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Brad and Joe discuss ideas for grazing and forage season that we should be thinking about already, even in the winter. Thank you for listening.
Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.
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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. It's just Brad and I today. Emily's been traveling everywhere. It's a lot doing the ambiguous [unintelligible 00:00:21] training, everything, so can't be here today and we're going to miss her, but we're going to push through. We'll push through. We'll be okay.
Brad: Exactly. I did actually see her in person for once, last week at a conference. It was good to see her. She was speaking and running out the door because she had to get to another speaking extension event. She is busy.
Joe: Yes. It's the life of being in an extension and I will be back to it. When this comes out. I guess I'll be back to work tomorrow. That takes up a lot of time and travel. It's fun. I love traveling around the state, but man, it could get stressful traveling that much and speaking all the time. My voice is out of practice for sure. I spoke at a conference yesterday and I had to have the water bottle right there because my voice was tired immediately.
Brad: Especially in the winter time. For people that don't really know what Minnesota winters are like, it took me six hours one day last week to go 150 miles, which is normally about two and a half hours. More than doubled my time because of snow. It's not easy, but we keep going.
Joe: We make it work. Today, we're choosing to get out of our winter mindset and look quite a ways into the future. Brad pointed out to me, it's actually not that far into the future. We're talking about getting ready for grazing season. Like Brad said, today you could be seeding three months from now. That puts you on a time crunch, you got to have to know what you're doing and have a plan for what you're going to do.
Brad: I think 3 feet of snow on the ground, and I know it's hard to think about grazing, but it really comes down to we could be seeding. I've seeded pastures here in Morris in mid-April before, and it could happen. The idea is to be thinking about what your forage is going to be like this spring, summer, and even into fall, to have a plan because yes, it'll creep up on you so fast and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, I don't have any seed and we're not ready. There's a lot of implications related to that.
Joe: I know we're talking with Brad, who is a dairy guy, but this is a beef topic 100%. This is something that we talked about when I had a chance to speak at this conference that I was just at. We focus on a lot of different things, especially as a veterinarian we focus on vaccines and treatments and all these things that seem to be really exciting and you get to use new products and all these things, but most of our prevention and management comes back to nutrition, which when we're talking summer means grazing and grazing management.
Whether it's dairy or beef, cow, calf side of things, or even if you're a stocker, it comes back to grazing management and trying to get ahead of these things and how do you do it? Are you going to implement an intensive rotation? How do you figure out water? All those things that we've talked about before. Today, I think we're going to get a little more into the nitty-gritty of the forage side of things and pick Bradley's brain about some of the new things he's thinking about, what he's going to do up at Morris.
What he thinks people can do because of the weather that's happened in certain areas of the state this year, so I'm excited to hear. Maybe a little bit of repeat of some of the things we said before, but definitely a new take, different perspective on some of those things as well. Brad, give me a little background on why this topic even came up right now and why we're talking about it.
Brad: I've been meeting with a bunch of grazing dairy farmers for the last three, four months. We get together every month or every six weeks and talk about some of the challenges that we're seeing, things that we would like to do, where we're going in the future. Even me as a researcher, it's humbling to hear a lot of the same things that we're seeing here in Morris that farmers are having challenges as well.
Trying to be involved in that and obviously listen to those farmers and get some good ideas about what's happening has really been very interesting. We met yesterday and we were talking about forages and nutrition because we're all thinking about the spring grazing season and summer forage needs and how that works into our operations. I think it's on everybody's mind because of feed costs.
Feed costs are still really high. We were talking about forages because some of us are not feeding soybean meal in our-- At least in our organic dairy herds, we're not feeding any soybean meal. Soybean meal organic is $1,200 to $1,600 a ton and it just doesn't pencil out. That was a topic that came up yesterday too. How do we improve our forages so we don't have to feed expensive feeds?
We use some organic soybean meal for our calf green, but other than that we don't feed it and haven't fed it for three years. It just is not cost-effective. That stemmed a lot of the discussion that we had yesterday.
Joe: Those groups are super valuable. It's one of the biggest things that I miss about being in private practice is really feeling like I got to hear from a bunch of farmers every day. It's cool that you can get that perspective from both sides, both the university dairy side and then from what I would say was the real world outside of the university system. The university dairy is definitely in the most real world-- I'm fine saying this on the recording, is that it's the most real-world piece of the university animal system that I've seen, but it's still the university which has both benefits and challenges.
Brad: We're definitely real world here and we experience the same things that a lot of farmers do day in and day out, so we are not immune to that. We are a little bit different, but we still have the same challenges.
Joe: What did you hear, Brad? What did you hear from farmers? Because I know you asked them a couple questions and one of them being, what's your biggest challenges with forages in grazing? What did they have to say?
Brad: A lot of it comes down to grass species is a question. We can talk about those in a minute, but one thing that came up, the first question that we had was about alfalfa grass mixtures for either bailage or silage and why we might think about adding grass into the mixture. Some people are going to go, "Oh yes, I do that." That's a no-brainer, but I think there's still a lot of people that might not add grass into an existing alfalfa stand because we just make it alfalfa, a pure alfalfa stand and that's what we've always done.
It really got my mind thinking yesterday about why we might put some sort of grass mixtures into our alfalfa field and it's really about chasing digestible forage and not necessarily protein. What we had talked about yesterday was your typical you want to see in your forages is the sort of 20:30:40 rule. 20% crude protein, 30 ADF, and 40 NDF. We had a nutritionist with us there yesterday and they really challenged us to not necessarily think about those.
We might think about NDFD 30, which is you can find on your feed test and that's really the digestible fiber portion and that's what we should be really thinking about when we're deciding on what grass or alfalfa mixtures that we want to use in our field.
Joe: I've always been taught, I've always heard, I've always heard from farmers is that protein is the focus and we're really concerned about that. Oftentimes coming from a little bit more of a beef background for me, we're super concerned about it because we're working with lower-quality forages, so protein becomes a huge focal point.
Brad: I think it comes down to calculating the percent or the tonnage of digestible fiber in the ration that you have. I need to write an extension article on this at some point to drive home the idea of that, but we'll take pure alfalfa. If you think about on average here in Minnesota, we get maybe three and a half tons per acre of dry matter alfalfa. One acre of alfalfa is about 1,260 pounds of digestible fiber, pure alfalfa.
If you add 4 pounds of grass to that ration, now we bump up the digestible fiber to 1,800 almost 1,900 tons of digestible fiber per acre. That's just using a little bit of maybe meadow fescue orchard grass into the mix. We can talk about Italian ryegrass. From a dairy perspective, that is like the king and obviously, there's lots of good things and bad things about using that up here in the upper Midwest, but if you put a little bit of Italian ryegrass in with your alfalfa, now you're producing way more digestible forage in that field than what you would just a little bit of maybe meadow fescue or orchard grass.
It really got me thinking about, maybe we need to put grass in our alfalfa. We don't do that here at our research center for our dairy herd. It's just straight alfalfa. We're not adding grass to the mixture. It really got me thinking about, man, how can I improve the forage digestibility and produce more forage per acre? Because even our farm, other farms, you only have a certain amount of land, and trying to be able to maximize the production off that land is the key. Yes, it got me thinking about how to add some grass into the mix for that alfalfa.
Joe: When you're adding grass to this alfalfa, we can start at the beginning. What time of year? When do you do that?
Brad: It depends when you're seeding. There's a couple of different ways you can do that. Obviously, if you're establishing a new stand of alfalfa, you can just add-- I think most people here, 4 pounds of grass, whether that's meadow fescue, orchard grass, those are the popular. Some people use tall fescue here in the Midwest, some farms like tall fescue, some don't, may be better from a beef perspective, but you just add that into the seed box when you're planting and it will come up with alfalfa.
You can also no-till and if you talk about alfalfa, maybe a thinning alfalfa stand, maybe you have some winter kill going on and we might see some of that, at least here in the upper Midwest. You can maybe no-till some grass into that alfalfa stand in early April. We had talked about Italian ryegrass and I'm going to be on that Italian ryegrass kit because that got me thinking we've never used it here, but I'm going to try it.
You maybe put 8 pounds per acre into a thinning alfalfa stand and it just rejuvenates that field for a year. Italian ryegrass is probably an annual in the Midwest here. Some people have got it to over winter, it just depends on the year. You can get a lot of forage and it grows really fast in the spring. For a thinning alfalfa stand, no-tilling, maybe Italian ryegrass into that would be ideal.
Joe: I think you're right, Brad. We are going to see some winter kill issues this year, especially in Southern Minnesota where there's been a decent amount of rain. We lost some of that snow cover. I think some people played it safe and didn't take a fourth cutting and are doing okay and they're going to be fine, but if you did and you went into winter with a pretty short stand, you might be seeing that thinning and quite a bit of winter kill.
Is this a viable option just to buy you a year to no-till in some grass and to say, "Okay, this will get us by for this year and then we'll figure out what to do next year." Would you prefer that sometimes to see how the alfalfa grows? Because you don't really know how dead it is, or would you just say, "All right, let's just start over?"
Brad: It certainly can buy you another year. It depends on what your crop rotation is and what you're going to do. If you need forage grass alfalfa, it's probably a viable option to no-till some, in this case, Italian ryegrass into that field to get that forage. If you want to start all over, you're going to have to plow it up and then it probably has to go to corn. Here in the Midwest, it goes to corn after alfalfa.
You really need to think about what your forage needs are and do you want, say, corn or corn silage, or do you want more grass for forage? It certainly will buy you a year and you'll get a lot of good forage, especially in the early spring and in late fall. It's going to buy you a year to really think about what to do and then maybe in the fall you plow it up and go to cover crops or corn the next year.
I think it's a good viable option to be thinking about that, especially this year, instead of going, "Oh man, I really need some grass and I really need some forage and I don't really want to go to corn." I think it's a good option to think about.
Joe: I don't want to get too long on this episode, but there is something on this list that really piqued my interest and I know we haven't talked about it. That is utilizing natives for forages. I'm curious how that discussion went with the farmers and your thoughts on it and why we don't see it more often.
Brad: It all comes down to forage quality. When you think about it from a grazing standpoint, timing of grazing. Some people, we think about natives, maybe big bluestem or some of the other forbs that we typically don't see in pastures as much in the Upper Midwest. There is a chance to graze those. They tend to be later maturing and not being able to graze those right away in, say, May or June, but it certainly gives you an option to do that.
Maybe from a beef standpoint, it might be a little bit better. The forage quality is maybe not as high, protein is certainly lower in natives when you're grazing them, but it certainly gives you diversity in your pasture. I think that's probably the key in all of this is having a diverse pasture that's resilient and able to withstand high rain events or drought events or grazing by maybe you got too many animals.
I think natives do play a role in that. I don't think you can bet the whole farm on them, but I think it all works within a rotation as well. It's an interesting topic and from a dairy perspective, people are always apprehensive to try natives because the protein is lower. They just sometimes perceive it to be straw out there and that's not the case. I think there's a role for those to play.
Joe: When you say later maturing, how late, and when does the timing work out? If you were going to have natives, when would you be grazing them to get the most out of them?
Brad: Certainly on a native standpoint, you're probably grazing those in July, August when they're a little bit more mature. A lot of them tend to be more warm-season grasses. We think about the Upper Midwest, they have prairie plants and they came on in the summertime when it got hot so you're going to be grazing them later.
If you're thinking about relying on grazing natives in May and June for a dairy herd, it's not going to work. It won't do it. There are certainly summer grasses to think about and they can certainly fit into the rotation. We've had some big bluestem pastures here in Morris, and you just graze them in July and August when they're later. For a dairy, there's a thought process that goes behind that. It certainly works for beef rotations too and summer grazing.
Joe: Do you get any regrowth on that that you can come back to a little later?
Brad: Yes and no. I think sometimes those, if you graze them hard enough, they don't really grow back, not to the productivity that you would based on a first grazing. It's a little bit less.
Joe: Yes, I always think about extending the grazing season because I think that's one of the most valuable things we can do, whether that's dairy or beef. I know you and I have talked about that a lot where you really take pride in being able to get that grazing season extended as long as you can. That's the same for the beef. We hear a lot about stockpiling forages and trying to mob graze that late in the year.
Any time I hear something later maturing, but still valuable, I always think about how late can we go and can we get regrowth and everything like that? I know that's something you probably talked about with your focus group is extending the grazing season. What did you hear? Did you hear anything new that we haven't talked about before or you hadn't heard before?
Brad: Yes, it was an interesting thing. We talk about maybe either extending the grazing season or getting forage later on in the season, and some of it had to do with cover crops and maybe they're grazing cover crops. One was talking about winter rye. Obviously, that's the king, at least for the cover crops here in Minnesota. The idea was you harvest the cover crop, either graze it for silage around Memorial Day, so the end of May, early June and then you maybe have a manure application to get some fertility on that.
Then we were talking about forage sorghum and planting a forage sorghum into the mix. Sorghum digestibility is really high, if we think about NDFD 30, it's about 65, so it's really highly digestible. Then the idea is to harvest it just after a freeze-up, so maybe September, even into October. Yes, you can graze forage sorghum. It's probably easier to harvest it, but you can graze both.
The idea is to maximize forage for your land. That was an interesting thing for me to try was maybe-- and I've done sorghum sedan grass after rye for grazing, but maybe it's like, no, maybe I try a forage sorghum and try to maximize our forage needs as well because this will grow 8 to 12 feet tall by October and you can harvest it for typically silage, not necessarily as much for bailage.
It was a different perspective to think about and some people were going to try forage sorghum as well so I thought, well, maybe we might try that and see if on small pieces of maybe an 8-acre field or something where we can just take a look at it and see what it does
Joe: Whenever sorghum comes up, my immediate question is why not corn? Why forage sorghum and not corn?
Brad: It goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, is all about trying to maximize the digestible forage per acre of land. Forage sorghum is really digestible, high NDFD. You can get a lot more digestible forage from forage sorghum than you can if you're going to plant corn for corn silage. That's really why we're thinking about forage sorghum instead of corn, is it's all about digestible forage and trying to maximize digestibility for forage rations.
Joe: Perfect. We've bounced around and covered all sorts of different topics, but I think they're good things to be thinking about, especially if you're worried about winter kill with alfalfa. There's a lot of options out there. I hope you talk to your agronomist and your nutritionist and get them to talk to each other, which can be a challenge sometimes. Then of course, if you have questions, comments, scathing rebuttals for us, you can email themoosroom@umn.edu.
That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu. Feel free to get in touch with us. If I don't know, I will absolutely forward it onto Bradley and then if neither of us know, we'll check in with Em, and then if none of us know, we'll figure out who to talk to. I'm going to cut the plugs there because Emily's not here. She's way better at it, and we've been talking long enough. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you guys next week.
Brad: Bye.
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