There are three good reasons for growing an alternative forage crop, according to Dr. Robert Kallenbach – availability, quality and toxicity.
Kallenbach, a University of Missouri Extension professor with the Division of Plant Sciences, told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor alternative forages can be used to fill a gap in a feed supply. “For instance,” he said, “if your farm was mostly cool season grasses, and you had a shortage of forage through the drying period of summer that we typically have, having a warm season forage would be advantageous to keep the pasture for livestock.”
A second possible use for alternative forages is to improve the quality of the pasture. Legumes like birdsfoot trefoil are typically more palatable to livestock than are grasses, and are higher in protein and energy. Since they fix their own nitrogen, they don’t need nitrogen fertilizer and can benefit grasses in the system by providing a little extra N to them. And a third use is to dilute the effect of endophyte infected tall fescue; over 90 percent of the tall fescue in the U.S. contains the parasitic fungus, and the ergot alkaloids it secretes depress rate of gain, milk output, calf performance and cow rebreeding rates. “If you use something that is not a native tall fescue, you can reduce the amount of toxin that your livestock are getting,” Kallenbach said.
But alternative forages have disadvantages. They’re usually slower to establish; another potential forage crop, gamagrass, initially produces thin stands and requires 24-36 months to get fully established. In the interim, keeping competing weeds out of the stand takes management, time and effort. Similarly, Kallenbach said birdsfoot trefoil “is a little slower to establish than white clover might be. It has some advantages in that it’s not a ‘bloating’ forage, and it’s one that produces well during dry periods in the summer better than most clovers do. But it doesn’t last long; it lasts about three years, so you’ve got to manage for reseeding the pasture every now and again.”
Another popular alternative forage is triticale; it’s actually a small grain, a wheat/rye hybrid, developed by plant breeders to combine the good grain production of the former with the hardiness of the latter. Kallenbach said triticale is typically planted in late summer as a forage, and cites it as an example of filling the feed gap. “Let’s say we plant around the first of September, which would be an ideal time to do that,” he said. “They’re going to take 45 days or so to get established and really have some grazable forage out there. You get to the middle of October or first of November, we’ll graze them; it’s all vegetative growth at that point. We’ll take it down to about 3″ stubble and let it go through winter; and then, just as soon as we get some warm days in late winter and early spring it’ll begin to grow, probably before any of our perennial cool seasons will as a rule. We’ll graze it when it’s vegetative through that period and, starting about mid-March to early April, we’ll start to get feed produced. The livestock will eat those when they’re immature, but as they get more mature and kind of ‘stocky,’ we’ll get out to those fields and spray them out.”
Kallenbach urged producers to be judicious, however. “When we’re looking at alternative forages, we’re looking at how they’re going to fit into our operation,” he said. “It’s probably not one of these things where you want to run through every single option you can the first year you think of it; you probably want to look at your farm from a whole production perspective and say, ‘What are issues that I can solve with this?’ and maybe tackle one of those, learn how to do that, and tackle the next one somewhere down the line.”
