cogangrass

[bsr]

we just got a property that has alot of cogangrass .currently we are using protein blocks and there is pasture grass on it . Does anyone have an idea how much protein is in this cogangrass? Any opinions are appreciated.

 

[IluvABbeef]

Location?

 

[novatech]

You might do a search on here on it.
It is considered an invasive weed taking over native grasses.

 

[bsr]

Our pasture is located in west florida

 

[Jogeephus]

I hope you kill it all or at least keep it down there. Its good for nothing and has little value. We are scared to death of it and are in the process of an eradication program. Kill it!

 

[ga. prime]

Cogongrass is listed as one of the ten worst weeds in the world. It doesn't matter what the protein % is because it is upalatable to cows. They won't eat it.

Jo, here's what I'm afraid is going to happen: We're going to wake up one day and find cogongrass growing all over the place, started from seeds stuck to the grills of F-350's and Polaris 4 wheelers and John Deere tractors and mowing equipment and brought here by visiting Florida deer and turkey hunters.

 

[Jogeephus]

Jo, here's what I'm afraid is going to happen: We're going to wake up one day and find cogongrass growing all over the place, started from seeds stuck to the grills of F-350's and Polaris 4 wheelers and John Deere tractors and mowing equipment and brought here by visiting Florida deer and turkey hunters.

I think you are right if people who are infected with this plague don't stand up and fight it with all their might. But lets not forget the contract mowers, straw producers, loggers, tree planters and farmers who work both sides of the line. Also, just think of the thousands of head of cattle shipped from Florida. If clover seed can be viable once it passes through the rumen I'm sure cogon grass will be too. Its spread is inevitable and I dread the day that I will be faced with it cause its coming if people don't fight it hard. And surely, no one would be stupid enough to bale it for hay and ship it! But....

 

[Angus Cowman]

Jo, here's what I'm afraid is going to happen: We're going to wake up one day and find cogongrass growing all over the place, started from seeds stuck to the grills of F-350's and Polaris 4 wheelers and John Deere tractors and mowing equipment and brought here by visiting Florida deer and turkey hunters.

I think you are right if people who are infected with this plague don't stand up and fight it with all their might. But lets not forget the contract mowers, straw producers, loggers, tree planters and farmers who work both sides of the line. Also, just think of the thousands of head of cattle shipped from Florida. If clover seed can be viable once it passes through the rumen I'm sure cogon grass will be too. Its spread is inevitable and I dread the day that I will be faced with it cause its coming if people don't fight it hard. And surely, no one would be stupid enough to bale it for hay and ship it! But....

Don,t be too sure about the baling part Jo saw an IDIOT up here baling sericea lespedeza this yr and trying to sell it and some IDIOT will probably buy it because it is cheap
I have been telling everyone about it and someone made a call to the state maybe they can stop it at least we can hope

Then again our great state gov't is the ones who brought it in from Oklahoma

 

[bsr]

THe cows are actually eating this grass. Every time we go down to the pasture it seems the whole herd is eating the cogan.

 

[ga. prime]

That's painful to think about.

 

[Brandonm22]

We planted sericea lespedeza here 40 years ago and had it all over the place right up to when we sold those fields. The stuff is great. If your cows won't eat it....get better cows!! The nitrogen that it fixates is worth it by itself and fescue hay with sericea is a lot more nutritious than fescue by itself. If this @#@!@#@!!! coal company descides NOT to buy (I got $2000 today from one of their loggers whose cutter operator went right across the property line and kept going and going and going!) our place in Fayette county I plan to plant 50 acres in an improved lespedeza next April.

I don't know enough about cogongrass to give an opinion there; though if the cows eat it and perform on it.....I would help it.

 

[ga. prime]

I don't know enough about cogongrass to give an opinion there; though if the cows eat it and perform on it.....I would help it.

A perfect example of the faulty, half-baked reasoning that led to the introduction of this noxious scourge of a weed to the western hemisphere. Read the research on it. I have.

 

[Jogeephus]

I don't know enough about cogongrass to give an opinion there; though if the cows eat it and perform on it.....I would help it.

A perfect example of the faulty, half-baked reasoning that led to the introduction of this noxious scourge of a weed to the western hemisphere. Read the research on it. I have.

If I'm not badly mistaken, the government is funding the eradication of it and will help people kill it through some funding. I don't think there are many hoops to go through as they understand we really need to eradicate this pest before it gets too far.

This weed will choke out everything including trees and has the potential of devastating our ecosystem. If fire gets in it, the fire will burn so hot that it looks like a pile of tires. It will even choke out galberry and palmetto. That in itself speaks volumes.

 

[grannysoo]

It will even choke out galberry and palmetto. That in itself speaks volumes.

Yes it does...

 

[Brandonm22]

I have looked it up and 7% protein is pretty sucky. What you would have too spend supplementing cattle grazing a pure stand of it probably would be uneconomical even for the lowest cost producers.

 

[Angus Cowman]

We planted sericea lespedeza here 40 years ago and had it all over the place right up to when we sold those fields. The stuff is great. If your cows won't eat it....get better cows!! The nitrogen that it fixates is worth it by itself and fescue hay with sericea is a lot more nutritious than fescue by itself. If this @#@!@#@!!! coal company descides NOT to buy (I got $2000 today from one of their loggers whose cutter operator went right across the property line and kept going and going and going!) our place in Fayette county I plan to plant 50 acres in an improved lespedeza next April.

I don't know enough about cogongrass to give an opinion there; though if the cows eat it and perform on it.....I would help it.

It is guys like you that think sericea and other invasive plants are great is the problem we have with eradicating invasive weeds and plants
It doesn't matter how much nitrogen it fixes if it chokes out other grasses and the nitrogen fixing abilityof sericea is minimal then you don't have anything left and cattle will only eat it when it is in early stages of growth not the heavy woody stems of the mature plant plants I have seen cattle starve running on heavily infested sericea stands Thge only thing I know of that will eat sericea consistently is goats

 

[pdfangus]

We planted sericea lespedeza here 40 years ago and had it all over the place right up to when we sold those fields. The stuff is great. If your cows won't eat it....get better cows!! The nitrogen that it fixates is worth it by itself and fescue hay with sericea is a lot more nutritious than fescue by itself. If this @#@!@#@!!! coal company descides NOT to buy (I got $2000 today from one of their loggers whose cutter operator went right across the property line and kept going and going and going!) our place in Fayette county I plan to plant 50 acres in an improved lespedeza next April.

I don't know enough about cogongrass to give an opinion there; though if the cows eat it and perform on it.....I would help it.

It is guys like you that think sericea and other invasive plants are great is the problem we have with eradicating invasive weeds and plants
It doesn't matter how much nitrogen it fixes if it chokes out other grasses and the nitrogen fixing abilityof sericea is minimal then you don't have anything left and cattle will only eat it when it is in early stages of growth not the heavy woody stems of the mature plant plants I have seen cattle starve running on heavily infested sericea stands Thge only thing I know of that will eat sericea consistently is goats

sounds to me like he does not know the difference between serecia and kobe-korean.

 

[Brandonm22]

It is guys like you that think sericea and other invasive plants are great is the problem we have with eradicating invasive weeds and plants
It doesn't matter how much nitrogen it fixes if it chokes out other grasses and the nitrogen fixing abilityof sericea is minimal then you don't have anything left and cattle will only eat it when it is in early stages of growth not the heavy woody stems of the mature plant plants I have seen cattle starve running on heavily infested sericea stands Thge only thing I know of that will eat sericea consistently is goats

Sounds to me like piss poor management. If the forage gets ahead of the cattle, knock it down or add more cattle. Don't sit on the front porch sipping ice tea and let the stuff get five feet tall. This is Alabama. We have cattle grazing old strip mine land all over the place on nothing but Sericea lespedeza and Ky 31 fescue. Some cows wont work in that environment. Cull those cows and get rid of those bloodlines. That's a whole lot cheaper than plowing up the whole place. A lot of these show ponies just can't cut it in the real world. The whole concept of "invasive" plants is a bunch of bull. Fescue, Coastal bermuda,bahia, sericea lespedeza and most other commercially useful forages aren't native, never were native, and like cattle themselves originated somewhere else or were concocted in a lab. All this wasting dollars on eradication efforts is doing is defending one introduced forage from another introduced forage. There is a ton of research available that shows that the cost of gain on a lespedeza stand is LESS that just about anything else that is out there. True the newer varieties of lespedeza (serala, interstate, AU grazer, etc) are more palatable than the original sericea lespedeza and probably should be what is planted today; but unless you are in real dry country where the sericea is sucking up all the water with it's vastly superior root system and thus killing the grasses next to it I wouldn't lift a finger to get rid of it. Fescue, Bahia, bermudagrass, timothy, dallisgrass, etc all compete real well with sericea lespedeza and I have never seen sericea get so rank that cattle won't eat it by Christmas. Even Kudzu is a useful forage if you can keep adequate grazing pressure on it.

 

[HerefordSire]

It is guys like you that think sericea and other invasive plants are great is the problem we have with eradicating invasive weeds and plants
It doesn't matter how much nitrogen it fixes if it chokes out other grasses and the nitrogen fixing abilityof sericea is minimal then you don't have anything left and cattle will only eat it when it is in early stages of growth not the heavy woody stems of the mature plant plants I have seen cattle starve running on heavily infested sericea stands Thge only thing I know of that will eat sericea consistently is goats

Sounds to me like be nice poor management. If the forage gets ahead of the cattle, knock it down or add more cattle. Don't sit on the front porch sipping ice tea and let the stuff get five feet tall. This is Alabama. We have cattle grazing old strip mine land all over the place on nothing but Sericea lespedeza and Ky 31 fescue. Some cows wont work in that environment. Cull those cows and get rid of those bloodlines. That's a whole lot cheaper than plowing up the whole place. A lot of these show ponies just can't cut it in the real world. The whole concept of "invasive" plants is a bunch of bull. Fescue, Coastal bermuda,bahia, sericea lespedeza and most other commercially useful forages aren't native, never were native, and like cattle themselves originated somewhere else or were concocted in a lab. All this wasting dollars on eradication efforts is doing is defending one introduced forage from another introduced forage. There is a ton of research available that shows that the cost of gain on a lespedeza stand is LESS that just about anything else that is out there. True the newer varieties of lespedeza (serala, interstate, AU grazer, etc) are more palatable than the original sericea lespedeza and probably should be what is planted today; but unless you are in real dry country where the sericea is sucking up all the water with it's vastly superior root system and thus killing the grasses next to it I wouldn't lift a finger to get rid of it. Fescue, Bahia, bermudagrass, timothy, dallisgrass, etc all compete real well with sericea lespedeza and I have never seen sericea get so rank that cattle won't eat it by Christmas. Even Kudzu is a useful forage if you can keep adequate grazing pressure on it.

What? Would you mind saying that again? :mrgreen:

What does Cogangrass look like?

 

[Jogeephus]

Here is a link to some information about it as well as some pictures of what it looks like.

http://www.gfc.state.ga.us/ForestManage ... ngrass.cfm