An island country situated in Oceania’s Melanesia subregion, which extends from New Guinea in the west to the Fiji Islands in the east northeast of Australia, the Republic of Fiji comprises a relatively dry region spanning the northern, central, and western parts of the country and a wet region in the east and has two distinct seasons – a wet season that runs from November to April and a dry season that runs from May to October. The grass that grows natively in the dry region tends to wither and die when the area experiences its long annual dry spells, which can cause the cattle and sheep that depend on it to rapidly lose weight.

Employees working at a site featuring factories, laboratories, training classrooms, dormitories, and a cultivation area used for demonstration purposes known as the Fiji Juncao Technology Demonstration Centre in Nadi, Fiji’s third largest city (Xinhua/Zhang Yongxing)

China introduced Juncao– a robust hybrid grass with the ability to withstand drought that can be used as a substrate for fungi, to control erosion and desertification, and as feed for livestock among other applications – as part of a special assistance programme carrying no cost for beneficiaries that was launched after the governments of China and Fiji signed an agricultural cooperation agreement in 2014, however, which has addressed the problem. Participants were taught how to grow a variety consisting of a clump of around 10 to 20 fast-growing tillers that rise to a height of about five to six m and can be harvested three to six times a year for many years and a root system that can fix a 15 sq m swath of sand and loose earth known as giant Juncao. Usable as green forage and capable of being processed and stored for dry season, the high-yielding grass’s height and ability to grow rapidly and the fact that it is widely adaptable and possesses high crude protein content make it a better alternative to corn stover, or the leaves, stalks, and cobs of corn that remain after a harvest.

In February 2019, Mahendra Reddy, Fiji’s Minister of Agriculture at the time, noted that Juncao is especially suited to the country’s dry regions and the long dry spells that they experience every year, a hectare’s worth of Juncao fields can produce around 450 tonnes of green feed per year, and that it can be cultivated in the wet season and made into livestock feed during dry periods while explaining a plan to enhance the country’s livestock production by optimising the use of Juncao grass and other new initiatives that his department had taken to promote agricultural development to the media and members of the public.

Tuli Young works as chief executive officer of a livestock farm located more than 100 km from Nadi. In March 2021, he explained that the pasture was plagued by a shortage of fodder, and especially a shortage of green feed during dry season, which greatly limited the size of its cattle inventory until Chinese experts suggested that the farm give Juncao a try after Severe Tropical Cyclone Winston hit in February 2016. The farm’s staff decided to start growing the grass on a 2.83-ha trial plot that March and began feeding its cattle with it three months later.

“Giant Juncao grass stands tall during the dry season, which helps my livestock grow,” he smiled.

The Pasture gained the capacity to export its beef cattle to countries like the Solomon Islands by 2017, and it expanded its giant Juncao cultivation by more than 16.2 ha in 2018. Tuli then launched a plan to grow Juncao across a total of nearly 405 ha of land and dramatically increase the farm’s cattle and sheep inventory, which the farm has been implementing in recent years while it also applies for organic beef and mutton certification.

For more information, please contact WFP China COE (wfpcn.coe@wfp.org)