Phred wrote in message
...
The first point is that since the days of draught animals are long
gone, most cane farms around here no longer have fences. In some
districts, and in certain particular situations (e.g. a significant
area of non-arable land [usually due to excessive slope] which was
cleared before world heritage "pristine" rainforest intervened),
there are mixed farms of cane/beef cattle. The cattle typically graze
on exotic pasture grasses, often naturalised rather than sown for the
purpose. _Panicum maximum_ and _Brachiaria_ species dominate (with a
fair admixture of the weedy blady grass (_Imperata cylindrica_) in
most cases .

The second point, which was raised today, is that cane farms were
heavily contaminated by chlorinated hydrocarbons over several decades
in the form of insecticide applied to control the larvae of the cane
beetle. With modern concern and consequent controls over potential
contamination of meat products, cane farmers don't feed crop residues
to cattle.

Given the current serious drought affecting most of eastern Australia,
there have been suggestions for using cane trash as drought feed.
However, for the reason given above, people are being very cautious
about it. Although BHC etc. have not been used now for quite a long
time, these compounds do persist in the environment for a very long
time.

So, before anyone would feel comfortable feeding cane crop residues to
stock, there would need to be some fairly careful testing of material
from individual paddocks. It may not be practical... but it will be
interesting to see how things do pan out if things get desperate.


Cheers, Phred.

while not suffering from the same contamination problems, sugar beet
tops are often cut and ensiled as a cattle feed in the UK. Indeed with
beet virtually all the crop is sold for animal feed after the sugar has
been extracted.


--
Jim Webster

"The pasture of stupidity is unwholesome to mankind"

'Abd-ar-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Khaldun al-Hadrami'