Legume for semiarid clay sois: an update

Since writing the article "New pasture legumes for clay soils in dry environments" for the last issue of the Northern Muster some 10,000 ha of Progardes (www.progardes.com.au) has been sown across North, North West and Central Queensland on various land types including: Mitchell Grass Downs; cleared Gidgee/Boree; cleared Blackwood and Brigalow; and Barkly and Gulf land types. Agrimix Pty Ltd and various graziers undertook the planting of Progardes using numerous methods including: aerial seeding into dry native grass (Mitchell grass); aerial seeding into freshly pulled and/or old pulled Gidgee/Boree country; aerial seeding onto a fully cultivated seedbed; aerial seeded onto blade ploughed country,; aerial seeded into burnt country; fully disc cultivated and airseeded; and partially tyne cultivated and airseeded. The results of these various planting methods are pending

Successful aerial seeding of Progades Desmanthus at Wambiana

In 2011 Progardes Desmanthus (a pasture legume) seed was aerial seeding into ash after the vegetation was pulled and burnt. Initial establishment was slow but in 2017 the plant density across the paddocks averaged 5 Progardes plants/m2. The frequency of plants was 39% and a distinct pattern of plants across the paddock could be identified and is related to the aircraft flight paths. The paddock is well grazed and has a botanical mix of native grasses and the Progdes Desmanthus legume. Progardes is proving to be a success on neutral to alkaline clay soils in the subtropics/tropics across Queensland. Aerial seeding was a successful method of establish this legume at Wambiana near Charters Towers

Successful pasture development at Cungelella: a grazier, a researcher and a seed company's perspective

Describes the need for legumes in the Brigalow/Buffel grass landtypes of Central Queensland and the successful introduction of Progardes Desmanthus and the resulting beef productivity

PROGARDES\u3csup\u3eTM\u3c/sup\u3e: A Legume for Tropical/Subtropical Semi-Arid Clay Soils

The range of available sown pasture legumes for the vast heavy clay soil regions of northern Australia has long been regarded as being deficient (Burt 1993; Jones and Clem 1997; Pengelly and Conway 2000). Indeed immense areas of northern Australia’s semi-arid clay soil regions have no sown pasture legume with proven adaptation and persistence through the long annual dry seasons (Gardiner and Swan 2008). The genus Desmanthus is a Mimosaceae legume containing some 24 species which are native to the Americas and range from being herbaceous to suffruticose in habit (Luckow 1993). Desmanthus is one of the very few legumes consistently observed to persist under heavy grazing on clay soils in their native environments (Pengelly and Conway 2000). Numerous accessions of Desmanthus were collected and introduced into Australia by various institutions, notably CSIRO and QDPI, over the past 50 years (Reid 1983; Pengelly and Liu 2001), as potential legumes for clay soils. After years of multi-site field evaluation of Desmanthus and other species, in 1991 QDPI released 3 Desmanthus cultivars, cvv. Marc (D. virgatus), Bayamo (D. leptophyllus) and Uman (D. pubescens), which were marketed as a blend named “Jaribu” (Cook et al. 1993). Currently, only cv. Marc is available commercially with a focus on southern subtropical Queensland markets. How-ever, Pengelly and Conway (2000) state that, owing to Marc’s low dry matter production, its contribution to animal diets and soil N is limited

Desmanthus for silage

Introduction: Desmanthus is known as a pasture legume where its inclusion can increase animal performance. However, under a cropping scenario desmanthus can produce high yield of good quality forage (Mwangi et al. 2022). This study was initiated to determine if desmanthus could be preserved as silage. Materials and Methods: Progardes desmanthus, cultivars JCU 4, JCU 6 and JCU 9, were established in three irrigated 4 ha blocks in north Queensland (19°35’S 146°54’E) on 21/12/2021. The blocks were slashed and regrowth was mowed after 60 d on 12/4/22. Within 4 hours of mowing, cultivars were round baled and wrapped in 5 to 8 layers of white plastic film wrap. Bales were stored on their ends outside. On 14/9/22 two bales of each cultivar were unwrapped and presented to a group of 15 beef cows for 24 h for monitoring of feeding behaviour. Samples at ensiling and feed-out were analysed by NIR. Results: The dry matter (DM) at mowing was similar, but JCU 9 silage was drier than the other silages (Table 1) leading to more extensive moulding. The loss of water soluble carbohydrate (WSC) in all silages was matched by a reduction in pH and production of fermentation acids. All silages had a restricted heterotactic fermentation typical of round bale silage. Video monitoring revealed that cattle spent more time at cultivars JCU 4 and 6, possibly due to visibly less mounding in these bales. Conclusions: This preliminary study demonstrated that desmanthus can be ensiled. All three silages were of good nutritive value and satisfactory fermentation and should support good levels of animal production. The higher apparent presence of moulds in the drier JCU 9 silages suggests ensiling above ~ 50% DM increases moulding and reduces preference for the silage

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Unlocking north's seed secret: results of Hughenden Progardes trial

[Extract] Noted previously in the Northern muster is the importance of persistence that a sown legume requires if it is to be well adapted, survive and be productive in our variable climate – including having the capacity to recover from drought.\ud \ud If a legume is persistent it implies that:\ud \ud ● The plant is tolerant of grazing.\ud \ud ● Has longevity.\ud \ud ● Has disease and insect resistance.\ud \ud ● Has a suitable flowering and seed maturity time to cope with our sometimes short and variable wet seasons.\ud \ud ● Has adequate seed production and hardseededness \ud for seed soil reserves.\ud \ud Here we report on the importance of adequate seed production, hardseededness, and, particularly, the soil seed bank found in a trial plot of Progardes Desmanthus (www.progardes.com.au) on Mitchell Grass Downs near Hughenden

Successful aerial seeding of Progades Desmanthus at Wambiana

In 2011 Progardes Desmanthus (a pasture legume) seed was aerial seeding into ash after the vegetation was pulled and burnt. Initial establishment was slow but in 2017 the plant density across the paddocks averaged 5 Progardes plants/m2. The frequency of plants was 39% and a distinct pattern of plants across the paddock could be identified and is related to the aircraft flight paths. The paddock is well grazed and has a botanical mix of native grasses and the Progdes Desmanthus legume. Progardes is proving to be a success on neutral to alkaline clay soils in the subtropics/tropics across Queensland. Aerial seeding was a successful method of establish this legume at Wambiana near Charters Towers