It’s kind of a Catch-22 – if you can afford to wait longer, you have a better chance of establishing a stand of winter annuals. But the purpose of establishing the stand is often because you need the forage, and quickly.
Although producers typically sow the winter crops in the first week of September, “if we wait until late September or early October, the chances of failure are much, much less,” said Dr. John Jennings, University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service animal science professor and forage specialist. “Even if it might be dry in October, typically the temperatures are cooling off. We’ll get some rain at some point; with the cooler temperatures that moisture lasts longer, and we can get the stand up and get it established.”
But the later they go in, the later they’re available for the cows. “If we plant the first week of September, we potentially could have grazing the first week of October,” Jennings told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor. “If we wait until late September to early October to plant, we can have potential grazing by early December. And if we wait until late October or into November to plant, it’ll be February to March before we have grazing available.” So, that’s part of the decision; another part is what to plant. Jennings said, “We’re generally planting annual Ryegrass, forage Wheat, Oats, Cereal Rye, maybe triticale, and last year we had a lot of good luck planting forage brassicas like forage turnips.” Dr. Rob Kallenbach, University of Missouri professor in the division of Plant Sciences and state Extension specialist for forage crops, said oats will produce the most pasture, but the crop rarely overwinters and would not be available for forage the following spring.
“Cereal Rye is a good fall grower as well,” Kallenbach told OFN, “and will survive even the toughest winters in the region and produce significant growth as well; usually we get a lot of forage from Rye, not only in the fall but starting in the middle of March until about the first of May.”
Another of the options, annual ryegrass, will produce a little more than 2,000 pounds per acre of forage going into autumn if it’s planted about the beginning of September, and will be significantly more productive than other winter annuals the following spring, growing until the first of June. “It’s a nice species if you want to work in a Bermudagrass rotation,” said Kallenbach, but “not one I particularly like if I’m trying to renovate cool-season back to cool-season, because it reseeds so well it can be a significant weed going into future years.”
Kallenbach pointed out many of the Tall Fescue pastures devastated by the drought of 2012 were planted in the 50s and 60s. “This isn’t the first drought,” he said, “so I expect a lot of those endophyte-infected Tall Fescue pastures, if we get some significant rainfall this autumn, to be able to come back. They may not come back as strong or as fast as they would have in years when the weather was not as extreme as it’s been this one but that said, those pastures will come back and survive.” Kallenbach said he’s had poor luck attempting to drill small grains into a stressed Tall Fescue pasture. “If I get enough rainfall to get that annual crop up and growing well, that’s usually enough rainfall to get the Tall Fescue that is there up and growing well, and I get significant competition between the two, such that my investment in this fall grain has not been very good. I’d rather see, in those cases, people make an investment in a modest amount of fertilizer to increase fall growth.”
But cool-season grasses like Orchardgrass, permanent Ryegrass, and Kentucky Bluegrass don’t handle drought as well; MU expects those stands to be significantly reduced, and Kallenbach said it can make more sense to interseed winter forages into them. “Also,” he added “if you have fields that have been in a warm-season grass – Bermudagrass being the one we think of most – those could, in cases, benefit from having a small grain in them as well. The warm-season grass will go dormant, and this cool-season species can provide some fall-to-winter pasture, if you handle them the right way.”
Jennings added Wheat or Rye are better suited to interseeding with Bermudagrass than is annual ryegrass. “The annual Ryegrass may grow all the way through May until June,” he said, “and there’s a period of time it could compete with the Bermudagrass. We need to regulate grazing pressure to keep that canopy open so the Bermudagrass can recover from the shading.”
If you want the stand to be available for fall grazing as well as spring, Jennings recommended first applying fertilizer when it emerges to get fall growth, and then wait to turn the cattle out on it until it reaches a height of at least 8 inches and starts tillering. “If the cattle are turned out to graze as soon as these plants are emerging and the field starts to green, you’re going to set the growth back until March,” he said, “and they won’t get any fall grazing at all.”
