MSU Extension Field Crops

>> Speaker 1: Good evening, everyone. My name is Jim Isleib. I am your host for tonight's field crop webinar. Our topic tonight is forage improvement on a budget with our presenter Dr. Kim Cassida, our Michigan State University forage Extension specialist. She works out of the MSU campus in East Lansing. Kim grew up in the great state of Maine. I called her a Maine-iac a few days ago and she said people from Maine prefer to be called Mainers, so Kim is a Mainer. She went to school at the University of Maine, and also Penn State, and worked for a number of years in the U.S.D.A. Agricultural Research Service, or ARS. She's been with MSU since 2012. And we're glad to have her there, and we're glad to have her online with us tonight. I just wanted to mention, Kim is also pretty avid about sheepdogs. She raises sheep. And her and her husband, and, and they participate in sheepdog trials, which I think is an interesting thing also, so Kim, I'm gonna just stop talking and turn it over to you. >> Speaker 2: OK. Thank you. And, good evening everybody. I always feel a little awkward doing these talking to you on my computer screen. But, hopefully we'll be able to move along here pretty well. I have given this talk a couple of times around the state to pretty good reception, and so James and Jim asked me to present it in these webinars in hopes that we might get it out to a little bit bigger audience. I did find it interesting that we seem to have a pretty good proportion of people on tonight who don't actually grow any forage. So I hope that means that you're thinking about growing some and hoping to learn some new tricks on how you might get started. So I would like to break this process down into several steps to think about, and the first step is Assessment & Planning before you jump into everything. And I, the first thing I tell people to work- to think about is, what do you have to work with on your farm? You need to think about things like which plant species are already present, if you've got any forages anywhere, and what kind are they- are they grasses, legumes, forbs, or weeds [LAUGH]? I find a lot of times people are- they'll actually contact me because they have a, an area that really is not in very good condition and hope- trying to find out how they could make that better. Also, you need to think about how you plan to use that forage. Do you want to make hay or haylage out of it? Or are you more interested in pasture? Or do you want to have a dual-purpose stand that you can use a little bit for all of the above? What kind of animals are going to be eating the forage, because that makes a difference on what you should grow and how you should use it. And what is the production class of those animals, because if any of you actually have animals, and a number of you do, you know that a dry cow is not the same as...is not to be fed the same way as a lactating cow, for What are your yield expectations from the forages, and what do you...what would you like to get for potential income from that? Then you need to think about the site characteristics; where you'd like to grow it, what's the soil type and yield potential of that ground, and what does it tend to be like; is it wet? Does it tend to dry out quickly if it stops raining? Is it rocky; does it have any slope to it? And what's the length of your growing season? I'm assuming everybody on the...on the webinar today is actually from Michigan, but I suppose that's not necessarily a good assumption. But there is, even if you're in Michigan, there's quite a difference in how you have to address things if you're in the U.P. versus if you are in the southern part of the state. And your choices will be different on your forage management. You need to think about your available resources. Do you have access to equipment, either equipment that you own, or that you lease or can borrow? And that actually is a, is a major limiting factor a lot of times for people trying to get started with forages, because it does require some fairly specialized equipment that can be expensive. Do you have availability of labor, and how much is that going to cost? And what kind of money do you have to put into the enterprise to get it started? And lastly, you need to think about the time frame. Can you afford slow progress, or do you need a fast turnaround on your investment? And this is a really big piece of what I'm going to talk about tonight, actually, because the title of this talk is forage improvement on a budget. And unfortunately, a lot of times if you are trying to do things with the least cost, that is probably going to be the type of improvement process that takes longer to get to you. If you want to fast return, that's probably going to cost you more money. So that's a compromise that you just need to think about at the beginning and decide how you're going to handle that. I just want to mention this particular document here, which is put out by NRCS. And it's actually a score sheet for rating the condition of pastures. And the, a few of the items on this list are not really relevant if you are going to be a...using your forage ground as a hayfield; for example, number eight here, 'livestock concentration areas'. And 'uniformity of use' also relates to animals. But the other eight things on this list are actually very useful also if you're trying to evaluate the condition of a hayfield, and decide what might be the best way to...to...focus your efforts on trying to make that better. And if you go to this website right here, you can actually download a copy of this; it's got a sheet where you can actually rate your pastors and actually get a numerical score. And I don't really have time to go through all of this here today; it's pretty self-explanatory to use it. But what you could use that for once you have done that with your different areas is that you can pick the ones with the worst score, as that is probably the place where you might make the best return on your investment by trying to improve it. Rather than working on the areas that are already pretty good. So the second step is going to be looking at better management of the things that you already have, because again, remember, we're thinking about this as being in on a budget, so we are trying to make the best use of the resources that you already have available. >> Speaker 1: Kim, could I interrupt just for a-? >> Speaker 2: Sure. >> Speaker 1: I failed to mention when I was introducing you that the way participants can get their questions to you is through the Q & A function on your screen. You'll see a Q & A...thing you can click and then type your questions in there. Sorry to interrupt, Kim, but. >> Speaker 2: No, no problem. >> Speaker 1: I want to people to be aware of that. >> Speaker 2: And I find that I'm not actually seeing that button while I'm on the share screen here, so. >> Speaker 1: Try moving your cursor up...to the top where it. >> Speaker 2: The top? >> Speaker 1: And wiggle it around up there and see if it... >> Speaker 2: Yeah, we're wiggling all over but- maybe- there it is; OK, I got it. It's just kinda slow. All right, I'll try and watch that and see if anyone's answering questions. Or asking, but we'll have a time at the end for people to ask questions. Also. So anyway [COUGH]. If you're looking at ways to improve your management, the first thing I always have people look at in a forage situation is improving your soil health and fertility. And probably a lot of you have heard this motto before- 'Don't guess, soil test'. There's a reason for that. You could really...if...with forage plants in particular, because a lot of them are perennials, you could do a whole lot of things trying to pour fertilizer on the ground or changing this, that, or the other thing, but if you've actually got things like your basic soil pH are not suitable for that species, you're really wasting your money looking at all these other things. Alright, and having the results of that soil test gives you a known target for improvement so that you can use your money most wisely and not just [COUGH] be throwing out, for example, throwing out nitrogen, if maybe that's not really the thing that your plants need. So a basic soil test from the MSU Soil & Plant Nutrient Lab costs eleven dollars, which includes soil pH, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and CEC. And that will come- when you receive it, will have recommendations for, according to the use that you said you were going to be putting the ground to, and give you recommendations for what kind of fertility needs to be applied. I also usually recommend that people pay the five dollars extra from that lab to get soil organic matter. You can also, with a lot of the, of the big commercial labs are already including soil organic matter as part of their basic test, so you don't always have to pay a extra charge for that. But that's a fairly new test that does give us some information about the soil health of your, of your site so that you can...see how you're improving it with use of your forage. Now when you go out to get your soil samples, you need to get separate samples for land units that have similar history, use, and land characteristics. And that would be something like, say, an individual pasture that was all, you know, one continuous fence; it had been used this a particular way. You would possibly sample or get a sample from that separate from a neighboring pasture that was used in a different way. Or, you also want to look at differences in soil type. We recommend that you test your forage lands at least every three years. You don't need to do it every year. It doesn't change that fast. But at least every three years. And one fairly recent change that we have made to our recommendations for pastures and hayfields- and this actually not even going to show up in any of the Michigan Extension soil publications yet, because we haven't gotten it changed; sort of a slow process to get our documents updated- but our standard recommendation is to collect a soil sample to six inches, and that really only applies when you have recently plowed land. We are now recommending that if you're in a long established pasture; a hayfield that has not been tilled in the last few years, you only need to sample to a three-inch depth. And the reason for that is, when you are fertilizing a hayfield or a pasture, you're always top-dressing the fertilizer. Well, not always, but most of the time. Which causes the nutrients to become concentrated in the top layer of the soil. And that's where most of the grass roots are also. So, if you are sampling to that deeper depth, it may actually indicate that you need more fertility applied than you actually need for the plants that you're growing. So, stick to the three inches for your pastures and hayfields. And you can use those results to guide correction of your most limiting nutrient first. And in my opinion, if you're looking at forage stand improvement, this is the order you ought to look at those things. The first thing to think about is the soil pH. Then ideally, you would have fixed that before you even started a forage stand, but oftentimes we find people did not do that, and now you have a stand that has a soil pH that's too low, really, for the crop that's growing on it. And when the [COUGH] think, I think I got another...yes. Another slide on this. When the pH is too low, it doesn't matter how much soil nutrient you put out there; the plants can't access it because the pH interferes with the ability of the plant to actually take up the nutrient. So you're really wasting your money in that case to put out things like P and K when the plant can't use it. So our minimum target pH for forage crops is different for different classes of forage. We'll find, usually, grasses are the most tolerant of a lower pH, and so the minimum we'd like to see there is six point zero even. Clovers and trefoils prefer a pH that is higher- up to six point five minimum, or higher. And with alfalfa, it's our most fussy forage in terms of pH, and it really does not like it when the pH is lower than six point eight. And then you can look at this little chart over here on the side, which is dry matter yield of an alfalfa stand in the first cutting relative to the soil pH. And you can see that when the soil pH is...here's six point eight, right about here. And when you have a pH less than that, your yield is really suffering. So some of the things that can cause a low soil pH are the native soil condition, and we have a lot of these in Michigan; they're just weathered glacial soils that just are inherently low in pH unless we do something to fix it. Another thing that can lower your pH is long-term application of nitrogen fertilizer, which is acidic, and will over time actually acidify the soil. We find also that when we plow ground, we destroy the soil organic matter. And soil organic matter provides buffering capacity to soil that helps moderate pH. And lastly, when we get erosion of the topsoil, that leaves us with less topsoil and more subsoil, which tends to be more acidic. So what we could do to help that is to apply lime. That's our main, main recourse. And the other thing that helps over the longer term is managing the forage land so that you can increase the soil organic matter to help increase that buffering capacity. But one important thing to remember even with lime- it takes six week, or, six months for lime, really, to change the soil pH. So, this is a long term process; it's not something you can change overnight. This slide just shows the current prices of several sources of soil nutrients. And you can shop around if your soil test indicates that you need one of these; try and find things that have the most bang for your buck when you look at the actual price per unit of nutrient that you are wanting to apply. Another thing to remember is that if you have animals and you're buying any kind of supplement to feed to those animals, that actually serves as a nutrient source for your, for your land. Because the manure hopefully ends up, sooner or later, back on your land. And animals don't retain very much of the nutrients that they eat, which gives you a pretty good source of nutrients if you manage it properly to help improve your land. And we're going to talk quite a bit in this, in this talk about how you could go about doing that. And I want to say one last thing about foliar plant nutrient applications. These can work, but they're very expensive per unit of nutrient applied, so typically, unless you have got a crisis situation, you're better off to look at your soil-applied nutrients than your foliars, because again, we're talking here about forage improvement on a budget. And I really don't feel that foliar nutrients fall into...into the cost economy category most of the time. I want to say just a couple of things about sulfur. This is a nutrient that we typically don't...have not been worrying about too much for forage stands. But Phil Kaatz, with MSU Extension, did a survey last year where we collected tissue samples from alfalfa stands around the state and discovered that more than half of those stands that were surveyed were either deficient- flat-out deficient- or they were low-normal in sulfur content of the plant tissue. Which concerns us. It used to be we didn't have to worry about sulfur fertility because we had something called acid rain, if you look at this chart right here from 1990. The red areas show areas where significant amounts of sulfur were actually being deposited on the land through acid rain, where it could then be used as a plant nutrient. But we cleaned up our act with the acid rain, so now we have 2013 chart over here, and you see that the red is all gone. And the amounts of sulfur that are now coming with rainfall are much, much lower. Unfortunately, the soil test for sulfur is unreliable. So we recommend that if you do want to check the sulfur status of your, of your plants, you need to do a plant tissue test, which requires clipping some plant material and sending it off to the lab, and most of the soil testing labs will also do plant tissue testing. And that's the best way to assess whether a purchase of sulfur might actually help you. All right. The second thing I want to talk about, improving your management, relates to harvest management, so harvesting to me is any way you are using that forage. We typically think of harvesting as being hay are silage, but these critters over here are also harvesting for you. They're your employees. You can send them out in the field; they don't actually demand a paycheck, but they can harvest that forage for you. Another thing that we need to, to understand about forage crops is that we have a great compromise that we always have to consider. Which is that because of the nature of the plant, as the yield is increasing- this is just percent of maximum over here and this is how long it's been growing back after a harvest- the yield will increase up to a maximum and then start to decline as the plant actually ages and leaves start to fall off of it. But during that time, the quality has been decreasing; that's the blue line. So we always have this great compromise of that as we get more yield, we get less quality. And the third thing that's happening is the purple line, and that's our root reserves on the plant. And that's what drives regrowth early on in the growth cycle. And it takes most plants approximately back to the full bloom or head stage before they completely replace the root reserves that they had to use up after the last harvest. So the next thing that happens is that if we are trying to get optimum quality, we're also hurting the persistence of the plant, because if you keep depleting that root reserve and never let the plant completely replenish it, over time you actually could kill that plant. So we always have to be thinking about this particular situation when we are managing forages. Now, the best way to economically harvest your forage is to graze it. The reason for that is again because those, those animals are your employees. They- requires a lot less machinery to graze than it does to harvest this hay or haylage. You also don't have to store it. And secondly, the grazing removes a lot less soil nutrients from the site in the first place; when you take a hay crop off of a field, you are exporting a huge amount of nutrients that you're then got to have to replace. Whereas the animals are going to recycle most of it. Rotational management gives you much better control of the cattle's harvest. In this situation right here, we have some cattle that are in a temporary electric fence that's separating them into small areas of this large field so that they utilize it more efficiently. So when they've eaten up all the- this happens to be a forge brassica pasture; when they've eaten up everything in here, they just move ' over to the next section, and that way they can prevent the animals from wasting too much forage. And this also has the advantage of controlling where the manure goes so that it's not all concentrated in one part of the field. Because if you gave animals access to the whole field, they would go out and eat what they want or wherever they want to eat it, and then they'd come back to...to their lounging area, which is usually near the water tank. And that is where they would rest. And that is where most of your urine and dung is going to end up. And that's not what you want to happen; you want to keep that distributed more equally out on the pasture. Another thing you can do is extend the grazing season with annual crops, and that just gives you a way to keep the animals out on pasture longer than you would if you were just looking at perennial forages. That's actually another example of what they're doing up here. A third strategy is something we call bale grazing, which happens during the white season here in Michigan. And in this picture right here, the farmer has just arranged his round bales in a long row. And then- it's kind of hard to see in this picture- but he's actually got some temporary electric fence right here that's fencing the animals into this row of hay, and you can kinda see the edge of another row over here. So he'll leave them in there to eat all that hay, which he has harvested and then just arranged out in the field when he harvested the hay. The good part about this is that these animals are going to waste some of this hay, yes, but that's just more nutrient that's being returned to the soil and meanwhile, they're concentrating dung and urine in this area that will, over time, over the next growing season; it's going to improve the land right here around this particular site. And the other thing that happens when you have animals grazing forage like this is that the feed that's wasted is likely going to have seeds in it, and that gives you an opportunity to re-seed an area that possibly needs different...a different population of forages in it. You just want to make sure you're not feeding weedy hay if you're doing that, because then you'd be spiking weeds into your area. Another strategy is to graze crop residues. Corn stover is probably the one most commonly used here in Michigan. But any kind of crop residue can be grazed. And thirdly- or thirdly, I guess fifthly- is stockpiling of forage. Which I'm going to talk about a little bit more here in a minute [COUGH]. Now, when you are grazing your animals, the main cost that you have- well, first of all, you need to have animals. But the equipment that you will be using to do that is fence, water, and labor. Basically. The newer systems of electric fence are a lot more affordable than permanent fence ever was, and the key thing to making an electric system work is that you need to have a good charger, and these are not going to be the cheap ones that you find in the farm store. The good chargers are going to cost six hundred dollars and up, because you have to keep that fence hot or the animals won't- won't respect it. The hardest thing to get to animals in a grazing situation is often water. But, there are also new, good portable water systems that are just plastic pipe laid over the surface of the ground. You can actually carry water quite a long way with some inexpensive black piping and a, and a coupler that attaches onto a portable water tank. And another thing you have to consider in grazing is what's the value of your time, which is, especially if you are rotating animals, you need to be out there looking at them and moving them frequently. And your time is worth something. A lot of times farmers are not giving themselves proper credit for what their time is worth. You need to remember to pay yourself. But you're likely to still spend less time than you would...you'd still have to feed the animals if you were hauling hay to them every day. Put it that way. You can also use your livestock to control the nutrient return by hauling hay out to them, and this is actually a picture from the research farm in the U.P., where they just took their winter feeding area and they would unroll their bales of hay in a different spot each time they took the hay out there, and you can see that there's quite a lot of hay left on the ground. And there's a lot of manure piles mixed in with it. You can see that we really haven't had green up here yet because we can still see a little bit of snow here in the background. But I'm told that once the, the grass greened up and came out through here, you really couldn't see any of this anymore; all of this biomass just degraded and became more fertility to return into the soil with all of this manure, and looked like a pretty good pasture. Another thing that you can use to help manage your manure distribution is to use portable water and mineral sources that could actually be moved around in the pasture. One point I'd like to make about any harvest system like this, or feeding system is that you want to harvest your hay on your most fertile land, and feed it on your worst land. Because you're trying to build the nutrients in this bad part. So, don't feed the hay back on a good field that you harvest it from. You want to pick up those bales and move them to the area that needs improvement. Now, stockpiling is a good way to keep your animals out of the barn longer. And minimize the expense of stored feed; these happen to be my sheep in my field, and...this was a few years ago when we had a fair amount of snow. And the sheep are out there digging industriously in this field. And what they're digging up is this tall fescue that had been buried by the snow while it was still pretty green. And you can see that what they're eating is actually pretty high quality stuff, and they are, they're willing to go out there and work to find it. So I had sheep out here grazing well into January that year, and they, they didn't even want to eat the hay I was putting out for 'em; they'd much rather go out and get this material here. But you need to manage the stockpile to save up that material to be out there at the time of year when you want to use it. And so this is how you would do that. So you'd need to set aside the pastures to accumulate that mass for the later grazing. You can stockpiling it any time of the year, but really where it's the most efficient is for stockpiling grasses for use in the fall and winter, when the growth rate is slowed down. And a lot of people will already be feeding hay, because their pasture is...is gettin' done on '. So, what you might try is to graze the stockpiling pasture through mid to late July. And if you don't have any legumes in the pasture at that point you would apply fif- thirty to fifty pounds of nitrogen. If you do have legumes in the pasture, you can skip that step. That just gives it a little boost to get good growth accumulation for about the next sixty days while that...while that grass is accumulating. And then you can resume grazing in October after the grasses stop growing, using stip- strip grazing to control the utilization and prevent the animals from wasting too much. Tall fescue is a really, really good forage for stockpiling because- and that's what the sheep were grazing in that previous picture- tall fescue accumulate sugar in the fall. It may not be growing very much, but it's putting a lot of carbohydrate into the plant material that will really help with the nutritive value of it. And it also does not degrade under cold weather the way some of our other forages will. And another species that's really good for fall stockpiling is all of the brassica crops. But especially rape and kale, which hold up under cold weather a little bit better than turnips do. Now the third management strategy I want to talk about is weed control. I've always been surprised here in Michigan because I don't actually get that many phone calls about weed control in pastures. Which may be that people have already figured out this, this particular point. But, you know, you need to consider whether that is a plant that the animals are actually going to eat before you get too worried about whether or not you want to try and control it. This happens to be a- it was supposed to be a field of turnips, which you can sort of see them here under all this weeds. We came up on this field with quite a crop of lamb's quarters, redroot pigweed and barnyard grass. When we put the yews out in this field, the first thing they wanted to eat was all the weeds before they would actually go to even start on the turnips, and this is not necessarily a bad thing because all of these plants actually have very- pretty good nutritional value if you actually do a forage quality test on '. You do have to worry a little bit about nitrate accumulation, but there's so much sugar and starch in the turnip that that helps neutralize the nitrate in the rumen and we actually had no trouble with nitrate toxicity in this field. Even though we did have pretty high levels in the, in the weeds. So that was just another good way to get some good animal feed out there. [COUGH] The best options in a forage stand for controlling weeds is cultural methods, because everything we've already talked about helps maintain a healthy stand that can outcompete the weeds. A lot of times, when people tell me they have a weed problem in the pasture, it often is gonna indicate that they've actually got a fertility or grazing or harvest management issue that needs to be addressed first, or the weeds are just going to come back. We do have limited options for herbicides in forage stands when you have mixed stands. Unfortunately if you have a legume and a grass together, which we often have in a forage field, any kind of herbicide that would kill a grassy weed is going to kill the grass. And any herbicide that would kill the broadleaf weeds is going to kill the legume. So, you have to decide what you're going to do; sometimes it's worth it to take out one of your components to control a bad weed problem. And other times, it's just better to live with it and use that as part of your feed source. If you are feeding animals, it's a lot easier to do that than if you are selling hay, because nobody wants to buy hay with weeds in it. There are few options for spraying. One thing that you can do in a mixed stand if the weed is taller than the other plants is to use a pasture wick, which is a roller that actually wipes the herbicide onto the weeds up above the canopy. Hopefully not dripping down onto the plants that you want to keep. Another thing that you can try is spot treating if you've only got weeds in one part of the field. One thing I always tell people with forage crops is, if you have a weed problem that's just starting, it is much better to do what it takes to get that nipped in the bud. For example, thistles are notorious; you'll just have, a few thistles will pop up in a field and you kind of ignore them, and pretty soon you have a whole field of thistles, whereby if you had just gone and dug out those thistles when you first noticed ' before they went to seed, you could nip the whole problem in the bud, so keep a shovel in your truck, and you see a thistle, just get rid of it. Some weeds you can control by top clipping or mowing. Which is one of the reasons why you tend to see different species of weeds in hayfields versus pastures. Another control mechanism for weeds is what we call mixed species grazing, and this is referring to the species of animal, not the species of plant. And the reason this can work is because sheep and goats in particular will eat a lot of broadleaf plants that cattle don't like. So if you have both kinds of animals and you can figure out a way to either graze them together at once, or maybe move one set- one species of animal through the field and then follow up with the other, you can get better weed control than you can if you're only grazing one kind of animal. And lastly, you can use overseeding to increase the amount of desirable plants in the pasture, and that's a...I'm gonna talk about that here in a minute. Well, here we are, getting right into that part. So step three in your improvement plan is to diversify your forage base. We like to see mixtures in forage fields for a number of reasons. It's been pretty well documented that if you have a grass-legume mix with about thirty to forty percent grass, for example, and alfalfa; that is going to give you more yield over the year than...than a pure stand of alfalfa will. Having that grass mixed in there also helps improve the hay drying rate, because it helps keep the swath and the windrow fluffier. It can help improve the stand persistence, because there's more things that...I don't say this...you know, if one plant dies out, the other one may still be there, so your overall stand will last longer before you have to reseed it. You typically, in a mixture, we're going to see improved digestibility and feeding value of that material for animals. For example, alfalfa has less cell wall in it than grass, which we always used to think, well, that just meant alfalfa was better because it has less NDF in it. But what we have found out is that the cell wall in alfalfa is- excuse me- less digestible than the cell wall of grass, because it has more lignin in it. And as a result, grass cell wall, even though there's more of it, it's more digestible and the animal will actually end up getting more energy out of that forage sometimes than they will in pure alfalfa. So what a lot of the dairy farmers are wanting to get grass in their alfalfa because it helps reduce the need to add straw for effective fiber to their rations, because they're getting that fiber, plus nutrition, in the grass in that mixture. Mixtures also help you with weed suppression, particularly the seeding year. They help with better erosion control because you get better soil coverage. If you are...if you have a legume such as alfalfa those are notorious for potential to cause bloat if you're grazing. And adding grass as fifty percent of that stand will help reduce the risk of bloat. And lastly, we know that a diversity of plant species in the field also helps improve soil health through encouraging a better diversity of roots and the animals that feed on roots. Which is your livestock that you have that you really don't see or think about. So, [COUGH] one way to do this is to add legumes to thinning grass stands. That can be pretty easy to do with frost seeding, which we're going to talk about in a minute. But the nitrogen replacement value. Of thirty percent legume in a pasture, and that's not really very much when you stop and think about it, but that's been shown to produce enough nitrogen to replace 180 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. And at 23 cents per pound of nitrogen, 180 pounds of...of legume nitrogen is worth 41 dollars and 40 cents an acre, so, this calculation may change depending on what you're actually paying on nitrogen, but it can be a significant...free- actually, it's not totally free because you had to buy the legume seed, but, you know, it's typically less expensive than buying nitrogen. This also will give you better forage distribution across the season because a lot of our forage legumes grow with a different pattern than grasses. And the legumes gives add nutrit- nutritional value- protein- to your, to your forage. So some of the ones that we typically will use are white clover, which is better for a pasture than a hayfield; birdsfoot trefoil, again, better pasture than hayfield; and red clover, which can work for anything. You can also overseed grass or other legumes into thinning alfalfa stands. When you have an alfalfa stand that's getting to the end of its lifespan, you can sometimes add one to three years more to it before you have to completely replace it by overseeding it with something else. And that- the establishment is expensive, so. The overall cost of doing this in comparison to completely replacing the alfalfa is, is much more economical. So, if you look at- some species will only give you one year of boost, and that would be your small grain, such as oats is often used; annual ryegrass or Italian rye- or, sorry. Just annual ryegrass here. Crimson clover. Or one that's currently getting a lot of press is berseem clover; we're actually trying to get some money to do a little project with this, but there are some companies that are promoting some new cold-tolerant varieties of berseem clover as overseeding crops to extend the life of alfalfa stands. If you want to get two or more years out of your overseeding, use something that will last longer. And that would be red clover, the Italian ryegrass, orchardgrass, tall fescue, or timothy. And these can be put in by frost seeding or drilling as early as you can get out on the alfalfa in the spring. To try and give the new plants a little bit of a head start before the alfalfa gets too far along in its growth cycle. I want to say a couple of things about using improved varieties. In my opinion, one of the key reasons for using improved varieties is not so much even about the yield. It's because the improved varieties have been selected for tolerance or particular environmental conditions, and when you look at something that has actually been. Our check variety which is Vernal; typically Our check Friday which is Virgil. Typically in northern Michigan it will be about a half a ton per acre or more per year and in the lower part of the state. Up to one to two tons for acre more. And at our current price of alfalfa hay. It's about one hundred fifty dollars per ton in a four year stand life. That's going to give you two to four times per acre more. Of alfalfa with that better variety. And that would pay for a lot of seed. Because that extra yield is going to be worth quite a bit of money. So it's actually worth it to buy the. The better see. It's also worth it to buy certified seed. That just means that the. The seed is certified to actually be the variety that it says it is. Which will mean that you know it has no growth traits a genetics. And that it has not drifted away from the original variety traits. When you buy something that is a variety not stated or. Or non-certified. Even of a name variety you just don't have that guarantee. Friday not stated see could be a whole lot of things. One thing we've recently figured out here in Michigan. Is that quite often. If a bag of alfalfa seed says it's Virgil. It's actually more or less the same thing is big variety not stated because a lot of the seed dealers have found out that Virgil will sell better that. If they call it. Friday not stated. Vernell is not a protected name. It's a public righty that's sixty years old and there's no regulations on use of that name. So I get a lot of people will tell me well I planted some Vernell it was the best alfalfa I ever had well what was it probably really. Because certified. Vernell really doesn't exist anymore as far as we can tell it's very very difficult to find it. But what that might be is all. Old seed of some other better variety. That they just wanted to move out of the warehouse. Overstock see. Sometimes from certified seat fields if they are more than five years old they cannot be sold as certified seed anymore but if the seed feels still producing Well the farmer might want to keep harvesting seed off that. But they can't call it whatever. It really is. It also could be seed from anyone who had a field and felt like harvesting subsea. So really what you're doing when you buy variety not stated seed is your gambling. You could get something that's really really good. Or you could get something that's really really bad. And you just don't know what it's going to be. From time to time. So that extra cost of certified seed is worth it in my opinion. I'm not going to go through this whole chart. Jam art. Are these people going to be able to access these recordings later. If they want to come back and check something or. Yes we're recording them and they'll be posted somewhere on the M S U extension. Website. OK. You know that's what I was hoping when I put this slide in so that people could go back and refer to this if they want to and. Obviously prices of sea change all the time these were some prices I looked up earlier this year. And I just tried to figure out. You know if you. To look at the seat cost per ton of dry matter you know potential. How do these different forages actually compare to each other you know because you don't plant them all at the same rate. So a bag of seed may seem like it's a prohibitively expensive. But if you're only going to be planting. You know two parents per acre of it that bag of seed will go a long way. So you really need this is the column that you really need to look at. Over here if you're trying to figure out whether seed is too expensive or not. There's a couple of questions. KHAMIS you want to look at them. Well I mean look here. OK I think I'm going to save those for the ad because they look like. We may actually get a little bit more answers that will fit. That. Before we get there. Now I can't close the window. There we go. Now I can advance by Sly there. Another decision you have to make when buying seed is whether you should pay the extra to buy treated seed. And in the case of forages when we say treated seed that use usually. It could include things like live. And hydration agents. A lot of times for each seed is very very small. And a lot of times they'll put a coating of lime on it just to help make it easier to handle. In the planting equipment. And the hydration ages help attract boys you're around that see. To help it get a good start would it actually gets the soil. The coatings will often include. Micronutrients which is just a way to get a little bit extra fertility. Around that see. In the case of. Legumes. There usually will be a bacterial inoculated in the in the coating that will make sure that the lid gives have access to the proper rise O.B.'s species so that they can fix nitrogen. And in some forage crops there will be a fungicide applied in the coating but probably alfalfa is the prevalent water where that would actually be the case a lot of our other forage crops don't actually have any kind of. Pesticide it's all these first three things that are in there. Now if you don't have a coded seed. And it's a lagoon. You really need to consider adding a ligament to it. And this could be bought separately from the seed of little bags. Of black powder. That could be coated on your seed. And if you have not planted Liggins recently in a field this is really cheap insurance to make sure that your. Look gives actually have access to the right. The shoes of rise O.B.O.. Will cost about thirty to thirty cents per pound to see. To buy that bag could knock you. And some labor to apply it. We do recommend that if you're using a coded seed you ship planted at the same pounds per acre is. Coated see don't. You know obviously the coding takes up part of the weight. But don't plant. More of it because the whole point of putting the coating on there is to help you be able to get a good stand with less seat. So don't defeat the purpose of that by actually buying more product and. All the research has shown that this actually works out pretty good you can actually get a good stand of forage with fewer seeds for acre. When you're used to these Codey. All right now we're going to talk about a frost seeding method. And this is just a really inexpensive and easy way to renovate. And do. New for you just hear your stance. And this is based on using trust action to bury broadcast seeds are broadcast seeders your. Cheapest type of leader that can go anywhere from there are broadcast rates you can put on a tractor. You can use a fertilizer spreader you can put it on the back of a four wheeler you can E.G.. If you have a really small area they have these little. Spinner rigs that you just put on a strap over your shoulder. Success of this method requires you have a freezing temperature at night with a daytime thought so it's a very short window of opportunity in the spring where this is going to work. We want to see the soil forming a hardy called the structure of ice crystals. On the surface doesn't tend to happen when you have a sandy soil. They just don't get the ice crystals that dry soils also will not work because they don't have the moisture. This is also a less effective method in areas where the snow belt is really late such as up in the U.P. where typically the grass is already turned a green as the snow is melting off and you really don't have that. Free stock cycle going on in order to have this work. You need to have good spring salt moisture to allow the seedlings to compete with the established plants. And you need to control the spring for it flush prevent shading of the seedlings. And for that reason it tends to work better and pastures that it doesn't hayfields because it has fields we usually get. You know people will let the hay field go pretty far. Before they'll take off that first cutting. And that may be too long for the little seedlings to hold out in the ship. See this just repeats. Most of the things I just said. But this picture just shows the honeycomb structure of this soil was. Frost seeded the day before this picture was taken. And the little red dots are red clover seeds. You can see some of these are already be at work into the surface of the soil. Now if you're going to try and frost seed or. Or drill early in the spring. The best time to plant for that is in the fall so that you can do some preparation on that area. Because both of these methods really work better if you have some salt a seed contact. The drill could create that but if you're Frost CD you're relying on the seed actually falling out of the soil still you need some soil exposed. So this is one of the only circumstances where I will actually tell people to abuse their pasture. I would like to see it over grazed in the fall or mowed really really short. To reduce the amount of residue that's out there the following spring. You can also use a chain drag or hair or a little bit a light disc. To disturb the soil. So it got a pear feels right here which actually that was for the picture I just showed you with the honeycomb structure where they were prepped the year before and here we are getting ready to frost seeded spring you see there's a lot of soil. Exposed. Not much residue. This field rate here. Is not suitable for frost seeding because if you spread seed out onto this it's just going to land on top of this. Dead grass and it's never going to get in contact with the soil. But this well it would be perfectly fine for drilling. For Frost city you need to consider using the right species of plant. The best frustrating candidates have small to medium size slick seed so that they can work their way down through any residue. And through that having a honeycomb structure and get a good contact with the soil. So we like to see things that are small and round so here we have some news down here which. All will work really well. White clover. This is coated birds for the tree fall which is why it's why it's got to live Cody. And red clover. Saw all of these will work really well. I have had success with ryegrass as an orchard grass in some circumstances the seeds are small. But they're a little bit. They have little short on time so they don't always work their way down as well as around seeds do. Small grains can work. If you have the ability to disturb the soil a little bit. I would not try. These are. These aren't real good to just throw doubt on the surface of the ground and I'll tell you the biggest problem I've had with this is that while life exists the great way to feed them. And we felt we fed a large flock of turkeys one spring on our field. With a wry. Frost CD effort. Now one of the things that we do not like to use for frost seeding are big fluffy. Seed such as these broad seed scenes would not be suitable because they're not getting it down. In contact with the soil. Because of the size of the fluffy. Another thing you can try for a low expense. Method to get seed out there is what we call treaded seeding. Which is similar to frost seeding except for that it can. Danny. Time of year. And that instead of frost action you're going to use one faction. To bury the seed. So you need to have access to some animals. Where you can put them out on the newly seeded area with a fairly high stocking density for a really short period of time. So that they can trample the seed it within a two to three day period. And that faction actually acts like a little bit of tillage to push the sea doubted to the soil. You don't want to use this in areas that are muddy. Because you push the C. to D.. And this is a. Example of that right here where we could get equipment on this Silva past year because the trees are too close together. So we just broadcasted the orchard grass in there and then let the sheet trample it in and that about. You know couple of months later this is what we had a pretty good stand a grass really for the trees. You can also add. Thanks to your fort stance by reduce tillage. You can do a complete no till seeding. Which means you don't need as much equipment to do the prep. You do need access to a notable cedar. But those can often be rented. And you will need to do some kind of control of the existing forage before you plant your seeds. Typically that's going to be a herbicide burn. Usually with life a Seder. Sometimes per quat. Some people will try doing. The residue control with really heavy grazing. Before and after seeding. This is hard to do because it's actually really hard to overgraze consistently enough. You do need to disrupt the small surface somehow to suppress the Saudi Bruce Hall seat contact if you are going to do any kind of. Broadcasted to an existing sod without trying to kill it. That will include things like light disk. To scratch the saw and expose about twenty five percent. Of soil. This is best to be done. Before you put the seed out. And then you could then plant using your no till drill or broadcast cedar. And then. If you want repeat the disc. After you get a broadcast CD to get even better. Corporation of the sea. You could try using herro. To do the same thing or the traffic. As I've mentioned before. I would recommend a disc is the best way to go about this. And if you're going to go in and. Have any kind of residue on the surface this picture indicates how short the residue should be. You really don't want it over the toe of your boot. If you have that much residue it's going to be hard to get saucy contact. The last thing I want to mention is our. Is our Web page. Which I hope that some of you will. You'll use because we do try and keep things on here up to date. To be a good resource for forage growers in the state. I want to thank you very much kill myself I don't see any more questions. So I think we're. We're pretty well completed for tonight OK. And thank you all for our listening in. Thanks again Kim.