​What will Anameka TM do….
· Fill the late summer to early winter feed gap.
· Substantially reduce supplementary feeding costs.
· Allow deferred grazing of winter pastures, boosting pasture productivity.
· Give you a LIVING HAYSTACK.
· Give your stock consistent nutrition with each plant.
· High in vitamin E for healthier animals and better meat quality.
· A good source of other essential minerals.
· Responds well to summer rainfall and helps to reduce water table recharge and salinity. 
· Sheep with access to Anameka have a 19-24% increase wool production when compared to sheep grazing stubbles, dry pastures or moderate quality cereal hay.
· After initial planting, there are very few extra costs.
· 20+ years if managed well. (based on Atriplex nummularia field plots).
· Deep rooted- grows in sandy soil to heavy clay.
· It does not need salt but happily grows in saline areas (where you would plant other Oldman saltbush).
· In saline areas, plant where there is still barley grass - it won’t grow in bare salt scalds.
· Persistent water logging will kill it (river saltbush and puccinellia grass are better for waterlogged areas).

Anameka, like other Oldman saltbush, uses out-of-season rainfall. Over time, this reduces water table recharge and allows salt to be washed back down the soil profile.
Ultimately, highly productive but salt sensitive grass pasture species can recolonise the pasture. These systems have been shown to quadruple sheep grazing days in autumn.

​What is Anameka?
What do I do with it?
· Anameka is a cultivar of OLDMAN saltbush (Atriplex nummularia), an Australian native shrub.
· It is one individual female plant, selected from 60 000 plants that were collected across Australia.
· It was selected for higher nutritional value, greater relative palatability and greater biomass growth rates after grazing.
· Anameka originated from a population in NSW, the WA oldman saltbush that were tested had much lower nutritional value and were not liked by sheep.
· It is propagated from cuttings to guarantee genetic integrity, it cannot grow from seed.

· Seed from Anameka TM crossed with local shrubs is unlikely to produce shrubs with similar nutritional traits.
· The breeding system of oldman saltbush is complex, with separate male and female plants and 4 sets of chromosomes (compared to our 2).  Scientists are working to develop elite seed lines but it is a slow process.

· The better area you plant it in – the better the quality growth you will have.
· Plant up to 1200 stems per Ha in optimal conditions to 700 stems per Ha for saline or very dry areas.  If you plant too many, they eventually compete for water and you get less biomass per shrub.
· Establishment is expensive so get it right with good site selection, preparation and rip to allow rapid root growth.
· Plant DEEP – leave a few centimeters at the top (maximize sub soil moisture).


· If there is a dry spring and no rainfall during the first summer, consider getting the fire unit out. One drink may save you the cost and hassle of replanting or managing patchy stands.
· First graze for sheep at knee height – for cattle at hip height, tug a few shrubs and make sure they cant be pulled out. Aim to leave more than a third of the leaves for the first graze.
· Manage grazing to keep plant under the head height of the stock – to ensure new growth is eaten.
· Use it or lose it - If the shrubs are not utilised each year, their growth rates slow down, they will produce less leaves and they can get tall and woody. 
· Don’t forget to use it in good years so you have it in the bad.
· Remember that saltbush is the supplement in your system and stock should have access to understory, adjacent crop stubble or provide other feed like hay, lupins or straw.
· Saltbush should be 30-40% of the diet of sheep and cattle as it has more than 20% salt in the leaves. Ensure access to good quality drinking water (otherwise they wont eat much saltbush).

Is Anameka saltbush for you?
Anameka has been selected for higher digestibility and improved preference to sheep. Across a range of environments, it had a mean organic matter digestibility of 64%, crude protein of 19.5%,sulpher of 0.45% and 25% ash.
We anticipate this nutritional profile and improved relative palatability will lead to increased voluntary intake, higher energy values and increased livestock productivity. Animal house feeding studies confirm the digestibility data. Saltbush can be a good source of selenium, copper, zinc and manganese.

The economic farming systems models suggest that forage shrubs are most profitable when planted on soils that are marginal for cropping. While Anameka has been developed for saline and arid areas, it will happily thrive on better soils. They do not need salt to survive.
To optimise return on investment on mixed crop/livestock farms, we suggest that you plant it in the better classes of 'marginal' soils. In saline areas start revegetating well above the salt scalds and move down-slope as the soil profile dries and salt is pushed back down the profile.

Be warned - selecting for higher palatability to sheep could result in higher predation by other critters. When Anameka is used in mixtures with other shrubs and oldman saltbush, it can be overgrazed- especially when set stocked for a long time. In mixed stands, short term heavy grazing is recommended. The need for vegetative cloning may increase the price compared to populations grown from seed.

Old man saltbush (OMSB) has been planted for stock feed in saline and infertile soils in the low to medium rainfall zones of Australia for many years. OMSB is native to the semi-arid areas of Australia, this means it’s already well adapted to dry and challenging environments. Once established, it can persist for decades provided it is not subject to extended water-logging. 
At the start of Anameka development, whole farm economic modelling was used to identify the traits that had the most impact of profitability. The modeling indicated that
energy was the most important trait. Improving digestibility by 10% would be three times more profitable than increasing biomass production by 10% or reducing the cost of establishment by 10%. In addition, improving the relative palatability of OMSB would reduce the likelihood of overgrazing the understory and associated soil erosion issues.

​Anameka development utilised sheep preferences and traditional agronomic and lab measurements. Sheep preference between oldman saltbush populations were largely consistent between research sites and years.  
Laboratory analysis indicated that sheep selected genotypes with higher digestibility of organic matter and lower salt.
When compared with the original 'wild' populations, the best 12 saltbush selections had 20% higher digestibility, lower salt and produced 8 times more biomass. Among these elite shrubs, sheep still showed clear and consistent preferences. This is likely to be associated with mineral profiles and plant secondary compounds. Out of the 12, Anameka was commercialised by the CRC for Future Farm Industries in 2015. CSIRO continues to develop saltbush and other native shrubs for Australian producers, with support from Meat and Livestock Australia and Australian Wool Innovation.