It’s called the “summer slump,” as the spring moisture dissipates and the grasses and legumes that rely upon it start to decline. To prepare for summer, make sure your farm stocks enough warm-season grasses to get your cattle to fall.
Tim Schnakenberg, University of Missouri Extension recommended producers have somewhere between 10 to 30 percent of their farm in a warm season grass, whether they cut hay on, graze it or both. Examples of warm season grasses are Bermudagrass, crabgrass, or native grasses like big bluestem, indiangrass, switchgrass and eastern gamagrass.
“Another option would be an introduced species,” Schnakenberg told Ozarks Farm & Neighbor. “Caucasian bluestem – which is not the same as big bluestem – is an excellent summer forage, but the problem we’re having with that is seed supply is very, very limited, so it’s very difficult these days to find the seed for it.”
Schnakenberg said forage tests and stocker performance trials show warm season grasses have excellent nutritional potential. As with other grasses, if it goes to a head and becomes too mature the quality drops pretty quickly. However, under a grazing system where it’s kept in a vegetative state throughout the summer months, he said that’s usually not a problem.
“We usually sow a warm season grass stand from mid-May to mid-June, so you’re looking at getting some first growth off it at about 90 days,” Schnakenberg said. “It’s going to be touch-and-go getting a new stand utilized its first year, but you might be able to flash graze it from August to around the first of September.”
Once the stand is established, it will be good to go in following years beginning in June.
“The most common forage to use during the summer is Bermudagrass,” Dr. John Jennings, University of Arkansas Extension state forage specialist, told OFN.
“In southern Arkansas, a lot of bahiagrass is used. As you move further north Bermudagrass is less and less of an option, so you have to look at other options like crabgrass, or summer annuals like pearl millet or sorghum-sudan.” Crabgrass reseeds itself but the annuals don’t, and Jennings also cautioned that if the choice is for native warm season grasses, they’ll require additional management.
The annuals will need to be fertilized to step up their productivity. Jennings said the fertilization rates are not excessive and if the objective is only grazing, 50 to 60 units of nitrogen will often be enough. If the producer plans to cut hay, a second fertilizer application may be helpful. While crabgrass can be compatible sown into fescue if the fescue is grazed off early in the spring, the annuals don’t compete well with fescue and it’s best to suppress the fescue with herbicide or disk it up.
Annuals can also stand in if a producer intends to renovate a field. They can destroy a stand of toxic Kentucky 31 fescue, use the annual as a rotation crop, and then replant the paddock to a novel endophyte-free fescue or to Bermudagrass.
“They can use that summer forage as their rotation crop, and do a different pasture each year until they get through that rotation,” Jennings said. “Hopefully, by then they’ll have a perennial summer grass like Bermuda or native grass; then, they’ll have their fescue for the spring and the fall.”
He said it is important to plan early.
“When they start killing the old fescue they’re going to turn loose a tremendous amount of weeds and weedy grasses that have been suppressed by that fescue. They may need to spend at least a year of time during the rotation or renovation process, or they’ll be disappointed with all the weed encroachment they’re going to have.”
