Forage Crops for Maximum Livestock Nutrition with Paige Smart

[Music] my name is Paige smart and I'm a Regional Support Manager with a company called South East AG receipts my role in that company is kind of twofold I work about half my time with our dealers so those are the the producers that actually like sell the seed to make sure that they're well educated and helping producers make the right decisions and then I spend the other half of my time doing talks like this and working one-on-one with producers about kind of their goals where their forages are now and where they'd like their forges to be in the future I did grow up on a farm it's a row crop farm where we do corn and soybeans and cover crops and I thought that I wanted to be as far as possible away from farming once I graduated high school and went to college I said I don't want anything to do with that farm invest and then you go to college and you start to really miss it right and I call it the sickness of farming it's just something once you decide that you enjoy farming you kind of have it in your blood and you can't really get away from it so I switched my focus to animal science and in that I kind of found my niche in forages and through working with dr. Matt poor and the amazing grazing program I found my passion and helping producers learn how to balance their forage production how to improve their grazing management and now with southeast Agri seeds I've kind of learned how to fine-tune which forages will work best for a specific niche need so really excited to be here today this is a really really great farm to be at if you have comments or questions or problems at your own farm that's what we're here today to talk about so let's keep this an open conversation but first things first I'd love to go out into the field and kind of take a look and do some like basic species identification so how can we identify fescue red clover white clover and a few more exotic things and just kind of talk about grazing management and how that can impact our forage composition in our pastures so we can go outside now everybody's favorite part right we're aware that their cool season grasses and their warm season grasses right and cool season grasses grow predominantly in our cooler seasons so spring and fall in in this region you probably get more cool season growth throughout the year than anything maybe in like July and August you'll see a lot more warm season forages start to come in but certainly cool-season forages are going to dominate this area and for that reason what should be kind of the predominant forages that you depend on cool season or warm season cool season right I know it seems like a stupid question but it's important in this whole conversation of how we select forages and how we manage them so without a doubt the most common base forage here is gonna be this plant right here which you guys what is this grass here fescue absolutely so fescue is pretty easy to identify if you're ever unsure it's probably fescue but it's got a round stem if you look at that leaf you'll see that it's extremely ribbed so like if you run your finger across it you can feel the ridges of that leaf if you rub it across your lips you can cut your lip pretty good so maybe don't do that unless you got some chapstick or something fescue is an extremely important grass for our region in my mind the best reason to have fescue is because it can be stockpiled and what I mean by stockpiling is it grows during one season and then that growth stays nutritive it stays intact until we need to graze it a few months later most fescue stockpiling is done in the fall and then you graze it during the winter so there's this like famous grazer his name is Jim Gary Shaw may have read some of his work he says there's four good reasons for fescue November December January and February so and I have to agree with that orchard grass bromb grass Timothy even any of your other cool season perennial grasses just aren't going to have the dexterity that fescue has and it'll leech its nutrients and lose its quality pretty quickly once we start getting into those heavy Frost's so that's why feschi was so important for us especially if we're thinking about minimizing the opportunities that we want to feed hey minimize the supplemental feed that we're using in maximizing our grazing days so fescue and this part of the world has got to be a pretty predominant part of our pastures does anybody know the issue with Kentucky 31 fescue in the fight exactly so Kentucky 31 the reason it's such a fantastic grass that it holds up to drought that it doesn't get very many diseases that pests don't really bother it so much and one of the reasons that it's not the most palatable forage to our livestock is because it has this fungus that lives between the cells of the plant and this fungus actually produces a toxin this chock s'en not only does it taste bitter but it actually negatively affects our livestock so all ruminants and if we start thinking about horses as well will have some type of negative performance because of that in the fight in that fescue now we have fescues that have the into fight present have that fungus present and make it such a hardy grass but that doesn't produce the toxin so forever reseeding fescue we want to make sure that we focus on those varieties that aren't going to negatively affect our livestock in the cattle industry alone it's estimated that the Kentucky 31 fungus costs producers up to a billion dollars a year in performance losses which is huge you know if we're thinking about like grass finishing or trying to minimize the supplemental feed that we offer the majority of what they're consuming is going to have that toxin in it so our opportunity for diluting the toxin in our grass finished or grass fed animals is even lower so it's something we've got to worry about even more still if we're in the grass fed or grass finished business the new feeds still have the underside slot yes but it doesn't produce the toxin I don't want to say they modified the fungus because it's not a GMO but they identified new funguses that were a part of the same strain that did not produce that toxin that's right mm-hmm yeah and the reason that they've gone through all that effort to put the fungus in the plant but a good fungus per se is because they tried removing the fungus from fescue first right that's like the first obvious stuff it's like hey there's this fungus in here that's bad for our livestock well let's just take it out but what you ended up with was a fescue plant that was less hearty we've gotten better at into fight free varieties but they are going to be more susceptible to disease and one of particular importance in this region is going to be drought and it's not going to happen on this farm but over grazing also is a huge issue for the longevity of like an in to fight free fescue so they said hey well let's find a fungus that gives it the same punch but without all the negative effects so that's kind of the direction that they've gone now with fescues the fight exists and the leaves is the toxin existent good question so does the in defy it exists where does it exist in the plant it actually exists in the entirety of the plant it is concentrated in certain areas so the highest concentration of the fungus and therefore the toxin is actually in the bottom two inches of the plant and then in the seed head so very often you'll hear like oh just clip the seed heads to manage for the toxicity and that definitely helps getting rid of or suppressing seed head production well absolutely what we think will reduce some of the the consumption of that toxin but what we don't cover is if we have over grazing for whatever reason you know stuff happens and we start getting into that shorter area of the plant it's very concentrated in that short area the whole fungus thing is super complicated but it's also really fun scientifically the fungus and the toxin are produced most intense when the plant is growing so in the case of fescue that's gonna be what fall in spring right so our our into fight load is going to be heaviest during that time so you'll see just like how we'll see that growth curve spike will see that in to fight load spike so that's another reason why stockpiling fescue particularly if we have Kentucky 31 is such a good management strategy because at that time the toxins are lower so it works out pretty well this boss neutralizes just frost neutralize it not frost itself no the cold weather because the plant isn't growing it'll get diluted and honestly I'm not sure how that dilution occurs I'm not sure if the plant metabolizes it or if it just dissipates but Frost's to my knowledge does not impact the the toxin load so it sounds like the end of fight actually is totally synergistic with the Bess cue because it doesn't want the seed parts eaten and it doesn't want to be grazed out too long exactly exactly the plant leaves not what we need but it's kind of teaching the whatever grace is on it when degrees yeah and it's really evolutionarily it's so cool I mean what's one of the biggest scares for a plant getting grazed that's a pretty scary thing for it to get D foliated it reduces its ability to do photosynthesis it has to metabolize carbohydrates that it's stored it doesn't want to have to do that so they've shown that these alkaloids that toxin that's produced actually has a bitter taste it's like anti herbivore E right it doesn't want to be grazed so it's really cool most huge idli doesn't want to be graced when it's going to make seed or when it's going to be taken to a point where it can't recover you can handle it other times so that's the greatest concentration of that impact at its most important time yeah absolutely it's super-fun I could talk about fescue forever but what we want to talk about today is unique forages and how they can fit into our livestock operations so certainly when we're kind of planning our operation are looking across our pastures we want to have a fescue component in there so that we can use that for stockpiling because it does so well in our environment but diversity is pretty important to us as well you can go on to a farm and you can tell how good their grazing management is by how diverse their species are and certainly when you look across these fields you see a massive amount of diversity right a few really fun ones that I want to point out to you you guys probably are very well aware of the importance of clovers in our systems you know what this clover is for red clover excellence and then if you want to pull up a white clover plant for me yeah that's perfect excellent okay so these clovers are definitely most predominant and do best in this region what's really fun is to see how well this red clover is doing this time of year so both of these are cool season perennial legumes typically we don't see red clover existing or surviving and pastures for as long as we'll see white clover and part of that has to do with the growth habit of the plant so as you can see from looking at the white clover and just what Meredith pulled up for me is white clover the stem actually grows along the ground and then all of this material up here is what we would consider a leaf so when it comes around and gets grazed we're leaving behind a pretty decent bit of that plant and we know that the more of the plant we leave behind the more quickly it can regrow in the less damage we've done to it right the less stress that we've put on that plant red clover on the other hand grows upright so when we have our livestock come through and graze or if we harvest and they'll take it down I don't know four inches or so we've removed and added a lot more stress done a lot more damage to this plant because of its growth habit so usually we don't see red clovers persisting for as long but red clover does produce twice as much dry matter during the summer than white clover even though it's a cool season legume it does pretty well in our Heat it's got a very aggressive a fruit to it which helps it kind of get through those droughty periods what's so special to us about legumes what do they do for us nitrogen right so another one of those really cool symbiotic relationships right we've already talked a lot about that the relationship that fescue has with the fungus legumes actually have a relationship with bacteria that are present in the soil what happens is those bacteria need a place to live so they infect the roots of the clover and create this thing called a nodule and we could dig and try and find some nodules here in a minute but there's no free rent right so the plant gave the bacteria somewhere to live it's got to do something for the plant so what it does the soil typically is 50 percent air and in that airspace we have a lot of into the atmospheric nitrogen so that bacteria will take that into and convert it into a form that's usable by this plan so what we end up with is not only kind of creating nitrogen or bringing nitrogen into our pasture system that wouldn't have been available otherwise but we're also increasing the crude protein of this plant because nitrogen is a critical component to the structure of proteins so we end up with a more protein dense forage and we get some free nitrogen so legumes have some critical importance to us especially if we're trying to minimize inputs and really maximize or optimize our outputs so maybe we can dig up some and try and find the nodules because there's actually a way to tell yeah that'd be good look how big this plant is y'all and that awesome look at that that's some yeah that's a really good one so one way that you can really increase the populations a red clover in your pastures is through good grazing management we talked about how harvesting is pretty hard on red clover so if we're leaving behind you know five or six inches of residual and if we have a good rest period after grazing we can really increase the amount that we've got out here because legumes are pretty good receivers they produce a lot of hard seed which will be in the soil for years to come all right I'm gonna steal that shovel from you it's a spade all right so you guys can see first of all that taproot oh yeah we can see some nodules here see do you guys see those small little round balls on this that are on the roots clovers all to my knowledge all utilize the same bacteria and the nodules tend to be really small and kind of like irregularly shaped cowpeas use a different bacteria and the nodules on those things are huge but the way that you tell if these nodules are acting actually fixing nitrogen is you bust them in half and if it's got like a red tint to it or a fleshy tint than it is fixing nitrogen so that one doesn't have a lot of good rich red color to it which is what I'd rather see but it's not green so the reason you can have nodules that are not fixing these bacteria I always joke and say that they're a lot like me they're lazy and they don't work if they don't have to if there is a lot of nitrogen present they won't spend their energy creating that nitrogen because it's not necessary for the plant so that may be what we have going on here or it may be as those nodules age they schleff off and die and they'll stop fixing nitrogen at that point but isn't that cool look at the taproot on that thing it is really neat that's what you want to have during drought there's so many good reasons to have diversity across your pasture one of them is because of that diversity of root systems because think about how great that would be what if we did have some kind of drought there's a good bit of work going on right now with alfalfa as well we typically think about alfalfa more as a hay crop and it certainly needs to be treated a little bit more like a hay crop clovers as long as we've got a good pH and a decent amount of potassium in the soil they can thrive pretty well alfalfa needs to have a very specific range of pH and very high potassium levels and it's got to be managed just a little bit more awkwardly than our clovers do but we are doing some work to try to figure how to incorporate alfalfa into our grazing pastures as well it doesn't groove here we can we have to focus on a specific fall dormancy it's definitely easier to grow in areas where we don't have such dramatic rainfall because if you're thinking about hay production and hay crops our climate makes it pretty difficult to produce a good hay crop so where most of the alfalfa is grown which is predominantly grown for hay it's grown in areas like more arid regions where they don't get so much rainfall and they'll just ear great irrigate across the top of it and then harvest it without having all the humidity and sporadic rainfall if you're not harvesting should you bother to try and seat it in from what I've seen at this point alfalfa is very sensitive seedling we can get clovers established into existing perennial grass very easily by frost seeding so let's say we stockpile our fescue we grazed it off in January and you know we left a good two and a half three inch stubble we could broadcast red and white clovers across the pasture and they would successfully establish like that now if alpha is extremely sensitive as a seedling so it seems that we have more trouble and less success if we try to seed that alfalfa into an existing perennial stand we can get them to establish if we're establishing the grass in the alfalfa at the same time although we might select something a little bit less aggressive than fescue maybe an orchard grass or a Festool Oleum or Timothy but as far as like frost seeding alfalfa not not a great choice yeah I'm just doing it into low guys didn't so much of a great choice either no it seems to be really really sensitive as a seedling kind of meaty so or did or did scattered foul and whatnot get a seed bed and then : the easiest way to get it established is definitely like with a prepared seedbed and then coming across with like a brilliant type cedar where it has a coal to Packer and then it drops the seed and then cult attacks over it again because it's a tiny seed so it's very sensitive to depth and also to like a pressure soil pressure yeah but you can if you have a thinning stand of alfalfa you can intercede grasses into that thinning stand of alfalfa but if you're not in hay production I'm not really sure what a straight stand of alfalfa does for you reasons given to rid of Steiner farmers were asking him to teach them and properly neither problems that they listed was that their pelvis stands used to last 35 years and currently the Sabine 1928 over they were only lasting seven years what's the current state so a well-managed stand of alfalfa is still gonna sit somewhere between that five and seven year range normally you start thinning out at like four to five and that's when you would consider interceding other grasses into it because interestingly enough alfalfa actually has a self toxicity so once those plants get to a pretty decent size they will secrete a chemical that prevents new alfalfa seedlings from germinating so you've got to have a break crop so a very common rotation is to have that off alpha straight seeded let's say year five it's been down to about 50% go in there with something like orchard grass or an into fight free fescue would be a great choice as well fescue Oleum even harvest that is mixed grass alfalfa hay for a number of years until your alfalfa is is pretty low or completely gone and then continue to grow that straight grass stand for several years so that that self toxicity chemical of the alfalfa is dissipated in the soil or depleted in the soil and then come back into the rotation with alfalfa one grass I do want to talk about because I think it deserves attention that has a similar issue to what you're talking about is orchard grass you hear a lot of people say the orchard grass used to last them like 10 15 20 years and now we're seeing our FAL orchard grass start disappearing after like even three years in some cases and a friend of mine from Virginia Tech actually did a PhD trying to figure out the orchard grass persistence problem and his conclusion was very similar to themes that we see in life which is it's not one thing it's a bunch of things so one of his suggestions was climate change orchard grasses is a little bit more heat sensitive than what you'll see on a fescue and because of the intensifying temperatures during the summer you're seeing orchard grass move further and further north or I guess not be as persistent further south as a better way to say that AG engineers have done done us a I guess a great favor and also great to service and they've created equipment that's very good scalping grasses off at the ground so that we can get more yield but what we know is that orchard grass is very sensitive to mowing height or grazing height so that has also played into the orchard grass persistence problem as well as some diseases that we weren't faced with earlier I guess in our farming seasons but even though we aren't gonna get orchard grass to persist as long as we will Kentucky 31 it still has a really neat place on our farms orchard grass is a very high quality forage but probably more importantly is that it's extremely highly palatable and why do we care if our forages are palatable or not right like what do we care if it's high nutrition if we can't get them to eat it right they've done studies to show that like this weed here and horse nettle horse nettle has like 20% crude protein but we don't care because we really can't get our livestock to eat it very well right what good is nutritional value if it's not palatable so orchard grass is incredibly palatable which we're thinking about grass finishing trying to put weight on calves trying to put weight on our cows the more that they consume of a nutritious forage the better off we are so orchard grass fits very well as like a four to seven year grass that we can utilize to graze during the spring and fall it doesn't stockpile super well to get that weight on our animals very commonly now I'm starting to see orchard grass also play into this whole fescue equation so you mentioned earlier how on your farm they've got some hay fields that are just straight fescue even though like this Kentucky 31 you know we know that it's it's doing us a little bit of harm it's really hard to get rid of it especially if you look across this field and see how well the fescue is doing and how dense of a pasture this is it's not very easy to commit to getting rid of it even though we know it's toxic so orchard grass is becoming it and clovers as well have become an important part of us diluting that fescue into fight so in those hay fields in our pastures we can come in and we can graze down this fescue a little bit lower than we normally would and we can intercede other grasses into it like orchard grass that will increase the palatability of the pasture increase the nutritive quality and increase that diversity so that we see less negative impacts of that Kentucky 31 orchard grass I think gets a bad rap just because it's not the permanent grass but I would encourage us to think about our pastures not so much as permanent but as perennial right I mean think about all the changes that you've seen in this pasture like since y'all have been managing it nothing's permanent the way that we manage it the the weather conditions that we have for several years in a road that all plays into what our pastures end up looking like between the management of the fluctuation in seasons you're absolutely right it's it's always different and sometimes it's like growing vegetables kind of but like man this is really good for fescue this year this is really good for this or that or even when we had that drought in 2013 16:16 and with rain a deluge oh yeah when was our building the Ark's the polder it's always something different and they all react to it differently and then and then it had management on top of that whatever it is if it's over stocked if it's perfect if it's under stocked if it's over great it all it's gonna have a affect on it with enough time it's always forgiving yeah if we get back and think about that drought that y'all had that was awful I mean it was like from August to December or something like that right without rain yeah so I mean that's a long time to go without rain and you probably looked across your pastures and thought that they'd never come back right you probably thought that all your all your grasses and legumes were dead and it that obviously wasn't the case so you're right it is amazing we can do some damage with with poor management or if we just manage a certain way at the wrong time but if we're really paying attention and focusing on how we should be managing that forage at that time and what kind of stress that that those grasses are undergoing at that moment we can make a huge impact so one thing that's really unique to this farm that you don't see especially on cattle operations is a form and I'd actually really like to have one of y'all talk about your choice to add this form into your system all right wait I I came back and recommended epidemic at like a minute chicory if we had some parasite issues with our sheep and we wanted a more of a natural approach and so we planted this we planted chicory which is high in tannins which helps control the coccidia that we were experiencing and that was our main reason for this we actually did a three-way planting I'm trying to remember what it was ever it was another one let's badies a-- chicory and I think we planted it and fall I think we threw in the cool season grain I think maybe nurse oh just nurse didn't had some biomass but that was an annual and this this has come back really well my protein right yeah it is so this is a four which is kind of like a broad term for a broadly forage that's not a legume and chicory in particular has been gaining popularity amongst like the food plot population people that plant for deer because deer really love chicory but more importantly from an agriculture perspective is how it fits in with small ruminants so because of that anti-parasitic a I don't want to say toxins but I guess they are toxic to the yeah-yeah it has been shown that actually clemson has done a lot of research to show that chicory reduces parasite load in our small ruminants which you guys know that that's a kind of like a never-ending fight so it has become more important to small ruminant producers but it shouldn't be categorized just for our our sheep and goat producers because it's actually a very high in protein this is a scavenging type plant it's another tap root so there again really helping us hedge our bets against drought and it actually does a lot of mining for minerals as well it's a very mineral rich plant now the one I picked was in a vegetative state meaning that it doesn't have that that flower or seed head to it and it's pretty palatable at this point I visited some this morning that had seeded out already or flowered out and the stalk on it was like as big as your finger and you know this had really gone away and he was not having any luck getting his sheep eat it so he had to mow that off to just get it get it out of the way but certainly this is a crop that I think bears a lot of importance again if we're trying to pack more nutrient-dense forages into our animals right so think about like giving them Donuts and Burger King instead of giving them fruit you know like really pack in those calories so that they can gain for us these forages can definitely do that we don't want to get these too high in our pasture composition and this certainly is not in any danger of that but plants like this this forb and then we'll talk a little bit about an brassicas they're very low in effective fiber and as much as we don't talk about fiber from a true slowdown perspective right we're always trying to push digestibility and push energy our livestock need that effective fiber in their bellies so we wouldn't want to turn them loose on something that was 100 percent this because they it would be too digestible run through and too quickly and would actually draw them backwards so just something fun to note about chicory percentages are really difficult for me because I always wonder are we talking about it from a dry matter perspective or are we talking about it as like an as fed perspective so I think the easiest thing to do from a producer standpoint is to look at it as like a percentage of the area because we're not going to dry down chicory right like we are to ruin our microwaves like that so I would probably start worrying about it if you were like in the 50% range and it would depend up on what else was in there as well if we had a lot of like ranked grasses like you know these are obviously going to be very very high fiber so if we have a lot of that to go with it then I wouldn't worry about it too much if we're up in that 50% range so as long as it's in that vegetative state they'll eat it but from what I've heard from producers that we work with once it starts to put out that flower that seed head I didn't want anything to do with it and I can't blame them and it's huge already bitter bitter be even more bitter right I just wanted to start off kind of showing you guys how good management leads to diversity and then kind of get out and touch and feel and you know get our hands dirty with this stuff and we'll start the the PowerPoint and then we can talk more specifically about how you can balance your forage production to make sure that you don't have an excess of grass at one time and then a deficit of grass and other times or at least planing that out the best we can awesome [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Living Web Farms

Views: 79,393

Keywords: paige smart, agriseeds, living web farms, good forage crops, unusual forage crops, how to manage pasture, nutritious forage crops, how to manage forage crops, cattle, livestock feed, grains, clover, fescue

Id: c_EglHtWlyE

Length: 35min 0sec (2100 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 12 2018