Killing the Weed Is Only Half the Job
What if the real question is not how to kill African Lovegrass, but why the paddock keeps giving it somewhere to come back to?
Drive through parts of New South Wales, Victoria or the ACT and African Lovegrass can be impossible to miss. Thick tussocks occupy roadsides, disturbed ground and increasingly large areas of grazing country.
For farmers caught with it, the response is understandable: control it.
Spray it. Graze it at the right stage. Slash it. Prevent seed set. Stop machinery and livestock spreading seed from one paddock to another. Those things matter.
But there is another question we should be asking.
What happens after the lovegrass is gone?
Because killing a plant does not automatically repair the system that allowed it to dominate.
And if we leave behind bare ground, weak pasture and the same struggling soil, we may simply be creating the vacancy for the next generation of Lovegrass to occupy.
This is an extraordinarily persistent plant
African Lovegrass, Eragrostis curvula, is a drought-tolerant perennial grass originally from southern Africa.
It is particularly successful in disturbed and degraded pasture and is commonly associated with acidic, sandy and lower-fertility soils. It can persist through difficult conditions that more desirable pasture species struggle to tolerate.
Once established, mature plants become increasingly unattractive to livestock. Animals selectively graze the more palatable plants around them, reducing competition while the lovegrass remains.
That is a nasty ecological advantage. The plants farmers want are repeatedly eaten.
The plant they don't want is left standing. Over time the competitive balance shifts.
Agriculture Victoria specifically notes that African Lovegrass can dominate overgrazed pastures because animals avoid mature plants, allowing dense infestations to develop. Then there is the seed.
According to NSW WeedWise, an African Lovegrass seed head may produce somewhere between 300 and 1,000 seeds. More than half can remain viable after five years and some seed has been recorded remaining viable for as long as 17 years.
So this isn't a weed problem that disappears because one season's plants have been knocked down. There can be a biological memory sitting in that paddock for years.
Bare soil is an invitation
This is where the story becomes more interesting.
NSW Government guidance states that African Lovegrass establishes readily in thin or bare pasture. Pastures with less than 70 per cent groundcover are considered at greater risk of weed invasion, while management recommendations aim for at least 90 per cent cover with desirable pasture plants.
Think about what that means.
African Lovegrass isn't simply charging into an intact, highly competitive pasture and effortlessly wiping everything out.
It is extraordinarily good at exploiting opportunity.
Drought. Overgrazing. Disturbance. Bare ground. Poor pasture establishment. Low fertility. Loss of desirable perennial cover. Roadworks and machinery disturbance. Those are openings. And once Lovegrass occupies enough of the paddock, the problem can begin reinforcing itself.
This is why the NSW African Lovegrass management guide makes an important statement that deserves far more attention:
The main control principle is to ensure the weed is replaced by better species.
There is an enormous difference between removing a weed and replacing a weed.
One creates an empty space. The other changes who controls the paddock.
The weakness we should be exploiting
African Lovegrass looks indestructible when you are staring at a mature infestation. Its seedlings are another matter.
NSW management guidance says African Lovegrass seedlings struggle to establish where groundcover is high. It recommends maintaining the vigour, persistence and competitiveness of desirable pasture species as part of long-term control.
That gives us a very different way of thinking about the problem.
The farmer still needs to control existing mature plants and prevent them setting seed. But at the same time, we should be asking:
How do we make that piece of ground increasingly difficult for the next Lovegrass seedling and increasingly favourable for the plant we actually want?
Now we are talking about roots. Groundcover. Water infiltration. Soil aggregation. Nutrient cycling. Grazing recovery. Pasture density. And soil biology. That is a much bigger conversation than choosing another drum of herbicide.
There is another ecosystem below the paddock
For a long time weed management has understandably concentrated on what we can see.
The plant. The seed head. The tussock. The spray result. But every plant is also interacting with an ecosystem beneath the surface.
"Roots release compounds into the rhizosphere. Microorganisms interact with those roots. Plants influence carbon inputs, moisture, litter and nutrient cycling. Different plant communities can therefore develop different biological communities below ground. And this is no longer simply theory in relation to African Lovegrass". Bronwyn Holm, Founder of Earthfood explains.
Australian researchers examining invaded south-eastern grasslands have reported that African Lovegrass invasion can alter below-ground communities involving bacteria, fungi, nematodes, arthropods and earthworms.
Researchers have also found differences between microbial communities associated with invasive grasses and native grasses.
We need to be careful with what that means. It does not prove that a microbial product will kill African Lovegrass. It does not establish that poor soil biology caused every infestation. And it does not mean soil treatment can replace weed management.
But it does tell us something important:
An invaded paddock is not simply a collection of unwanted plants sitting above an otherwise unchanged soil ecosystem.
The system below the surface can be changing too. That deserves much more attention.
So where does Earthfood fit?
Earthfood Life is not a herbicide, and we are not going to pretend that it is.
If you have mature African Lovegrass producing seed, it needs to be appropriately controlled. What Earthfood brings to this conversation is the other half of the job.
Earthfood® Life is a certified organic living soil microbial system designed to establish and support biological activity in the soil and root zone.
The purpose is to help restore biological processes associated with nutrient cycling, soil structure and aggregation, root-zone function and the establishment of stronger plants.
The farmer's objective should therefore not be:
Spray Earthfood onto African Lovegrass and watch the weed disappear.
That would be nonsense. The more interesting approach is this:
Control the existing lovegrass. Stop seed production. Protect the ground from further invasion. Establish desirable pasture. Then work on making the soil underneath that desirable pasture function better.
Because ultimately the strongest defence against an opportunistic plant is something useful already occupying the space.
Killing without replacement can keep us on the treadmill
This is one of the fundamental problems with treating weeds purely as enemies to be killed. You can successfully kill a plant and still fail to repair the paddock.
If the desirable pasture remains weak, roots remain shallow, soil remains poorly structured and large areas remain open, you haven't necessarily changed the ecological opportunity that favoured the weed.
You have removed today's plant. The seedbank may still be waiting.
NSW's own advice recognises that control has to be integrated. Spraying alone has limited circumstances in which it provides effective long-term control, and larger infestations require combinations of control, pasture establishment and pasture management.
That doesn't make herbicide useless. It means herbicide is a tool rather than an ecosystem. There is a difference.
Perhaps the paddock is telling us something
At Earthfood we spend a lot of time asking farmers to look at what their soil is telling them rather than simply looking at what is growing above it.
Where is the bare ground? How quickly does rain enter the soil? Where does it run? What does the soil smell like? How deep are the roots? Does the soil crumble or set hard? What plants are returning? What disappears when management changes? What happens after drought?
And, importantly, what occupies a space when something else dies?
African Lovegrass gives us a particularly good opportunity to examine those questions because its persistence is so well documented.
If we keep killing it and it keeps coming back, perhaps the next useful piece of information is not simply another way to kill it. Perhaps we need to understand the system we expect to replace it.
Earthfood wants to demonstrate our knowledge
So rather than simply writing another article about Lovegrass, Earthfood will put the proposition into a paddock. So all can see.
We are looking for an Australian farmer with a genuine African Lovegrass problem who is interested in establishing a properly documented on-farm trial with Earthfood and our experienced soil scientist.
Not a manicured demonstration patch. Not three photographs taken six weeks apart for advertising. A real paddock. A real Lovegrass problem. And enough time to find out what actually happens.
The trial would establish baseline conditions before treatment and, wherever practical, maintain treated and untreated comparison areas.
We would want to document groundcover and species composition, soil condition, infiltration, root development, plant vigour, moisture behaviour and other appropriate measurements before and during the trial.
Existing African Lovegrass would still be managed using appropriate control methods. We would then investigate what happens when rebuilding soil biological function and competitive desirable pasture becomes part of that management program.
Our soil scientist would help establish the scientific framework and appropriate measurements. Earthfood would document the project.
And the farmer would provide something no laboratory can reproduce perfectly:
a working Australian paddock under real farming conditions.
This would be a commercial field trial, not a free-product promotion.
Bronwyn Holm will contribute her Earthfood project time without consultancy charges, but the participating farmer would purchase the Earthfood product required for the trial and meet agreed freight, independent testing, soil-science and other specialist professional costs associated with the project. We will chip in. Product will be one third of current product prices used on fields and we will hold that as well.
That matters because a meaningful trial has value.
Product costs money to manufacture. Professional soil scientists deserve to be paid for their expertise and our soil scientist will donate his time on this trial.
Laboratory testing costs money and we may not need one because the results could speak for themselves. And if we are serious about producing evidence farmers can trust, the work needs to be done properly.
If the results show no meaningful difference, we need to know that.
If they show something significant, we need to know that too. That's what a genuine trial is for. And for all farmers with this issue we can all future proof our land for our legacies within family and regions.
The next question
African Lovegrass is already telling Australian agriculture something. It thrives when there is an opportunity to occupy ground that better plants are failing to hold.
So perhaps the question shouldn't end with:
How do we kill African Lovegrass?
We need to ask the harder question:
What do we need to change so that, once it is gone, the paddock favours something better?
Because after the weed dies, something will eventually occupy that ground. Our job is to make sure it isn't Lovegrass again.
To be part of this trial contact: enquiries@yourearthfood.com