Key Messages:

• The season began with an early break, but conditions tightened with a dry spell, slowing early momentum.
• Ryegrass (Vortex) and Lucerne (Silverosa GT 7) were the best performers in terms of cover and feed.
• In the most damaged/variable areas, Puccinellia and Messina gained more room, but were very patchy across the trial.

Project Aim:

The Community of Practice provides a collaborative space for producers to share knowledge, compare approaches, and learn from each other’s experience with saltbush and understory systems. Using an initial trial site, the project will test new species and design approaches across paddocks with differing conditions, building on existing expertise to refine and expand successful understory systems across the region.

Project Background:

In 2023, Facey Group and CSIRO established commercial-scale demonstration sites combining Anameka™ oldman saltbush with a range of understory species to build more drought-resilient and productive systems on saline landscapes. The project generated strong local interest, reflecting the prevalence of low-lying saline areas and long-established saltbush paddocks across the Wickepin region.

The demonstration sites highlighted the significant potential for increased feed supply and biomass, while also exposing practical challenges, including grass weed management and variable performance across different landscape positions. These learnings reinforced the need to go deeper into how these systems can be refined and better adapted to local conditions.

In 2025, the Community of Practice emerged to bring together producers who are interested in, or already experienced with, saltbush and understory systems. By building on previous work and shared on-farm experience, the group aims to strengthen management practices, improve consistency of outcomes, and support wider adoption of these systems across the region. This season, a new trial is set up to test previous varieties and a new design approach to the system.

Project Update:

A new site is being established to extend the learning from previous seasons

• The new site will try Lucerne and ryegrass alongside clovers, tall wheat grass, and mixes to address mid-saline areas.
• A new design was planned to allow wider corridors of understory species with double lines of saltbush in between. This would favour a praying and space management for moving mobs.
• New saltbushes are tried out with river and old man saltbush as stand-alone species and in mixes.

The consistency of previous season results is to be followed with this new setup, as well as increasing the flexibility of functional understory systems to the farm feed necessities and operations. Stay with us for further details of these reasons.