Rhodes Grass

Rhodes grass produces on moderately saline and alkaline soils and under irrigation with water other forages will not take, which is why it appears in irrigation districts of the Middle East, North Africa, Australia and Pakistan. It is also used in reclaiming sodic land, where its stolons cover ground quickly and organic matter accumulates.

Soil suitability should be assessed with local soil survey information and, where available, field testing.

The grass cures well and is baled for hay at large scale, and it is the basis of an international trade in baled forage into countries that import most of their livestock feed. It does not ensile well, so a producer choosing Rhodes grass has chosen a hay system, with the drying weather that implies.

Fertilizer rates, timing, and forms should follow local soil tests and regional guidance. AgricultureID does not publish universal fertilizer recommendations.

Because it runs and roots at the nodes, Rhodes grass repairs gaps, holds soil on erodible ground and competes with weeds in a way a tussock grass does not. The same habit makes it harder to remove from a field going back into crop, and it is why the grass is used for waterway and roadside stabilisation.

The seed is very light and chaffy and will not flow through a conventional drill without either a special box or a carrier, so establishment is often by broadcasting onto a prepared surface and rolling. Poor stands in this crop are usually a sowing-mechanics problem rather than a seed-viability one.

Feeding value is good while the sward is young and leafy and drops sharply as it stems, so cutting or grazing interval decides the value of the crop more than total yield does. Rhodes grass hay cut late is bulk rather than feed.

It survives a dry season but is less drought-hardy than buffel grass or guinea grass, and in low-rainfall pastures it thins where those persist. Its combination is water-responsive productivity with salt tolerance rather than survival on very low rainfall.

Some Rhodes grass cultivars are poor hosts for root-knot nematode and are used deliberately as a break in horticultural and cropping rotations for that reason. Whether a given cultivar has that property is a cultivar question, not a species one.

Management combines resistant varieties, rotation, monitoring, and — where justified — locally authorized control products applied according to their labels.

Cultivars divide into diploid types, which are earlier and finer, and tetraploid types, which are later, coarser and generally higher-yielding. The two suit different systems, and seed of one is not a substitute for the other.

Rhodes grass has naturalised widely outside sown pasture and is treated as an environmental weed in parts of Australia and the Pacific. As with the other sown tropical grasses, the traits that make it persist under grazing are the traits that make it persist where it is not wanted.