Tackling Giant Rats Tail: An Innovative Approach with the Evolve BLADERUNNER™️

With thanks to Deon Attard of Attard Pastoral Company, property Chrisdale Park is located at The Leap, QLD (20km North of Mackay).

In July 2024 my family purchased around 400 Acres of costal grazing country, the property was a former Dairy and later a Cane Farm until the early 1990's. There is three paddocks of fairly dense Giant Rats Tail (GRT) around 80% GRT coverage which is a member of the sporobolus grass family.

There is a further two paddocks of what we believe to be Paramatta Grass which is a member of the same sporobolus family which also have around 80% coverage. The GRT is as tough as fishing line, there is no definitive management strategy for it and our research indicated that a lot of time and money could be spent for no gain whatsoever. Most people are using a chemical approach.

Through my research on how to manage these grasses, I watched a webinar on YouTube between the Australian DAF and their American Colleagues. They talked about a study conducted in Florida, USA. There was 4 test paddocks, a control, one was treated with a broad acre glyphosate spray, one was treated with whatever the Americans call flupropanate and the final paddock was managed with a mechnical device called a Roller Chopper. The Roller Chopper is a gigantic bladed roller towed behind a bull dozer, used in forestry applications to manage regrowth. The thing I found interesting was that after 3 years those three paddocks had a similar amount of GRT regrowth and the Roller Chopper paddock from memory fell between the two chemical paddocks for performance. My father Robert Attard who is a retired sugar chemist and I found this interesting since wepreferred to take a non-chemical approach to managing our GRT. Our property, Chrisdale Park has had virtually no chemicals used on it for at least 40-years. The thought of starting with them is very much a last resort for us. I found an Australian company who makes the Roller Chopper but the cost was around $70,000+ and I'd probably require a bull dozer to tow it.

My research lead me to Joe Fleming of Evolve Engineering in Walgett NSW. Joe makes a steel roller with chevron patterned blades, Joe had no experience with GRT and referred me to an Ag Consultant he'd been talking to called Tarek Lees on the Sunshine Coast in QLD. Tarek had built his own roller and had been experimenting on GRT with it and says he was having reasonable results with it in his opinion. The roller is very low maintenance and doesn't require big HP or much diesel consumption to pull it, although a lot of farmers told me it wouldn't work in their opinions, Dad & I decided it was worth a punt in order to have a non-chemical solution.

Evolve BLADERUNNER™️ 4500 Versatile tackling Giants Rats Tail near Mackay in QLD, Australia.

We are unclear as to what the best stage of growth is to use the roller. I feel that the drier it is, the more damage we can do to the plant. Dad is of the belief that it works better with some moisture in the ground as the blade can penetrate the soil and he feels that gets a better crimp on the material. The jury is still out as to when is better. Our ground is uneven being a former cane farm until the 1990's, the rows were never worked into the ground and are still there today. We've been driving across the rows so the roller can go into the dips, going in the other direction the roller was running across the tops of the rows and only getting a good crip on half the material. If you had a level paddock it'd work better and you could go faster. 5km/ph is about the speed we can comfortably sit on without knocking the tractor or the operator around. On our ground we've found that 2 passes in opposite directions was the minimum required and 4 passes (2 each way) was better and gave us a good enough crimp, this is busting up the GRT crown in places, each clump consists of multiple plants and we think we might be killing some of them but we don't know for sure.

After about 2-weeks we found beautiful soft new shoots on the GRT which out cattle are absolutely loving. Add to this they are trampling and camping in those areas that we have rolled meaning they are now doing some of the work for us whereas previously the cattle could not effectively move around in those areas due to the height and density of the GRT. After the rolled areas have been left sit for 3-4 weeks to dry out, another single pass of the roller is laying a large amount of the GRT onto the ground. At this point we hope the microbes will get into the laid over GRT leaf and break it down for us, we'll be using what was a weed effectively as mulch layer for the new crop.

Our treatment plan at this stage is to roll a paddock with 2-4 passes, wait 3-4 weeks before spreading a cover crop seed into the paddock then rolling it again in a single pass and putting cattle back into the paddock for a week to help trample the seed into the ground and chew off some fresh GRT shoots. We'll then lock the paddock up for 3-4 months and see what happens. If the cover crop grows as planned we'll graze it off, do some more crimp rolling, possibly some weed wiping and we'll over-seed in Autumn with a pasture mix that we've come up with between our own research, other local farmer's advice, advice from Tarek and Barenbrug seeds. The pasture will be 20% of either Signal Grass or Humidicola, we will use Humidicola in the wetter areas of the block and Signal Grass in the rest. We know those grasses grow very well in our area as they're on the side of the road everywhere.

After all this, we expect to manage with some weed wiping with the Rotowiper and possibly some spot spraying but the amount of chemical we plan to use will be negligible if our plan works. If you ask me again in about 5-months I should have an update by then but so far so good, the crimp roller is performing as expected. We're having to do more passes than we'd like but it isn't that much of a drama and so far the results speak for themselves.