A planned approach to reseeding in 2019

Thursday 03.01.2019 , News

Those that did manage to find a window of opportunity to reseed experienced the benefit from newer swards; as these were the last to burn up and the first to recover following the drought. Reseeding older, underperforming swards is a fundamental practice to gain productivity from grass–based systems.

For farmers where reseeding this spring is high on the agenda; now is a good time to identify what fields should be targeted to get the biggest return on investment from reseeding.

For those with ground under forage crops, these fields will be the obvious starting point. Other fields that should be targeted are those which are producing below-average covers on your farm – if you measure grass it is easy to identify which fields these are.

The most obvious fields for reseeding are:

  • Fields which have been poached or damaged
  • Fields where the quantity of perennial ryegrass is lower than ideal
  • Have you noticed an increase in weed content of some fields?
  • Do you need to skip some fields as they are not recovering as well in the 21-day rotation

Choosing the best varieties will always be important – for grazing swards, choose late heading varieties, delivering good quality and high seasonal yield. AberGain and AberChoice are the leading late varieties on the Recommended List and Pasture Profit Index (PPI) for the past number of years.

The 2019 PPI will be published over the coming weeks and this will help form the basis for your reseeding decisions in 2019.