Welcome to the Maine Farmcast! This is your host, Dr. Glenda Pereira, an Assistant Extension Professor and the Dairy Specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, as well as an Assistant Professor of Animal Science within the School of Food and Agriculture. For today's episode, we're going to switch gears and talk about a little bit of what goes into helping our animals grow. So we're going to talk about forages predominantly.

And I have somebody I've been wanting to get on the podcast for a long time now. So we have Joe Lawrence today joining us from Cornell University, he's going to introduce himself. But he's with the Pro Dairy team, and he's a senior associate extension educator. But he's going to tell us more about that. So I'm really excited to talk about their corn silage program that Joe leads with his team there.

And I think a lot of the information we're going to learn about today will be super useful for this growing season and then for the next growing season as folks plan that out as well. So Joe, without further ado, thanks for being on the Farmcast and let us know a little bit more about yourself.

Yeah, thanks, Glenda. So as you mentioned, I'm part of the Pro Dairy team at Cornell, which is an extension and applied research team. And so myself and my teammates have statewide responsibilities in different areas from field crops to farm business management to dairy science. And we, you know, we work both with our county and regional educators and the Cooperative Extension System around the state and with, with the faculty on campus and their research and extension programs. So I've been in this position about ten years.

I'm a native of the Northern part of New York State up along the St. Lawrence River and continue to live in that area and run this statewide forages program. And part of that program is our corn silage trials, which we collaborate with University of Vermont Extension on, and as well as we've had some great collaborations across the Northeast from the University of Maine Extension down to Pennsylvania, there's corn silage trials there. So and that's part of what we'll get into today is the opportunity to utilize this data across the Northeast and and pick out the parts that are most impactful for for your farm.

Yeah. I want to go on a little sidetrack here, but we're recording this in late January, and we're going into the Super Bowl into two weeks. So as a native of Upstate New York, are you a Bills fan?

So so I don't know if I should admit this on on a a public format like this, but I I actually grew up as a Pats fan.

I think I mean, people are gonna come for you,

Joel. The Bills mocking us I should. Yeah. I know that. I get that a lot.

But I will defend myself in that this was not a, you know, a Tom Brady era front runner thing that this was something that started when I was quite young and I lived through some pretty poor records. So it back way beyond their success in this century. So, but yeah, never was really, never really embraced the Bills, even though I'm not too far away. And not to go on too much of a tangent, my 15 year old has been a diehard Seahawks fan since he was about three years old and picked his favorite team based on the logo he liked the best. He's, so he's excited.

The Seahawks right up through. It's a pretty exciting time for him too.

Yeah. That's that's kinda cool. So two coasts, I guess.

Yeah. Yeah.

So back to to the focus of today's episode even though this is great. So you had mentioned that you've been in this role for about ten years. Where were you previous to this? Quickly, tell us a little bit more about your training and how it helped prepare you to lead this corn silage program because you have this awesome report that you send out to folks. And I'm gonna put a link to where they can find more information in the show notes.

It's a lot of planning, a lot of moving pieces, and trying to plant as many hybrids as possible across the state of New York and even in Vermont, like you mentioned with our colleague Heather there. It's a lot to put this program together and then have successful results that you can share and use in your extension programming.

I guess a little more background is my initial interests were really, I thought I was going to get more into the nutrient management space working with the dairy industry. I was going through school at a time where the KFO program and some of the nutrient management planning aspects were really kind of in their infancy and starting to develop and I thought my path initially was going to be in that area. So I went to SUNY Cobleskill for my undergrad, and then I did a master's at Cornell in nutrient management. My first job out of Cornell was with a county cooperative extension here in New York and Lewis County in the northern part of the state. I landed in that job and really enjoyed it, but a lot of the questions I was getting from farmers in the county was really on forage management, and I kind of joked at the time that there was, you know, the classic agronomist helps you get the seed in the ground, pick the fertilizer, kill the pest, and then their job's done, and then the dairy nutritionist comes and picks up a sample of the silage and sends it off to the lab and has to figure out what to do with it, right?

And there wasn't a lot of, it seemed like there was a bit of a disconnect in between there. And we had a dairy educator in the county at the time, too, that I worked with, and we just made a great team and really had, really keyed in on this issue. And so and started doing a lot of programming around forage management from the harvest of the crop to the feeding of the cow. So I'm not an animal nutritionist in any way, I joke that I've dealt with it coming out the back end and I deal with it going in the front end, the cow itself is a bit of a black box to me. But that all set me up pretty well, that experience.

And then I did leave Extension for a few years and worked as a crop advisor for a local cooperative and got some good field experience doing that prior to this position coming available. But I felt like it really set me up well. And I found the area of forages really fascinating and had the good fortune to come into this position with Pro Dairy and at that time, there was a corn silage program evaluating hybrids that had been on kind of on hiatus for a couple years because the previous faculty that had run the program had retired. And so really, was kind of baked right into my job description that the college was interested in getting this program up and running again. So we had some great support from some other faculty at the college and the industry was looking to have this again.

I came on board in the 2016. And we hit the ground running in 2016 with kind of a revamped version of the program. So we, it's in seed companies, any seed company that's out there is invited to enter hybrids and they do have to pay an entry fee. That's how we fund the program. But so they can enter hybrids that they're choosing out of their lineup, pay an entry fee and that we provide a third party side by side evaluation of those, those hybrids and, and right now, the programs morphed some over the years, but right now we offer a location and one location in Central New York and then one location in Vermont with Heather Darby and her team there at UVM, and we average between sixty and seventy five hybrids that get entered each year.

So at both of these locations, we'll have those 60 to 70 some hybrids all planted and randomized replicated plots. And we monitor them through the season and harvest and send, get yield data, get forage quality data, something that's a bit unique and we feel like sets our program apart a little bit is instead of just providing the results of the forage quality data, we also, we run the sample, the corn silage samples through a mock diet and the CNCPS program, which is a ration balancing program that was developed at Cornell and is estimated to feed about 40% of the dairy cows in the world. So it's out there in the industry under some trade names, but the backbone science of the model is the CNCPS through Cornell. And so what we do is we take kind of a base diet for the growing season. And then we supplement substitute all of these different hybrids that were grown in our trials into that diet and look at what it what it does to milk production, the predicted milk production.

I do like to clarify that it's not necessarily a diet you would actually feed your cows because if your nutritionist is working with you on the farm there, if you put in a new corn silage, they're gonna adjust other ingredients to rebalance it, right? We do not do that because our interest in using the model this way is a little different and that we want to see what it tells us these changes in corn silage are going to do to the predicted milk production rather than trying to rebalance the diet.

Yeah. And I think you said it really well in the beginning when you were in your county role, there seemed to be this lag in what the cow is actually eating and you bridge that gap. It it kind of fell in your lap. This program fell in your lap, but you're bridging that gap now. And I work with Tom and and Mike as well in this capacity to to try to meet in the middle to what could this potentially do for milk yield.

But I think it I think that's, like you said, a really big benefit of this program is that you're having those results to potentially assess. And then something you said too, this is really a platform to provide results for farmers and consultants to potentially try this on their farm and then see if it works or not. Right? And I think that's why you said, you know, anybody's welcome to participate. And and your report is really so digestible.

No pun intended. Mhmm. So then folks can utilize it in that capacity. Right? So maybe next year, they they're potentially working with their nutritionist or with their seed dealer, they can look at these results and then say, we have a similar growing degree day, a similar soil type, similar season here.

I like these milk yield results. Let's see what we could do with this. So I really like the application of that, and it's kind of awesome that it came back a full circle for you in that beginning role. And now you're kind of, you know, having this output and outcome here for the farmers, not only in New York, but across New England as well.

Yeah, and that's something not just our data, but a lot of these sort of trials have shown over the years is some of our key forage quality metrics are driven as much by the growing environment and the weather conditions as they are by the hybrid. So, mean, certainly hybrid selection is still a really important thing for farms, we want to pick hybrids with the relative maturities that really match our growing season with the pest tolerance packages that give and the agronomic packages that give us the best the best results for our farm. But especially if we look at fiber digestibility, which is a big part of balancing diets these days, right, when utilizing forages, we see that with among non BMR corns, the growing season, in particular rainfall patterns can create a larger difference in fiber digestibility than the hybrid genetics do. So if you have poor digestible corn silage that you're feeding on your farm right now, it's, you know, to me, it's really the best way you can put your time and energy to use is really evaluating is are these problems we're experiencing with our forages something that is inherent to the growing season we had?

And if that's the case, then it's not necessarily doesn't doesn't necessitate that you have to go out and try to redo your whole portfolio of what hybrids you buy, or reassess your growing management or your harvest management. May just simply be a fact of the growing season is what we provided and we have limited resources, limited time on a farm, right? So if we can, if we can kind of recognize the things that are outside of our control a little bit, and just accept them for what they are, we can put more of our time and resources into managing the things that really do make a difference in the bottom line of the farm, right. And I think this that's another way in addition to looking at hybrid performance, another way this report can help us is is helping us understand if if it was the growing season or our management that is impacting the type of forages we're feeding right now.

Yeah, No, very well said. And I kind of wanted to start putting some of these building blocks together. So a hybrid, because maybe folks know, maybe folks don't know, what differentiates a hybrid versus a non hybrid?

Yeah, and that so that's something that we see in corn, most dominantly in the field crops industry is, and it's been around for several decades, plant plant breeders realize that if you took two different male and female corn and cross pollinated them that you would get this first generation hybrid of the two parents that has more vigor than either the parents may have had. And, and that's unique. We don't see that in soybeans or alfalfa or some of our other field crops. We would refer to them as varieties because it's a different variety of soybeans, but it's not a it's not a hybrid of two parents like we have in corn. So hybridized corn dominates the industry.

For some niche markets, you may still see what's called open pollinated corn or, or something which is not a hybrid, but really a vast majority of the industry for both silage and grain is dominated by hybrids at this point.

And what about growing degree days?

Yeah, so growing degree days are a way to recognize that each calendar day isn't the same thing to whether it's a plant or insect or whatever, the temperatures we have affect how they they grow during that period. So there are different growing degree day models with what we call different base temperatures that are applied to alfalfa versus corn. There's even some pest models that have different base growing degree or base temperatures to understand the life cycle of a pest. And we use that in IPM to predict when pests will be a problem. Like for corn, for example, we use a system where you take the high and low temperature for the day, and you subtract off a base of 50 as your base temperature, and that gives you a number of heat units that were accumulated for that calendar day.

And again, we use different bases for different plants because it's based on the idea that different plants are going to utilize temperatures differently. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. A lot of what your report alluded to was that a major focus for you guys was to understand what the weather patterns potentially were, really document them well to then say, you know, is the yield we're seeing for this specific hybrid really due to the fact that there's and I think you mentioned this. There is significant hybrid differences. But at the end of the day, it's really the weather and those factors that we can't control. So in the 2025 report that you published, had two planting dates at your two locations.

And folks can share, you know, go look at this report, but I'm just gonna quickly highlight some of the cliff notes and then your harvesting dates. And you had early mid hybrids, and then you had mid late hybrids as well, but you had two different harvest dates. And then this 2025 was a curveball for everybody. So you mentioned that you weren't able to harvest at one of the locations due to the fact that there was just so much variability. It potentially wasn't worth your effort to harvest and then generate a report for that.

But you have a ton of metrics and variables to look through here. Do you want to talk to us about just some of the key points of what you documented? And then more specifically, the differences in the hybrids will likely due to environmental factors. And I think that's critical because you said in the beginning before we started this podcast, maybe there's places in Maine that are more similar in environmental factors to places in New York or elsewhere across the country than in that same county you're in. And I see that all the time.

We have microclimates here in Maine, and it really impacts folks are like, oh, we got rain today, and it's like nobody else got rain. And it's just these micro pockets. So I really like that you kind of target that as an explanation so then folks can really understand what their environment is like and apply this hybrid or not.

Yeah, it's always great to have data from your like own farm, right? But in the absence of being able to do that each time, the more data we can provide on soil types on rainfall patterns and growing degree days, hopefully the more you can dial in on a location that was similar to your your farm's growing season and it may not be the location that was closest to you. But going back to the to the report itself, right, so we will accept hybrids, whatever the companies want to enter, but for practical reasons, right, we want to, we really focus in on harvest timing and maturity at harvest. So if we have too broad of a range of maturities, it's very hard to harvest them. And we feel like we're doing discredit to the report if we have some hybrids that are harvested way too immature, you know, say a dry matter that's in the high 20s or low 30s below what we would target, or if we have some hybrid shorter season ones that end up being harvested and they're way too dry, that's not a really great representation of what those hybrids can do if we're not harvesting them at the ideal time.

So to manage for that a little bit, we tend to accept hybrids from eighty five days on the shorter end up to one hundred and ten days on the long end, and then we split them into two groups for harvest timing. So those earlier, the eighty five to ninety eight day hybrids, we'd harvest at one time and then we may come back to that site a week or ten days later to harvest the ninety nine to one hundred and ten day hybrids to give them the time to get into the maturity range we want. You know, that's going to vary across the Northeast, It's going to vary across the big state like Maine. It varies from north to south in New York too, right? But we try to offer a range that that is most representative of the growing climates that we're going to experience.

Yeah. Yeah. And see here, that's one of our biggest challenges is that, like last year, some folks, because it was so wet, they were planning past the July 4.

And

we had a pretty harsh, quick winter. And even like, I remember this December, it was just really a harsh winter right away. And so we had an earlier frost and that just kind of threw everything off. So I always tell folks to really look at those growing degree days and then work with their experts on this because that harvest time is really critical. And maybe they need to harvest earlier rather than later because of all these other environmental factors.

Yeah, thanks for explaining somewhere about that. I don't know if you wanted to add anything else.

Yeah, well, think you made a great point there. And that's an area where so there's perception in the industry that if we can grow longer season hybrids, we're going to get higher yield. And there is some evidence of that on the grain side, in particular, but we consistently see in our report and you can go to our results and see this, we try to highlight it each year where we may have a short eighty five day hybrid that yields as well or better than a ninety five day hybrid. And part of that is because of maturity because around 50% of our silage yield comes from the ear and a significant change in that results in that yield on a dry matter basis is when we convert more of that milky substance that's in the ear into starch. So that's not only increasing our total tonnage we're harvesting, it's also increasing the starch content of our silage.

So we can actually get higher yields and more of an impact on better yields from a field by waiting and, you know, instead of harvesting it when it's 32% dry matter, if we can wait till it's 35%, 36% dry matter, we can see a more significant change in yield and the added value of extra starch content, then we can see harvest with that ninety five day hybrid versus the eighty five day one. And I really challenge farms, especially with the how unpredictable our growing seasons have been, is be it pull back a little bit, drop your, you know, you may want to drop your average relative maturities that you're selecting by maybe five days. And that's going to give you more management, more flexibility to manage and pick your harvest timing than it is than trying to push the envelope and grow that hybrid that's the longest possible relative maturity you think you can squeeze into your location.

Yeah. Yeah. So my colleague, our colleague Juan Romero would love to hear this because he's all about dry matter. And he's like, please try to get as close to 35 to 38 as possible. Yeah.

He's a big proponent on that. But sometimes that's not always a reality. And I do just want to highlight one more point about this report, and then I think we'll wrap up with our conversation about this awesome silage variety corn silage hybrid evaluation program. But you have some really cool graphs and it's figure 1.5, just highlighting kind of that overlap between yield and predicted milk yield. I really like how you plotted all of the hybrids on this graph and folks can really look at it, but kind of what you were talking about.

Right? So you have your four you had your I think it was 85 to 94 day, 95 to 98, 99 to 104 and then 105 to 110. And you plotted all of those hybrids and then kind of had your yield, your minimum and your max for both crop tonnage, and then for predicted milk yield. Folks can use that, but I see that, like, for example, in your lower growing degree day, the eighty five one, a lot of the hybrids seem to be potentially, like, on the top two quadrants, whereas there was more variability. Or maybe the short and the really long one actually.

But I see the first one, there's a lot more above average yield in milk for your shorter growing degreed acorn. So just something to think about as folks peek through these results. These quadrants really do a really good job of helping us digest some of this information.

Yeah, yeah, we found a lot of value in those because it is a way to look at a site and say what was above average in both yield and quality and to your point, dry matter can really drive that, right? So those shorter season hybrids that were a few points drier at harvest, it can drive their yield and because they're now they're a little more of a nutrient dense package with a little higher percent starch in them, and that can potentially drive benefits in that That's predicted milk yield and dry matter a great observation of that highlights how management and that selection process can influence that.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, is there anything else we didn't talk about today that you would like to just wrap up with?

I already kind of said it, but again, we hope this is of value across the Northeast. And we do have some, we've had some past collaborations, and we were hoping for some future ones where we can expand out the number of sites we have a little bit to represent more variation in the weather conditions different areas have, but so I would just say stay tuned for that. And if you're interested, know, our contact information is on the report and probably be with this podcast. And we're always looking for collaborators for for this work.

Yeah. Yeah. No. We'll share all this content in the show notes, folks can find more info there. So thanks so much, Joe, once again, for being on the Maine Farmcast.

This was a great discussion.

Thank you.

For our listeners, if you have topic suggestions, comments, or questions, be sure to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.