Can clover grow in Cavan?

Clover won’t last up here” is the phrase Teagasc researcher Donal Patton hears most often when introducing the subject of clover to dairy farmers in the northern part of the country.

Patton and his Ballyhaise colleague, Barry Reilly, are doing their best to prove the naysayers wrong. Whether they succeed or not remains to be seen, but they’re certainly winning the early rounds.

The Irish Farmers Journal visited Ballyhaise last week and was impressed with the quantity and distribution of clover on the farm. The pair started 2021 with little to no clover present on any of the farm.

A new experiment was designed to look at the impact of clover and meal feeding rates on production, profit and the environment.

Half the herd is grazing grass only and the other half is grazing grass and clover swards.

Within these, half the cows are getting fed the standard Ballyhaise feed plan of 600kg meal per cow per year, while the other half is getting fed double that at 1.2t/cow.

“We know from other experiments that you get a milk yield kick when cows graze clover swards but we want to know what happens if we feed more meal to cows grazing clover swards and what impact does this extra meal have on nitrogen surplus,” Patton says.

The experiment began in 2021 with the researchers in a race to get as much clover established on the clover treatments as possible. Unlike in other experiments where the whole farm is reseeded with grass and clover in year one, Ballyhaise is running the trial at the same time as getting clover established.

Twenty-five per cent of the farm was fully reseeded last year along with another 15% of the farm oversown with clover.

A further 25% was fully reseeded this year and about 10% oversown with clover.

An ordinary farm couldn’t support this level of reseeding or oversowing and hope to produce enough winter feed. Just 30% of the winter feed requirement was produced in the grass and clover 600kg meal treatment last year, even with 210kg N/ha applied across the treatment. This is OK for a research facility like Ballyhaise where silage can be got from other parts of the campus but for an ordinary farm this level of silage deficit would be crippling.

By next year, Donal and Barry hope to be back to normal levels of reseeding per year and have good clover contents across the entire grass and clover grazing blocks.

Total annual chemical nitrogen usage will be 250kg N/ha in the grass-only swards and 125kg N/ha in the grass and clover swards. The experiment is set to run from 2021 to 2026 and, in many ways, it won’t be until the last few years that the real results will emerge around cow performance and persistency of the clover.

Clover persistency

Long winters, wet summers, steep slopes and flooded fields will be a test to clover persistency in Ballyhaise.

These are different challenges to those experienced under existing clover research sites at Moorepark, Clonakilty and Solohead.

An interesting aspect of the Ballyhaise approach to oversowing or reseeding is to cease nitrogen applications after the clover is sown.

This puts additional pressure on grass growth and the fields look very hungry during the no N phase but you can’t argue against the fact that they got super clover establishment, with only a tiny portion of the farm oversown last year and not having excellent clover contents now.

The dairy unit at Ballyhaise Agricultural College has been operating as a research farm for the border, midlands and west region for the last 17 years.

In many ways, the farm has been a beacon in the fog surrounding milk production systems in the region.

The farm has grown 14t DM/ha on average over the last 11 years and the herd of spring-calving Jersey crossbred and Holstein Friesian cows sold 482kg MS/cow on the 627kg of meal in the grass and clover treatment last year.

An open day will be held on the farm on 13 July from 10am to 5pm.