Alternatives to Monoculture Graze Out Wheat

0:08 Well I'll just start by saying there are a lot of arguments you could make to anything I'm gonna say but we're not gonna talk about those today. So alternatives to monoculture gray's out wheat. This is how I see monoculture gray's out wheat. There's nothing wrong with it, it's a good hammer, it's a useful hammer we can build things with it, but I'd rather have a toolbox. It looks like this. Sometimes you need more than a hammer. Sometimes getting a bigger hammer and more hammer and using the hammer more often isn't the answer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver or a pair of pliers.

0:44 So why? Well obviously we've talked about soil health and so these are kind of the principles of soil health. We want to mimic nature. We want to armor the soil and so more opportunities I think with some of these alternatives that I'm going to show to have more armor on the soil. We want to minimize disturbance. I'm gonna say that depends on which one of these alternatives we choose. If we're planting more often that might actually be increasing disturbance. So increase plant diversity. Obviously with a lot of these alternatives we'll have a lot more opportunities for plant diversity. Warm seasons, broad leaves, legumes, fibrous roots versus tap roots, high carbon plants versus low carbon plants. Keep living roots in the ground for a longer time. I think each of these alternatives provide an opportunity to make that happen and then integrate livestock and that's gonna be more than just cattle in my opinion. It's great if we can add cattle to our systems and I know that's probably going to be the first go-to species in this area but just like we want plant diversity we want animal diversity as well.

2:08 So here's kind of how I would sum that up in some different words as I would say have proper soil fertility that's not almost

2:14 But that's important if you don't have your soil fertility properly balanced, properly applied. If your pH is way out of whack or your other nutrients are way out of whack, all those other five principles won't matter.

2:28 Don't manage traffic and surface disturbance. Grow vigorous, well-adapted plants. Rotate crops. Rotation is going to be a big part of this. If you're in wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat monoculture, graze out. I think we've got room that we can improve on that system. Like I said, there are lots of arguments you could make to that. We're not going to talk about that today.

2:50 Don't kill all the weeds. Wheat is not necessarily a bad thing all the time, just depends on your system, depends on what you have there to eat it. A lot of things that are weed to a cow are not a weed to a goat or a sheep or a chicken, turkey. And then add diverse cover crops and add diverse livestock.

3:16 Real world, what does that mean? Extend the grazing season and/or produce more grazing during the same season. Spread your risk. Break compaction. Scavenge and cycle nutrients. Reduce erosion. Hopefully add to your bottom line. This list could go on and on and on, hopefully for the positives too. An alternative to monoculture wheat. And this is another thing: whether we need to take advantage of these weather fluctuations.

3:46 It may be uncommon to get 8, 9 inches of rain in August, but if you planted August first and had something out there and took advantage of that, what would that have meant to fall forage production, potentially? Whether that's June, July, August, anytime, be ready for those good weather opportunities and also spread risk for those times of bad weather that will come.

4:13 So number one, number one way we can add diversity to an alternative for monoculture graze wheat is add more cool season grasses to the wheat. If it's grazed out anyway, does it really matter if we have a mix versus.

4:30 Weed only if it's grazed out. You may have to check with your insurance programs and whatnot, but we'll assume that those don't exist. We'll assume that we're strictly thinking agronomically and not thinking about what the other issues may influence that. But barley, you could add barley that will take high salt, high pH soils. Oats, fast production, a lot more fall production. Tends to be, rye is going to be earlier, earlier than trip. Trip will be earlier than wheat, so we can get some earlier fall production. Rye grass, much later than wheat, can reseed itself, tolerates wet soil, tolerates low pH. So all of these are options, could be options to add diversity and add to our production beyond just monoculture grazing out wheat.

5:25 Here's some data. This is from our farm, Red River Demonstration and Research Farm, last year. This is the forage production we've got Gallagher wheat, which is the number one wheat variety in Oklahoma right now, in F 402 oat, in F 201 triticale and elbow and rye. So how much better are those than what's one of the best wheats right now for dual purpose grazing grain? How much forage did we potentially give up by planting wheat, even one of our best wheats we can grow? What did we give up there?

6:06 Here's another one. This is in Plains, Georgia. You've got the 2017 forage production and the two year, the 1516 and then the 1617 production. This year, Elbon rye didn't do as well, but there's wheat again, a different wheat, but Gore wheat, a good grazing forage wheat. In F 201 triticale, again the 402 oat, and then Marshall rye grass. Rye grass, look at that production there. If your graze out only, maybe that's an option. Look at how much more forage there could have been. Here's some data from Comanche, Texas, again rye grass. This time dry grasses at the bottom, oat, trip wheats in the middle, rye, barleys at the top, College Station.

6:56 Rides bottom wheats near the bottom trip. Try grass barley again at the top. So how do we know which of those years and which of those locations on which your farms is going to be the best one? I can't tell you ahead of time, but if you plant a mix, you're going to have some of the best ones out there.

7:16 So think about that. It's going to increase plant diversity, help armor the soil because if we have all of those out there—wheat, oats, barley, rye, triticale, rye grass—you'll have more residue because some of those will mature earlier. The cattle will quit grazing them and so you'll have those stems left, that residue left after the rye has gotten mature and they've gone over to the trip, and then after it gets mature and they go to the wheat and it gets mature. So opportunities there.

7:51 Another opportunity: add broadleaves to the wheat. If you're going wheat for grain, we may look at something different than if we're going wheat for grazes. Out for grain, you might want spring peas that would potentially freeze out here and so you could get that nitrogen production, that diversity in the fall, freeze out in the winter, steal harvest grain. Crimson clover, I think, would not freeze out but stays low growing enough that you could harvest your wheat over the top of it and not get it in the header. Lentils may be an option. I think they would freeze out here, especially if we used spring lentils, and so again, that would be similar to the spring peas. Spring lentils, brassicas, radish—most of the radishes, the tillage radishes will freeze depending on where you are. If you're in South Texas, maybe not, but if you're in this area, this Wichita Falls area, radish may very well freeze out. Purple top turnips tend to for us disappear if we have livestock grazing. They tend to eat them out and eat those bulbs, and so by the spring we tend to not have any.

9:08 Turnips left in our winter pasture so you may want to look at planting a mix. It looks something like this—that's fast and it might come up and look something like this. So you can see some brassicas in there and I see some peas in there. That's a mix of small grains in that field.

9:30 I have a producer that operates a system like that where he plants a mix in the winter and he says I don't have to have crop insurance, I don't have to pay the custom harvester, I don't have to worry about hail. He harvests every bit of that forage through livestock—both cattle and sheep. He harvests all that. He's been doing this for over 30 years, and that brown top layer of soil that most people have maybe an inch or two of, he has 30-plus inches of. I don't have a picture of it because when I saw a soil pit on his place, I was so in awe of the depth of the 30 inches of dark dark soil that it just completely escaped me to get a picture of it. You just don't see that.

10:22 All of the neighbors around him have that red dirt that you all see in Oklahoma. So it is doable. It takes time, but we've seen that we can build about an inch of that dark layer with these diverse crop mixes and plant diversity. We can build about an inch of that dark layer per year. We can move that inch down about an inch a year, moving it down into the soil. So benefits the soil nutrients—those legumes in there and some of those different rooting structures and scavengers have different rooting depths. Benefits soil fertility, benefits structure by again the different roots, the different exudates, the different microbes that they attract, creates that good aggregated soil structure. And that's your increased plant diversity there.

11:14 So number three option: potentially add warm season plants to wheat. If you are at the field day yesterday at Apache, you saw the production that we could.

11:26 Potentially get by planting some warm season things like corn or sunflowers or millet in the fall at wheat planting time. Those are all gonna freeze out, but if you can get a thousand pounds of forage off of that extra, maybe it's worth it. Here's what some of that could look like in the fall. This is a mix we planted on our headquarters farm in Ardmore, and in addition to seeing some corn and sorghum and sunflowers, there's some radish in there. We've got our small grains, but I really like that monarch butterfly in there on that radish that's flowering. So that gets a lot of people real warm fuzzy feeling, and for some people that's better than any increase in production they can get is seeing those monarch butterflies, seeing the pollinators. Can still harvest grain. Again, those are warm season plants, they're gonna freeze out, so you could still harvest grain off of that and have your increased plant diversity option.

12:33 For over seed dormant sod, we have a lot of Bermuda grass and other perennial warm season grasses that are dormant in November, depending on when frost is, December, January, February, March, they're starting to green up. So we can use herbicide or frost or fire or other management tools to set that Bermuda grass back at some point in time in the fall and over seed those with small grains or with legumes like vetch and winter peas and crimson clover, winter lentils, maybe brassicas. They're hit and miss for me in sod. They do a lot better in cropland than they do in sod. Maybe some perennial broad leaves. If we're not using herbicides on our warm season grass pastures, why not put a perennial broadleaf in there, some plantain or some chicory, that's fast.

13:37 Here's some that we used fire as our tool. This field is a field of Bermuda grass intermixed with Alamo switchgrass, and if any of you have any Alamo switchgrass, you know how big and

13:51 Aggressive it is and so we took a match to it and burn it off and plant it immediately following the very next morning we did that in the fall I don't remember the date but it was last fall and burned it and burned it one afternoon planted at the very next morning and this is the stand of small grain mix that we got in that and all we did was take off the above ground residue there was still an inch or two of litter on the soil surface that we had to plant through so we managed our fire so that we didn't take it down to bare mineral soil we just wanted to get it where we could plant through it because what was there would have been very very difficult to plant through.

14:43 Here's some over seeded sod with small grains and brassicas and this has had no fertilizer on it in fact so it's scavenging up leftover nutrients that were there from the warm season production on that Bermuda grass here's an interesting comparison of some of these legumes that we can put into Bermuda grass sod this was taken up the road near Illinois Bend Texas and number 33 if you can read the number the one that's not flowered and it's number 33 is hairy vetch number 34 the one that is flowered is wooly pawed veg wooly pawed flowers about six weeks earlier so think of what that could mean as far as growth and potential to fix nitrogen and yet not compete with your Bermuda grass it's already done its thing and flowered by the time the Bermuda takes off.

15:43 Here's some mix this is in southwest Arkansas near de clean he plants a diverse mix into his Bermuda grass pastures in the fall and this is what it looks like in the spring and he ends up with way not enough cattle in the spring and they graze what they want and trample the rest he's using high intensity stock grazing and they're trampling that back and it's just getting better and better and better for.

18:23 If they're down in the canopy of that mix in the shade it's a little cooler, little shadier, and we've had some good success with brassicas, certain ones especially collards have done well for us. Here's some interesting data. I've been planting these for several years and we plant them in a monoculture strip, but then we also mix everything. So if I have 40 plots, 40 different entries, I'll take one extra seed packet of each one of those and mix them all together and plant a mix. Then I rate these with a numeric rating system: zero, there's none there; one is poor; two is fair; three is good; and four is excellent.

19:09 Keith pointed this out one time. He was looking and he said, 'Look at how much better the mix looks than any of the other plots.' And this is some of the power of diversity that we think we see. At least that's what I'll attribute it to. And so the mean of all the other plots is never as good as the rating for the mix plots.

19:31 So I take all of my rating numbers for every location, for every rating date during the summer, and I can do the average on all of those. I can do the average of all of the mixed plots and I'm always about one rating number better in my mixtures. So that's some power of diversity there. They may look something like this and again, increased opportunities to graze.

19:58 Some people would say, 'Well, I would never plant sunflowers. I spent my childhood hoeing sunflowers.' Cows love flowers and they will select, and that was the first thing they selected in this field were the sunflower heads. They would eat them off and then they would go and select some collards and they would eat them down to the ground. Then they would come back and graze around on some of the sorghum Sudan that was in there in the millets. So this gives you a nice opportunity to potentially rest your summer grass and think what the value of that is to your.

20:33 Soil health of having big healthy well rested summer grass at the end of summer versus short hot stressed summer grass at the end of summer. It helps armor the soil by having that cover crop out there, increases plant diversity, increased living roots in the soil instead of that ground being fallow between wheat crops, increases livestock grazing opportunities, plant companions with summer crops. Potentially this is some of the work that Jimmy's been doing. Milo he's done it with Milo. We've used mung beans. I think you could get by with a low group soybean, a group 2, group 3 soybean. Squash is a potential that we could use with Milo, corn. I think several of these could potentially work in a corn canopy underneath the corn. Sunflowers, oats. I think we can get by with oats again. They're down in the shade and I think we can grow some oats under sunflowers. Mung beans again, a low group number, a group two or group three soybean. Brassicas, squash. So that aftermath can provide a freebie on forage. It gives you more plant diversity, helps armor that soil underneath of that summer crop, increases opportunities for livestock grazing again. And you saw the video of what that can look like.

22:04 How about adding diversity to some weak summer grass? We had the opportunity to do that after the drought years of 10, 11, 12, 13 in some areas. And so there's very few species that I feel like work well for this, but there are some that at least work mediocre. The sorghum, sorghum Sudan, Sudan species, sunhemp is a legume, tends to hold its own against perennial warm season grass during the summer. Okra, a broadleaf that again tends to hold its own against perennial warm season grass in the summer. Maybe legumes. Maybe we can add some alfalfa or Illinois bundle flower, some of these perennial legumes. Maybe we can add some forbs again.

22:52 Chicory, plantain, pigweed for grazing, pick weeds, excellent forage, giant ragweed, phenomenal forage, sunflowers. So you know, think outside the box, some opportunities here.

23:06 This is some that was some drought—it out Bermuda grass. We could not find any Bermuda grass in this after the drought, and so we planted one of these mixes: sunhemp and pearl millet and cow peas. This mix did very, very well.

23:22 This is some other Bermuda grass that we did, and I see some okra and some millet, sand, some sorghum. There's collards in there. And what we have found—what tends to happen is the perennial warm season grass that we thought was gone recovers, and in areas where I haven't done this, we end up with a weed patch and not much grass.

23:52 But the places where we've done this and gone in and over-seeded these on those weak stands that we've maybe lost due to drought or something else, it recovers really well. So much so that one guy kind of wanted to add this to his system, and then he ran out of acres to add it to any system because his grass got so much better, faster than he really expected.

24:17 So it adds diversity, tends to improve the grass, helps armor that soil that otherwise would be bare because those weak, thin stands of grass, increases plant diversity.

24:27 How about planting at odd times? Here's some that was planted August 20th. Again, you wouldn't really think of that as a time to plant a warm season annual forage crop, but August 24th went out about 60 days later. We did some clippings, dried it down. We had 6,000 to 100 pounds of dry matter forage. How many of you would like to have 6,000 to 100 pounds of winter pasture by August or October 26th? That's the name of the game, right? Fall, early fall forage.

25:04 October 26 is pretty early. A lot of times we use November 15th as our hopeful turnout date for winter pasture. 6,000 to 100 pounds—there's a lot of years we

25:14 Don't grow 60, 100 pounds and dry minor forage on the winter pasture all winter long. So think about some of these odd windows that you might can take advantage of. Again, be ready to take advantage of weather opportunities. They will come, there will be opportunities.

25:32 This is another picture that wasn't that field, but this is another field that was planted in August. And I said, 'Oh boy, this was a Jimmy's.' I said, 'I don't know, it's going to have to rain.' And these are some cattle that they look like they're really short cattle. They're not—there was just a lot of forage up there. I had to get up on top of the feed truck to get a picture of them down in there. And so we can fill those forage gaps potentially with some of these odd planting times. Again, armored in that soil, increasing plant diversity, having living roots in the ground.

26:12 Here's another one: how about plant cool season perennials? And I put perennials in quotes because some of these aren't necessarily perennials, but they reseed themselves well, like rye grass and some of the clovers can reseed themselves. But what about fescue or wheat grass or winter grass or blue grass instead of wheat? Maybe that's an option that we should look at.

26:36 Could potentially meet all five of the soil health principles. We'll reduce our disturbance because we've got a perennial out there. Have our soil armored all the time because we've got a perennial out there. If we plan a diverse mix of perennials, we'll have our plant diversity. We can have our livestock grazing for livestock diversity. So I like to say it's like finding the sweet spot: is it a cover crop? Maybe. Is it a double crop? Maybe. Is it a multi-species grazing crop? Yes. Yes, I'm going to plan on making money on that somehow by grazing it with something. And if I can't, then it's a cover crop and I've had my cover. But if I can, I'm going to capitalize on that. There's always a way. There's always a way.

27:30 And look at what made a way in this situation: this is solid rock diversity. That's not just a single plant species there. There's a diversity there that's making a way where people would say, 'Oh, that'll never work. You can't grow plants in solid rock.' There's always a way.