The fire currently burning at Castle Hill is indicative of the dry conditions many parts of the east coast have experienced this winter/spring. We have just weaned at Lincoln and have started the ewes and lambs on a leader follower rotation around the lucerne. The weaned lambs are staying on lucerne to avoid a check … Read more
Professor Derrick Moot was awarded the Ray Brougham Trophy by the New Zealand Grassland Trust in Nov 2016. As part of this, award Derrick was required to make a series of public lectures. This video is a recording of the lecture which took place at Lincoln University, Canterbury on 6 Sep 2017. The duration of this … Read more
Rachel Fields presented her PhD exit seminar on Friday 14th July at Lincoln University’s Field Research Centre (FRC). This video is a shortened version of that seminar presenting her main research findings. The topic of Rachel’s PhD was ‘Causes of elevated coumestrol in lucerne and mitigation of the subsequent risk to ewe reproductive performance’Coumestrol is … Read more
In this video Prof Derrick Moot discusses the differences between established and establishing lucerne stands in relation to the rate at which the roots explore and exploit water stored in the soil. Known as the extraction front velocity (EFV) this is a measure in millimeters of soil per day that the plant roots access to … Read more
Posted on behalf of Professor Derrick Moot and Dr Keith Pollock Yes, it’s been a dry spring and summer. Not unheard of in Canterbury but more extreme than normal. At Ashley Dene, 538 mm of rain has been recorded from 1st March 2014 to 28th of Feb 2014. This is about 88% of the normal … Read more
With drought conditions developing along the east coast we thought maybe we would throw some numbers out to put a price on how lucerne can transform dryland farming systems. Here, at Lincoln, the 2014/15 rainfall for the Jul-Dec period is about 170 mm – or about half what is expected over the same period in … Read more
In this video members of the Lincoln University Dryland Pastures Research team explain the impacts of nitrogen fertility and water availability on the current pasture production of dryland cocksfoot and perennial ryegrass pastures at Ashley Dene (approx. 3 minutes).
Monthly rainfalls have been below average here at Lincoln since April. Pasture growth rates have slowed as water stress conditions have developed and all our dryland experiments at Ashley Dene have been de-stocked earlier than usual. On Monday we released Dick Lucas, our resident annual clover guru, at Ashley Dene to talk about soils, their … Read more