Introduction

Dryland farmers in North Africa and the Near East have, in the past fifty years, been the focus of many schemes to try to improve the productivity their farms. Many of them are battling to maintain levels of productivity due to erosion and decreasing soil fertility. The system they use consists various versions of a cereal/fallow cycle. In latter years it has been suggested that they replace the fallow with grain legumes or forage crops, and use more nitrogen fertiliser. To a large extent farmers have resisted this advice. An alternative system is available that is cheap and particularly suited to dryland farms where capital is scarce and resources are few. This is the medic/cereal rotation that was discovered by farmers in South Australia early in the twentieth century.

The legume pastures used as the basis of livestock and cereal production on dryland farms in South Australia consist of two major species.

Medic

Medic is the common name given to species of annual medicago (M. truncatula, M. rugosa, M. polymorpha etc.) that are native to the winter rainfall zones of North Africa and the Near East, the Southern Mediterranean zone of Europe and Turkey. They are not native to Australia but they adapted remarkably well to Australian conditions. Several medics are believed to have been introduced accidentally onto farmland in South Australia in the mid-nineteenth century as contaminants of imported cereal seed from North Africa.