Rohan spreading perennial ryegrass (SPR) was specifically bred to give sheep and beef farmers persistent, easy-care pasture. It is a diploid with a unique spreading ability, very fine leaves and a dense habit. It has good palatability, is late flowering and comes with NEA2 endophyte for good animal performance.
Download the Rohan SPR product manual here
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Rohan SPR has a spreading characteristic which provides two key advantages. First, it helps Rohan SPR fill bare areas in a pasture, that may otherwise be occupied by weeds as shown in the photo below. This means Rohan SPR competes against weed ingression.
Second, Rohan SPR’s spreading habit helps pastures recover from adverse climatic events, particularly extended dry periods, because it spreads to fill space where ryegrass tillers may have died.
Rohan SPR is not indestructible. Like all ryegrasses it will perform best under reasonable management and soil fertility. But its spreading habit improves its persistence compared to other cultivars.
Key with any pasture is matching a cultivar to the requirements of the particular situation. So where does Rohan SPR fit? Sheep and beef farmers often look for different pasture types across their properties, based on persistence.
High yield in dry
Under ideal conditions Rohan SPR does not have the same yield potential as cultivars such as Trojan, producing about 10% less. But under tough, dry conditions Rohan SPR will likely persist and yield more over the life of a pasture.
Under semi-intensive to semi-extensive farm systems it is not easy to maintain pasture quality in late spring. Late heading cultivars help, but Rohan SPR is more than this, and in on-farm trials is showing a 0.7 higher ME than some other cultivars in November and December.
A continual comment from farmers with Rohan SPR is that it 'always looks good'. It stays greener and leafier and is often preferentially grazed.
Rohan SPR has consistently shown excellent persistence across our testing programme. The results of two trials below show its performance in areas with ryegrass persistence issues, on farms with known persistence problems.
Rohan SPR with NEA2 endophyte provides very low staggers risk pasture for sheep and staggers free pasture for cattle. In the 12 years we have sold NEA2, no ryegrass staggers have been seen in sheep or cattle on commercial farms. A low level staggers have been only seen once on a deer farm, in optimal staggers conditions (first short regrowth after a drought; grazed by elk which are particularly susceptible).
