Finely chopped and buried for years as silage, lucerne ferments and smells sickly sweet when damp, and is being dumped to feed thousands of breeding ewes on Oxton Park, a major sheep-grazing and cropping enterprise near Harden in southern NSW.
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The extended O'Connor family, who run Oxton Park, once regarded silage as opportunistic, to be cut in times of abundant spring pasture.
Now silage is crucial, especially this autumn, when each morning breaks without sign of rain. Dogs bark incessantly, driving the ewes into contractor Jock Dunn's drafting pen, where he scans each one with a 30-second ultrasound.
Dunn separates pregnant ewes with twin lambs. They get a good helping of silage. Ewes with a single lamb will get a little less, while barren ewes are shipped off for meat production.
Paul O'Connor says the last significant rain fell in early March, allowing 500 hectares of mostly triticale to be sown for grazing. "It's still looking quite good. Getting some rain now would really kick it away and give us a big advantage into the winter, where food looks as if it will be hard to come by," Mr O'Connor said.
Agronomy adviser Andrew Daley says the Harden district is in full drought-feeding mode.
"I think when it does rain it won't stop," Mr Daley said. "They are all predicting floods this year. We'll see. El Nino is going out and La Nina is coming in and the Indian Ocean is apparently very warm, and when it is we get decent rain," he said.
Mr O'Connor says rain will make grazing crops worth their weight in gold to finish cross-bred lambs and merino wether lambs for sale.
Lucerne silage is made in spring.
"We take the sheep off it, put a rock roller over it to push any little rocks in the ground while it is still soft. In October we will cut it," Mr O'Connor said.
Pasture put through a fine chopper and stored in a big, excavated hole holds about 70 per cent of its water, which is why older sheep in a dreary, dry spell quickly line up on either side of the smelly trail for a feed.
"We have hardly got any pasture feed left at all. We are feeding all the breeding ewes. We would be feeding about 85,000 kilos of silage three times a week," Mr O'Connor said.
More silage would have been cut last spring had more rain fell on Oxton Park. "It was still enough to produce quite a bit," Mr O'Connor said. "It really comes into its own in a year like this – most years, really, because before we did the fine chop silage we would need to feed out a lot of grain."
Silage works out at half the cost of grain.
"I can't recall ever having to feed much silage much later than this. If it stays dry through until the end of May that will put the pressure on as far as whether the silage has enough energy for pregnant ewes. That will be something we will have to weigh up. Let's just presume it's going to rain before too long."
