As of Aug. 28, before the remnants of Hurricane Issac passed through, 99 percent of Missouri’s rangeland and pastures were rated poor or very poor by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. Southwest Missouri got 1.0-2.5 inches of rain as a result of the storm, and when the next NASS report came out Sept 4, Missouri rangeland and pastures were… 99 percent poor or very poor.
This makes winter forage supplies more important than ever, and “there are optimists out there who have fertilizer buggies that have been running through the pastures and scattering cereal grain like Rye or maybe Wheat; some of them have been putting out turnips this year – anything they think that will grow as soon as we get some cooler weather and rain,” reported Eldon Cole, University of Missouri southwest region livestock specialist at the Lawrence County office in Mt Vernon, Mo.
And what’s gotten Missouri cattle producers through a lot of winters has been fall stockpiled Fescue. “We’re going to be counting on it again this year,” Cole told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor. “It hasn’t failed us, most years. Some years are better than others, but this year we sure hope it’s good, because we need a lot of help to extend our winter feed supply.”
The interseeding of small grains has been one of the refinements in stockpiling Fescue over the years. Producers seed in Wheat, Rye, or Ryegrass; recently they’ve been turning to brassicas like turnips and radishes. “These are crops that can tolerate a lot of weather abuse,” Cole said; they produce an early, quick crop of forage, and then the cattle will eat the crop.
Another refinement has been strip grazing. “It’s kind of like feeding hay,” said Cole. “You don’t turn them in to the whole bale pile at one time; you let them eat a few bales and then when they’re done with that, you move the fence to where they have access to some other hay or, in this case, pasture.” And he said producers have fine-tuned their fertilization. “We used to probably put on more nitrogen… somewhere around 50 pounds of actual N seems to be the desired amount to put on at this time of year,” Cole said.
Dr. John Jennings, University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service animal science professor and forage specialist, told OFN the fertilizer should go on in early September. In addition to nitrogen, he said, “the potash and phosphorus levels should be based on soil test recommendations; without a soil test, we need to put at least 50 units of each one of those on as well to promote good growth, if we have not put any on earlier in the year.”
Chicken litter is abundantly available in northwest Arkansas, but Jennings warned against overdoing applications of it. During one of the University’s drought meetings during the summer, he said, “a producer had made the comment that he had put on a heavy rate of chicken litter one summer to promote some fall growth, because he was out of pasture. He put on more than needed, and then it continued to stay dry; the forage accumulated a high level of nitrate, and he had trouble with death of some animals. We don’t want to do that; we have the growth potential to make 2,000-3,000 pounds of dry matter per acre on these fall grown forages, and 50-60 pounds of nitrogen per acre is enough to promote 2,000-3,000 pounds of dry matter. So that’s the rate that we want to stay in.”
With fall rains and cooling temperatures, the Fescue should grow through October and November, producing a good quality pasture sometime in December to early January. “Then we can graze that through the wintertime, as long as it lasts,” Jennings said. “This year there’s been so much summer stress from drought that we’ll have to carefully evaluate those fields to make sure that we have a good, live stand left to fertilize.” Jennings is a proponent of the 300-day grazing project, an effort by the University of Arkansas to manage fields so they can be used by cattle 300 days out of the year. Unfortunately, that didn’t work in 2012.
