Dr. John Gilliland:

Where we are seeing integration working very well is if heifers, for example, are designated just to the multispecies area. With the predicted price for fertiliser this spring, there are a lot of people looking at multispecies swards to try to reduce what will be significant cost. As people start to explore this, we would encourage them to take one particular grouping of animals on the farm and designate them to a multispecies area, and do rotational grass within the multispecies. When chopping and changing one does not get the full animal performance. We have had extraordinary animal performance off the multispecies, but we have not chopped and changed. When an animal is designated multispecies, it stays on it. We have found that where an animal stays on multispecies it absolutely thrives. In a dairy situation when wanting to bring on in-calf heifers and getting them into calf, that is certainly a very good place to start. We would never foresee that 100% of a grazing platform would be multispecies but we feel that it has a huge role to play. It is particularly good in that regard. That is how we would encourage people to go in first. We would say put it on and see how it works but do not chop and change the whole time. Take one group of animals and keep them on that platform.