Assessing and restoring pastures after drought/flood
I'm Ryan Miller, Crops Extension Educator. Earlier this morning, we recorded an episode of the Strategic Farming Field Notes program. Strategic farming field notes is a weekly program addressing current crop production topics. A live webinar is hosted at 8 AM on Wednesdays throughout the cropping season. During the live webinar, participants can join in the discussion and get questions answered.
Ryan Miller:An audio recording of the live program is released following the webinar via podcast platforms. Thanks. And remember to tune in weekly for a discussion on current cropping and crop management topics.
Angie Peltier:Welcome today to today's strategic farming field notes program from University of Minnesota Extension. These sessions are brought to you by generous support, from Minnesota farm families through the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council and the Minnesota Corn Research and Promotion Council. We're happy to have you join us for today's session that, you know, is is going to be of use for many of our corn and soybean producers that also have cattle. It's all about the challenges that, folks have experienced in recent years with, with growing, enough forage for their herds. My name is Angie Peltier, and I'll be moderating our session here today.
Angie Peltier:We have 2 guests. We will be from Doctor Craig Schaeffer. He's a professor in the University of Minnesota Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics and extended Extension Forage Agronomist. And we also have Troy Salzer, extension educator in AG production systems in Northeast Minnesota in Saint Louis County, and he's a pasture manager, livestock, and hay producer himself. So the last several years of alternating between severe drought or snow cover during winter and ponding or flooding in spring and summer have proven quite challenging for those relying on perennial crops such as alfalfa to feed their herd.
Angie Peltier:With that in mind, I will turn it over to Doctor Schaeffer for his thoughts on how best to assess a stand of alfalfa and how best to try and improve those stands. Then we'll move on to Troy who will share with us how he and other cattle producers in northeast Minnesota have been able to provide high quality forage to their herds despite challenges. Doctor Schaeffer?
Craig Scheaffer:Good morning, everyone. First, kind of recap the year for you, this particular year, It seems like every year is different. These, at least in the last couple of decades, we've had these extremes of weather. Last year, it was a drought. This year, of course, we've had a lot of rain, excessive amounts of rain early on, and we had actually, quite a bit of variability in the amount of rain occurring at different locations.
Craig Scheaffer:And now we're, of course, headed into the fall. Let's start with the spring. This spring, kinda addressed to what I was thinking about. I I think overall in the state, very little, alfalfa winter injury and very little grass winter injury. This occurred even though we didn't have the snow snow cover.
Craig Scheaffer:And, it's likely because the fact our temperatures really did not get low enough to damage the alfalfa. I was particularly, concerned about what was gonna happen in April when alfalfa broke dormancy relatively early because it was warm. Yet we didn't get frosting or damage to it. So this is good so we had good stands and but then we encountered the spring with this rainfall and a lot of farmers were very much challenged to harvest hay are are in any form silage village because the drawing windows were very short. And, this really kind of screwed up the first harvest in a lot of the alfalfa growing regions.
Craig Scheaffer:And, really delayed it. And I so I think the result is more low quality hay. So this interfered with the 1st crop for certain. 2nd crop, bigger crops, things are much better. We have wider windows.
Craig Scheaffer:So now we're headed into the fall. And, I just wanna alert people that looking at middle of August to early September is a great time to do new seatings. Seating after small grains or reseeding canisters, pasture renovation work. Be aware of the fertility issues, you know, of all these classic things, seeding depth. And, hopefully, it'll we'll get some uniform, timely rainfall.
Craig Scheaffer:The, you asked the question about assessing alfalfa stands, and, I would encourage, everyone to do that this fall. And the way the way the best way to do it is to go out over a field, of a similar stand age and take, numerous, square foot quadrants, count plant counts, count plants, determine whether you have 3 to 5 plants there, but also do stem counts. You should have 40 to 50 stems in a square foot. So if you go out and look at a field, try to sample variable parts of the terrain, where it's low spots, high spots. And, I would try to get a field up to almost 20 different samples.
Craig Scheaffer:Take a notebook with you. Jot it down. This will let you know going into the winter what you have so you can plan for next year. I'm just looking at other questions that you ask, if you wanted me to address. Do you want me to just talk about different things?
Angie Peltier:No. If you don't have a good state going into winter, what would you how would you remedy that situation? Is there anything that can be done? Craig, you'll have to unmute again.
Craig Scheaffer:So if your stands are very are poor, let's say, going into the winter, and I'm talking about alfalfa and alfalfa grass mixtures. And to to the point it doesn't look like they're gonna be very productive in the coming year, then you really need to be thinking about termination. Termination stands. Termination. And, think about also planning to reseed in another part of your farm, the coming the coming year.
Craig Scheaffer:So that would be my approach. Those, of course, those stands which are very thin like that, I'll certainly go go ahead and harvest those in the fall of the year because you have a, you know, if you're gonna terminate them anyways, you might might as well get the forage off there if you can. Since this might be the only time to talk about this, I should just say something about fall cutting. And that, you know, we still support the idea of that period about 45 days before the first killing frost, you don't cut. And that takes early September to, sometime October, November.
Craig Scheaffer:So depending on where you're at. So, be aware that cutting alfalfa going that time increases the risk. And after after that time, after temperatures get lower, 26 degrees, if you've had a coming frost for alfalfa, then, it's okay to cut but leave stubble. So, just wanted to slip that in because the question comes up every year. Not that.
Craig Scheaffer:So
Angie Peltier:So so let's move on to Troy. Try. I know that, we we talked at a meeting on the on the main campus, might have been last year or the year before. And I know there were fires in your area was so dry. And everybody seemed to be very worried about getting enough, you know, feed for your your herd.
Angie Peltier:And so would you mind talking about where your forward stands, are this year? The experiences you've had and and how how best folks were able to weather those storms, those recent storms.
Troy Salzer:Well, good morning to all of you. As far as last year with the drought, it was a very severe drought in, northern Minnesota last year all across the north, north area, especially dry in, St. Louis County. And in many cases, virtually no, no forage production. Even the weeds didn't grow last year.
Troy Salzer:And I don't know if that's fortunate or unfortunate, but that was the case. And I was quite surprised. You know? Craig had mentioned the aspects of impact to the alfalfa stands and such. That's really something that going into fall, we really didn't have a good assessment in, our area because, everything had virtually gone dormant, including, alfalfa, which tends to be a very drought tolerant plant.
Troy Salzer:And so the assessment really wasn't there. But in general, things, went in, and came out in much better condition than I had, anticipated. Although with all of that open area, it really allowed many of our weed species, to take off, especially in terms of, like, things like bull thistle or plumeless thistle. The biennials really took hold and, a lot of our pastures are suffering due to, those drought conditions, last year. Overall, many of the grasses did recover fairly nicely.
Troy Salzer:In fact, in some cases, in my own operation, I've seen, stands better than they were even before the drought as far as what they are, other than dealing with some of the weed issues.
Angie Peltier:So you guys were talking about the the mixed alfalfa and and, grass stands, it's if somebody needs to add a little bit more grass because they've had gaps, let's say in the alpha alfalfa stand due to insect pressure or or whatever other reason. When's the best time to to seed? Do you, frost seed similar to some of the legumes or or what how do you add a little bit more to your to your hay crowd there?
Troy Salzer:A few ideas that that, we've utilized over the years, at this point in time, with your legumes, if you're looking to add those virtually in our area. We want to be thinking about that by about mid August here, if we're going to, utilize interseeding. It really has to be an open stand though from my point of view, because if it's not open, oftentimes, those little seedlings can't compete with some of the other grasses. And so that's something that you have to assess. If your if your stands are quite open, then then there's a chance of that.
Troy Salzer:If we're going to just do a, broadcast seeding, it's valuable to maybe do some light tillage in there so that you get better soil to seed contact, maybe dragging, actually setting back that stand, with grazing and then going ahead and even, using that tillage so that you open up that thatch to get that seed down to it. At the same time, it really is a good time to, add some fertility to that, soil too. So soil testing is a really important component of that. I don't know, if Craig has had good experiences or or has some additional suggestions that might, be also helpful.
Craig Scheaffer:Yeah. I get the, you know, the key point that Troy made was this issue of open stand or suppressing the existing stand. My experiences with successful overseeding. Well, I have not had many successful overseeding experiences because that competition with existing grasses or legumes will often can provide excess competition with those, new plants. So, I think it's better, if at all possible, to do a, you don't have to do moldboard plowing, but some kind of significant tillage or herbicide application to suppress, stands.
Craig Scheaffer:Some counties, some farmers still do no till seeding. And, with no till seeding into pastures for pasture renovation, what you can do is and it's better in the spring of the year. You suppress the grass that's there using a herbicide and you use a specialized cedar so you can drill that seed in. Make sure you have good soil seed contact. As Troy mentioned that also requires you to take a look at issues like fertility and it's better to do that in the fall so you could you know do the treatments in the in the spring.
Craig Scheaffer:I wanna say something about frost seeding. Frost seeding in Minnesota, from my experience has has been successful 30 to 50% of the time. Others have had much more success with it. It is a good way, if you're set up to do it, to introduce legumes such as white clover or red clover into pastures, all grass pastures. As Troy mentioned, if you need to open that up, usually by heavy grazing or tillage dumps, something in the fall of the year to suppress that grass.
Craig Scheaffer:And if you have a pack of weeds out there in the fall of the year, you have a bunch of thistles, or you have, let's say, it's bloomless thistles and there's a bunch of rosettes out there in the fall ready to go in the spring, you're not it's not gonna work out too well. So pasture renovation really requires a lot of lot of thought into it. You know, you gotta deal with fertility. You gotta deal with weeds. You gotta deal with suppression.
Craig Scheaffer:And, if you do all of that, you can very much be successful.
Angie Peltier:We have an obvious question here. Answers or if you both want an answer. But, this person who's anonymous said that, he or she talked with some producers who are forced to put a pay in less than ideal conditions, namely while it's still wet. What are concerns, with doing that and what can producers do to protect that hay during storage. Another issue that we've encountered encountered during drought years is silage that's just too dry.
Angie Peltier:So how what to do in those situations, gentlemen?
Troy Salzer:As far as the wet goes, we do have to be very concerned if it wasn't put up in, great condition. I would say the biggest thing to be very cognizant of is, dust and mold, for your livestock. We could run into a lot of problems, when feeding that, whether it's the horses, or dairy beef, sheep, goats, all of the above. And so being sure that, we are, aware of that, be, very cautious about, utilizing that. And there's some different, methods that we can utilize to overcome it.
Troy Salzer:But if we are in that situation, I encourage people to think about ways in which they can adopt, and utilize the technology associated with, maybe a wet forage system, whether it's chopping and ensiling, or utilizing, baleage, which we utilize a lot in northeastern northeastern Minnesota because of the lake effect and the, high, humidity as well as the, amount of, dew that we tend to see. And so I I'd encourage people to to think about, those sort of things in particular. And maybe, Craig, you can you can handle the rest of, Angie's question.
Craig Scheaffer:I don't know if I can answer that part. I did I did wanna say, Troy, that, I just wanna follow-up on your comments about, alternatives to making hay. I think this year, it was really such a such an opportunity. If you have a system, are you making haylage where you can get the forage off the field in 2 days? Sometimes one day, but usually it was 2 days because all the soil moisture, and, tremendous advantage compared to doing 3 to 4 days.
Craig Scheaffer:And, so if if you wanna make high quality forage, you gotta think about a system like that. Otherwise, you're gonna wait to an opening in the weather to to send up. That's gonna give you, you know, much more. You're gonna have dry matter losses, and you're gonna have losses of quality. The question about okay.
Craig Scheaffer:Well, what about what about if it's if it's too dry? Okay. For hay, we'll just deal with hay. Hay that's too dry and handled too dry, a rake that at less than 40% moisture and so forth, you're gonna have a leaf loss. So I think in terms of making hay, either system, monitoring moisture, get a get a hay monitoring system in place, moisture moisture monitoring system in place so you can do things at the right time.
Craig Scheaffer:Schedule schedule various activities at right time, including bailing. I think Troy mentioned, you you bale wet hay, and it's gonna mold, and you're gonna have really well, you're gonna have bad hay. Wanted to wanna mention one other product there for making hay, and I don't know if anybody in the audience uses it or not, but paper server tips, are around, and you can apply those. And they're basically fungicides, propionic acid, for example, there's other examples of them as well, that, you allows you to extend that window of moisture content up to 35% moisture instead of having to be, less than 20% moisture. So if it's if you're making silage and it's too dry, what do you do?
Craig Scheaffer:Okay. Well, why is it a problem? It's a problem because if you're making silage and it's too dry, it's not gonna pack properly. It's not gonna ferment properly. So you can add water.
Craig Scheaffer:Water, and I've not had a lot of experience on this. I've just read about it. Just have to admit that. But water can be applied at the blower or at packing. It should not be just applied at the top of the silage.
Craig Scheaffer:You need to integrate it into the silage pile. Find a way to do that. So and that will give you you'll get some rehydration in that case. So, does that answer that? Troy, do you have any follow-up on that?
Troy Salzer:Yeah. One thing that I'd encourage people to do, if they do allow the hay to get a little bit drier, especially last year during the drought. One of the things that I encourage people to do is to actually wait for dew to get back on that hay. That is a very common practice in drier regions of the United States where they actually bale at night as compared to bailing during the day as it, dries out that hay very quickly with, in cases, most cases we have, fairly windy conditions and high temperatures. It pulls that moisture so quickly that the the window for harvesting ideal hay in that 15%, shrinks very quickly And then we have that excessive leaf loss that Craig talked about.
Troy Salzer:If, we get down in that 10, 11% moisture, and really, lose a lot of quality in that manner as well.
Angie Peltier:Makes sense. We did have a question. Let's talk about some alternatives that we have for extending the grazing season? So we had an audience question that came in before the program, about the seeding rate you'd recommend for perennial grass after soybean harvest. Can you talk about that and then potential for other cover crops that can extend that grazing season a bit?
Troy Salzer:In my case, I've had, a fair bit of, opportunity over the years to utilize different, cover crop mixes. And, probably, from my point of view, some of the best options would work nicely in that mixture. Would work nicely in that mixture. We often will utilize some brassicas in there, purple top turnips, some of our hybrid, products, like Winfred or other hybrid, brassicas like that. As all of those really have a tendency to put on decent growth, in the fall.
Troy Salzer:My experience with some research that we did also included literally a day in August is a week of grow in September. So if we can go ahead and really be aggressive about planting immediately following, that soybean harvest, that small grain harvest, whatever you're following, get that done. Be be proactive in that. In fact, last week, I was talking with the individual. They even forgo their manure application before seeding and actually come back and utilize, the opportunity to put that on over top after they get it done just so that they can do it more timely.
Troy Salzer:I think that those things are are really, really helpful. The nice thing about the brassicas, even if they freeze, they will continue to grow after that if there's conditions that, are appropriate, if it's light frost, from that perspective.
Angie Peltier:Doctor Schaeffer, anything to add?
Craig Scheaffer:Yeah. I have something to add. Yeah. I support what he what Jordan was saying about these the annuals, particularly like oats, barley, you know, spring, a little spring barley planted in the planted in August. We get a lot of forage production as well.
Craig Scheaffer:I also wanna introduce the idea of stockpiling and I wanna truly comment on this is that one of the options to extend the grazing system, and it's again, needs to have have need to have some planning, and, we also need to have the acreage is, you know, lay off or or stop grazing a pasture in August and let the forage accumulate until August, September, even October, get 2 to 3 months of accumulation of grass out there before you put the animals back in. So that's another that's called stockpiling. And you could also put on some nitrogen in August, £50 of nitrogen, and accumulate dry matter that way. So that, if you've got pastures, grasses already, and, this works better on some grasses than others. It works really good with the fescue, particularly meadow fescue works really well.
Craig Scheaffer:That's my favorite new grass. So I had to sip that in. But, it it will work on a lot of the different cool season grasses we have here. The taller one's probably not bluegrass, but put some nitrogen on, hold the cattle off, and then graze late. But, you know, you gotta have the fencing, the pasture land to do that.
Troy Salzer:To follow-up on that, Greg Guy, I agree with you. And a combination of these things really works well from my point of view. Having some fescue, species in there as it does stand a lot better, than many of the other grasses. But that in combination with some of these annuals where they do truly stand long into the fall, really helps to keep that, above. And if the cattle can or sheep can find those products, they'll dig through some of the, dig through some of the, snow to actually, continue to consume it.
Troy Salzer:One other follow-up thing. Last year, during the drought, it really taught me that we we need to be aware that if the forage stand gets grazed too too short, and if it if it is short, the best option is to really pull them off and, do, an actual, sacrifice area. Because if we continue to grub that, that stand down shorter and shorter, it opens it up and increases the potential for weed pressure. It it re, slows the regrowth process. All of those things really put it at a severe disadvantage in the future.
Troy Salzer:And so using a sacrifice area strategically can be extremely helpful.
Craig Scheaffer:Since we're we're talking about drought, it seems strange to do this, but, given the rainfall we have. But, again, this is something one needs to plan it plan for as well. But, it's not a bad idea to have some pasture area planted to, sorghum sudangrass or sudangrass to to buffer against the drought. It'll give you summer forage. So it would be part of a system where you have the perennial grasses, but you have some annual grasses as well, And use those.
Craig Scheaffer:It'll give you some risk mitigation potential. So those would be what we call the annual annual grasses. Sorghum Sudangrass, we like. Sudangrass, we like a lot for that purpose. And there are some others as well.
Angie Peltier:Thank you. The gentleman, Roy Salzer, doctor Craig Schaeffer. Boy, time flies when you're having fun. We could talk about this for hours. Thank you so much for the discussion this morning.
Angie Peltier:We thank everybody for attending this week's, University of Minnesota Extension field notes program. We also would like to thank our sponsors, the Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council and the Minnesota Corn Research and Promotion Council.
