blog post

[pdfangus]

new cover crop blog post.

http://pdfangus.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/672/

 

[melking]

Good idea on the half and half. When you are talking cover crops, you are talking for grazing right? If so, is that sorghum grass?

 

[pdfangus]

Good idea on the half and half. When you are talking cover crops, you are talking for grazing right? If so, is that sorghum grass?

I am running a multi farm multi county multi species cover crop program at my work....

The majority are cool season cover crops....we have them over a wide spectrum of production models, cash grain, dairy, vegetable, wildlife managment and a couple of beef producers.

At my house I have one field that is not being grazed just cover behind cover to monitor soil quality.....

the field with the good crops was and will be grazed....and replanted to cool season cover til spring.

the tall crop is sorghum sudan grass, also millet, soy bean, cow pea, buckwheat, a little corn, and sunflower.

I will graze it in about four strips and let the cows take about half of the volume......then I will move them....broadcast the fall cover and bushog and run my little spike tooth aerator over it....

 

[melking]

Thanks, I have very limited acerage and I am always on the search for faster growing grazing materials.

 

[pdfangus]

DOWN YOUR WAY YOU COULD PROBABLY GROW THIS STUFF NINE OR TEN MONTHS A YEAR.....

 

[cow pollinater]

I'd be interested to know if you've been involved in any work on peak nitrogen production for clovers and legumes. I've got about twenty acres of the nut ground under white dutch clover and I rotate it in on the off-years when I'm redoing my floors so every year about twenty acres gets planted while the rest is getting worked over. Everyone agrees that it adds nitrogen but no-one can tell me WHEN the best nitrogen production is. Should I let it bloom? Should I keep it mowed short?

I did a mixture of triticale, legumes, and vetch on some of my hardpan soil two years in a row and mowed it short and disked in in the spring two years in a row on some lease ground and increased the production by about thirty percent.

 

[pdfangus]

I'd be interested to know if you've been involved in any work on peak nitrogen production for clovers and legumes. I've got about twenty acres of the nut ground under white dutch clover and I rotate it in on the off-years when I'm redoing my floors so every year about twenty acres gets planted while the rest is getting worked over. Everyone agrees that it adds nitrogen but no-one can tell me WHEN the best nitrogen production is. Should I let it bloom? Should I keep it mowed short?

I did a mixture of triticale, legumes, and vetch on some of my hardpan soil two years in a row and mowed it short and disked in in the spring two years in a row on some lease ground and increased the production by about thirty percent.

No...I have not been involved in any work like that. But there is a guy east of me a couple of counties who has grown 150 bushel corn behind a cover crop of rye and vetch with no other inputs. All the nitrogen came from the cover crop...primarily the vetch. this was on a sandy coastal plain soil which has had a good history of cover crops....around here we calculate roughly a lb of nitrogen for every lb of yield goal corn...

with most plants the relative root mass is directly proportional to the above ground mass. Legumes produce nitrogen from the bacterial root nodules...the more plant you have......the more roots you have..... the more nodules...theoreticly more nitrogen....

in fact I wondered why white dutch clover....other than its persistence....why not its larger cousin Ladino or even Red, or other clovers.....Now I know zero about what grows well where you are.....

Vetch here is only a cool season crop but it is pretty much the champion at nitrogen production here.

The process goes beyond the pure addition of nitrogen....
we have to learn about the addition of organic matter in most any form to the soil....
the organic matter feeds the life in the soil and in turn the life in the soil feeds our plants....

one of my producers just grazed his summer cover crop.....he started to graze them and I think he finished Friday/Saturday. According to his best guess, he had 80 cattle on ~ .80 acres for one day of grazing or 100 head/acre moving them daily….amazing – they really tore it up, in a good way….and now it will rest to late fall. they grazed it pretty clean but they also trampled a lot of organic matter down onto the soil....we are going to have a grazing field day there in September. His cover crop was the same mix as mine and was probably about the same stage of growth and same size.

 

[melking]

DOWN YOUR WAY YOU COULD PROBABLY GROW THIS STUFF NINE OR TEN MONTHS A YEAR.....

Is there anything to the so called danger of young sudan grasses?

 

[pdfangus]

yes....I forget all of the possible permutations but sudans and sudexes can be subject to prussic acid accumulation....
especially when the plants are young and or experiencing rapid growth....or when they are stressed or recently frosted....

 

[cow pollinater]

in fact I wondered why white dutch clover....other than its persistence....why not its larger cousin Ladino or even Red, or other clovers.....Now I know zero about what grows well where you are......

The white dutch can be sheared off a quarter inch above ground when the nuts begin to drop and it's slow enough in growth that you have a month long harvest window after that mowing to get a good sweep with the harvest equipment. I like to have grass about an inch high at harvest just to cut down on nut breakage when they sweep but any more than that and the equipment can't get them all. In addition to losing nuts you wind up with a pest control issue the following year as the un-broken nuts left behind are a host for this years adult pests.

 

[pdfangus]

thanks CP....

I learned something today....

 

[Simmonscattleco]

Do you have any suggestions for cover crops in sandy soil? We are trying to get our sandy soil more fertile through the use of cover crops and rotational grazing.

 

[Nesikep]

pdfangus, this is one of the most interesting topics about soil, cover crops, and such I've seen here, Thanks!

We had a field of winter rye 2 years ago that we threshed last summer... our combine loses a lot of seed out the back, so I took the subsoiler through it, then a harrow and roller, and it came back.. Next to it we had a field that was in sunflowers 2 years ago, and planted into summer and winter vetch last spring. We were looking to get seed from it, but the seed set was terrible, and with all the sunflowers coming up it was just a tangled mess... the mower we had bought to mow it was a POS, so I had to make do with a haybine... I took it off as hay, then disked it and sowed more rye there as well. You could see a marked difference in the field that had vetch last year compared to rye, the rye was a much darker green and about a foot taller. I just plowed it all under last week and will be putting it into pure alfalfa hay again. We have grown buckwheat here as well, and it grows excellent, but being pretty expensive seed, we wanted to harvest it, and found that with the heat and dryness around here, you just can't keep it wet... it also turns into a tangled mess.
We just got some yellow lupine seeds, 3 varieties, 25 seeds of each, which we will test and propagate. They're supposed to be an annual, non shattering, low alkaloid variety, so they should be palatable to cows, but apparently are excellent at making phosphorus available, as they have some special enzymes and acids to liberate it from the soil.. as well as good nitrogen fixation. It will be several years before we have enough seed of any of the varieties to make any serious tests.

Again, thanks for an interesting topic!

 

[pdfangus]

pdfangus, this is one of the most interesting topics about soil, cover crops, and such I've seen here, Thanks!

We had a field of winter rye 2 years ago that we threshed last summer... our combine loses a lot of seed out the back, so I took the subsoiler through it, then a harrow and roller, and it came back.. Next to it we had a field that was in sunflowers 2 years ago, and planted into summer and winter vetch last spring. We were looking to get seed from it, but the seed set was terrible, and with all the sunflowers coming up it was just a tangled mess... the mower we had bought to mow it was a POS, so I had to make do with a haybine... I took it off as hay, then disked it and sowed more rye there as well. You could see a marked difference in the field that had vetch last year compared to rye, the rye was a much darker green and about a foot taller. I just plowed it all under last week and will be putting it into pure alfalfa hay again. We have grown buckwheat here as well, and it grows excellent, but being pretty expensive seed, we wanted to harvest it, and found that with the heat and dryness around here, you just can't keep it wet... it also turns into a tangled mess.
We just got some yellow lupine seeds, 3 varieties, 25 seeds of each, which we will test and propagate. They're supposed to be an annual, non shattering, low alkaloid variety, so they should be palatable to cows, but apparently are excellent at making phosphorus available, as they have some special enzymes and acids to liberate it from the soil.. as well as good nitrogen fixation. It will be several years before we have enough seed of any of the varieties to make any serious tests.

Again, thanks for an interesting topic!

sounds like you are doing some good innovative work as well....

I have fallen in love with Lana Wolly Pod Vetch....I bought a bag of that two years ago to add to my fall cover crops....had som that reseeded pretty well so I still have some this year.....depended on grazing managment...

this past fall I used dixie Crimson Clover....I like it but I love the Vetch....

Horses are currently grazing a plot that has Rye, Crimson Clover, Volunteer vetch and Austrian Winter Peas....

 

[Nesikep]

We have some volunteer vetch and birdsfoot trefoil coming up in one of our fields, it's been slowly spreading over the years. I'll try and post a video tonight of plowing down the rye.. The plow we got works pretty good, the rye was 2 feet tall and it buried it nearly completely... really nice ground there. We have a half acre of sainfoin we thresh every year as well. We found that in our climate, to get seed off the legumes, you have to cut them once early in the season, then they'll grow back more uniformly and set seed better... It takes a lot to learn it all, and a whole lot of errors!