Leeston Pastoral in Goulburn, New South Wales | Agriculture company

Leeston Pastoral

Locality: Goulburn, New South Wales

Phone: +61 437 949 510

Address: 924 Woodhouselee Road 2580 Goulburn, NSW, Australia

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24.01.2022 A picture tells a thousand words! The benefits of holistic planned grazing in action. Our pasture has seen 112 days rest since its last grazing and will still receive another 24 days before it is grazed again. A pasture that is not over grazed and given sufficient rest has so many advantages including many that are shown in the second image created by the US Dept of Ag in 1947! As you can see this information isn't new, we just need to remember the lessons of the past.

24.01.2022 It doesn't get much better than this! Mixed perennial pasture with Capeweed and Pattersons Curse helping to bust up soil compaction. Both have deep taproots and provide habitat for beneficial insects and bees. The steers are looking pretty content with the whole situation too

09.01.2022 A little update on last week's post about adding seeds to our distillers grain pellets. This is the results of washing 1 handful of dung through a 2mm strainer this morning. As you can see there was still a mix of 13 seeds visible. It looks like the field peas and sunflower seeds didn't make it through intact and I think the 2mm strainer let the small seeds such as clover, millet, turnip and safflower though so none were counted. Fingers crossed we see some sprouts soon

04.01.2022 Here is another update on a Mallow (some would call a "weed") patch that the cattle devoured in June and the plant succession that is now taking place. The first two photos show mallow taller than the steers and the aftermath 10 minutes later The third photo shows the dieback that followed. We were a little concerned at this point as the was a lot of bare ground, but we just left nature to it.... The fourth photo shows the amazing recovery and succession of Shepherds Purse from the mustard family. It has had an extremely thick germination with 100% ground cover now. It has seeds with high oil content (up to 20%) and is known as 'protocarnivore', since it has been found that its seeds attract and kill nematodes as a means to locally enrich the soil. It should be interesting to see what follows this amazing plant.

04.01.2022 Last week I put up the image below comparing our pasture to our neighbors. Some people expressed concerns about having too much feed available and that it would have detrimental effects on the pasture into the future. For example, clover not being able to germinate and compete with the large volume of pasture. I decided to revisit one of our best paddocks that had a huge amount of feed available last rotation and see what the effects were. The first photo is of the paddock la...st rotation, showing how much feed there was and how much residual was left. We had approx 200 steers in the 5ha paddock for 3 days. The second photo is showing the feed available today. The pasture is in very good condition and there are lots of other species including clover coming up through the grass. The third photo is of the clover roots showing very healthy nitrogen-fixing nodules :D Finally, the last photo was from last week showing our paddock that had had 112 days rest. As you can imagine I am very pleased with how we are tracking. Oh and so are the steers, who have been on a grass-only diet (no more pellets) for 14 days. They were reweighed this morning and averaged 1.8kg daily weight gain since having the pellets removed.