keep it as a live document which is how i envisage it online then that those updates can always be be made quite simply yeah and so with respect to environmental footprint where does cocks food set with respect to you know nitrogen inputs and and things like that so the nitrogen input sits um in a similar space to perennial migrants so we're looking at uh depending on the autumn applications depend on how much grazing you really want to achieve and and uh how much biomass you want from a silage, cartora or grazing so you're looking at somewhere between 30 and 70 kilos of nitrogen applied in the autumn and then we're looking at 120 kilos of nitrogen being applied in the springtime so from a nitrogen perspective it sits in a similar realm to perennial regress the other inputs are probably all actually quite similar with similar number of passes across with um yeah with herbicides and um PGRs fungicides they're probably certain pretty similar to each other i mean obviously if you know weeds and diseases are you know on the top priority list have we got a resistance management strategy and so do the cocks food growers are implementing from a disease perspective probably not the disease the main diseases to date have been the rusts which are low risk from a resistance perspective but the the the major issue with the especially with the downy is that you're actually applying the same product to potentially the same pathogen that still alive from last year over and over and over uh and there's a yeah there's potential that it has some resistance and that's why we've seen it um build up but we have no proof of of any of that at the moment um grass weed wise i think we're probably using enough different chemistry families whether growers are implementing that knowingly or whether just alternating um families as they see different weeds coming through i'm not fully convinced either way i think they deal with what's in front of them on an annual basis uh as opposed to necessarily having it in the back of their mind uh but the chemistry we're using cocks but is quite different to what they would use in the intermediate crops so we obviously we can't use the cereal products to the as largest extent in cockswort because we're trying to kill yeah the grass and cereals uh which would take some of the cockswort out so i think in the rotation perspective they have a resistance um program in mind but inside the five years in cockswort uh that's where we're trying to get to with the especially with the downy mildew at the moment we're using two products and we're really trying to explore to get sort of five different modes of action that are potentially useful against that pathogen yeah okay so i guess the big question is when is this um sort of grower guide going to become available i'm hoping we can hand this grower guide out at the field day cockswort field day that we'll be having somewhere not sure if it's scheduled for i think it's scheduled for late october this coming season excellent any other comments that you want to make about cockswort no cockswort's been it's a challenge uh especially the last five years with the the weaver and in the downy not necessarily turning up when we want to run fungicide trials yeah uh but no overall cockswort there's still a lot that we don't understand necessarily about how it grows and the genetic diversity between different cultivars and different origins um but that's the challenge of of growing and growing the crop every every cultivars potentially quite different yeah and you know with with the amount of funding that fad has you know we have to be quite pragmatic around what we can and can't do on some of these smaller m crops so i think you know doing little bits regularly and then pulling all together into a grower sort of guide is probably the base that we can do i mean i'm sure cockswort growers want us to do lots and lots more but then i'm sure you know the two and a half thousand other growers sort of say what you know no so it's getting that balance yes yes so we've had a definitely had a push on cockswort in the last few years uh but i think that's been appreciated by the growers because it's potentially saved their industry yeah and and yeah toolfescue is sort of next on the on the horizon okay great so thank you very much Richard and um thank you listeners um look out for the cockswort grower guide that's coming out in september online and available at hopefully the cockswort field event in october so thank you for listening have a great day on the farm thanks for tuning in to cut the crop presented to you by far if you like to know more about any of the topics discussed or have any suggestions for future topics go to dub dub dub dot cutthecrop.co.nz