Launch of Irish Pasture Profit
Index encourages greater
focus on grass variety traits
The launch of Ireland’s new Pasture Profit Index
(PPI) that aims to help farmers in their selection
of grass varieties should encourage UK farmers to
make better use of their own Recommended List
information.
So says Dr Mary McEvoy, previously part of the
Teagasc Moorepark research team that spent six
years developing the PPI, who says the new index
is a response to Irish farmers’ increased interest
in individual grass varieties and demand for some
form of economic evaluation.
Dr McEvoy, now technical development manager
with Germinal, believes some of the benefits that
Irish farmers will gain from using the PPI can be
replicated in the UK simply by more thorough
interrogation of variety information available
through the independent Recommended Lists.
“The PPI provides a total merit index for
individual grass varieties that is based on the
economic value of a number of important traits,”
she explains.
“These include seasonal dry matter yield, quality,
silage dry matter yield and persistency, with
values being prescribed according to a range of
parameters and base assumptions. The advice to
farmers using the PPI is usually to look beyond
the headline figure and review the sub-indices,
to ensure they match varieties as closely as
possible to their own specific farm and system
requirements.”
Whilst there is no PPI for farmers throughout
the UK, there are independently compiled
Recommended Lists for England & Wales,
Scotland and Northern Ireland, all containing dry
matter yield, quality and persistency information.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there is some consistency
between the best performers on the Irish PPI and
the higher ranked varieties on Recommended
Lists in the UK.
“The highest of all varieties on the PPI, the
tetraploid late perennial ryegrass AberGain, is
also an outstanding performer for dry matter yield
and D-value on the 2015 Recommended Lists for
England and Wales, and also Scotland,” points
out Paul Billings of Germinal.
“Similarly, the highest ranked diploid perennial
ryegrass on the PPI, AberChoice, has very high
performance characteristics on the lists for
British farmers.
With three of the top five in the Irish PPI being
Aber varieties from the IBERS Aberystwyth
University grass breeding programme, credit
should be given to the longstanding strategy to
breed for quality alongside dry matter yield and
other characteristics. It is clear from the new Irish
PPI that grass quality, when available in quantity,
equates to financial gain for farmers.”
Announced on 13th November, the PPI
will become an official list in Ireland for
2015, published as part of the Department
of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s
Recommended List. The currently available list is
a test proof and includes 17 varieties, with several
other varieties potentially to be added to the
official 2015 list once DUS and seed availability
information is known. Even then, the PPI will not
be fully representative of the Irish Recommended
List, but development will continue and the
expectation is that there will be a PPI in Ireland
for all Recommended List varieties by 2017.
Farming Express. Page 3