MANAGING PASTURES FOR OPTIMUM FORAGE PRODUCTION

 

In the fall, make a decision which field will “winter” your cattle.    In general, the least value of your pastures should become the winter “sacrifice” pasture, where round bales can be unrolled for cows to eat (what they sleep on becomes soil-building organic matter) and then, while grass comes on in the spring, all the “pugging” of a wet pasture is contained in one field.

Plan on seeding summer annuals into the winter sacrifice pasture.    You may need to disc it over to smooth off all the pugging holes, but that makes a seed bed for sudangrass, sorghum- sudan crosses, or millet that (if seeded by early June) will be big enough to feed all your cattle during the heat of the summer when grass slows into near-dormancy growth (this will be very much a problem with this year’s dry spring conditions).    

As soon as soil is firm, move cattle into better pastures.     In fact, your smallest or irregular-shaped pastures need the cattle first, and here is why:   bigger pastures (rectangular shaped) can be bale harvest most easily.     With the weather conditions prevailing this spring, grass hay could have been cut by the 15^th of May.      By now they would have a good second growth and offer some early summer grazing before the summer annuals would be needed.

It is unsound harvesting to cut your alfalfa first.    Even the newest grasses will still push heads two weeks ahead of alfalfa first-buds.     Of you leave grass fields to bale last, you not only will sacrifice much of the protein content into the seed head, the plant may go dormant for most of the rest of the season.

Properly rotated vegetative grass may provide you six grazing passes per season per pasture.   This is twice the potential feed you are likely to harvest from a three-cutting hay making system.     It is our alfalfa-based approaches to hay making that are causing us to undervalue and underuse the fertility capability of a rotated, fertilized pasture system.

Unless you grow alfalfa to resell to dairy herds, do not worry about cutting it full bloom.    Early cut alfalfa is just too low in digestible fiber to be an optimal beef cow feed.    “Rocket fuel alfalfa” in a beef system is only of incremental benefit in feeding out finishing steers.    Grass is truly a more balanced forage feed than alfalfa, which grew to prominence only because when in combination with high energy corn it could appear to be a “balanced” ration on chemical tests.

The most profit in a beef cow-calf herd is to fully utilize the rumen.    Cattle raised on forages will develop a full digestive capacity from that forage, and with appropriate genetic selection on your cow genetics you can get growth, milk production for calves, and nice body conditioning without the need for a third to half the ration being corn and oilseed based.    Beef phenotypes should be selected for the ability to finish by age, not on weight gain from grain.