Annual Ryegrass for Grazing and Spring Forage

0:12 All right, deal. Let's talk about annual ryegrass. Little bitty annual ryegrass is widely used in the late summer. It's a great cover crop, extremely commonly used as a spring plant or a couple talked about here, mainly because it is an annual crop and so it's going to head out relatively quickly. As you can see here, we've got several different types of annual ryegrass that we'll talk about here.

0:39 TMT bow is a tetraploid type we're right where I've setting here is the winter Hawk which is a diploid type and then over where Dale is standing we have Italian ryegrass which is a little bit unique and we'll talk about those features.

0:55 The tetraploid typically are a little longer season. It's going to grow a little longer before it makes these seed heads and we just would expect a little more growth. The diploid is tend to be more.

1:05 Winter hardy so if we're planting this in September and we wanted it over the winter that the diploid would be the best choice for overwintering the tetraploid would be the best choice we're probably just getting this much growth in the fall and although we have seen the tetraploid overwinter here is probably just not as often or as consistent. Annual ryegrass can be difficult to establish especially if you're not paying.

1:31 Attention to growth stage and weather conditions and that's probably the reason it's not often spring planted because when it gets to this reproductive stage like this it can be more difficult to terminate and so you typically wouldn't use this a lot for spring plantings it would be more of the summer and late summer if you want really good in-field. We'll talk a little bit about why rye grass is such a good grazing product if you want a.

1:56 Spring plant rye grass we really would encourage you to look at the Italian ryegrass because as you can see it's growing vegetatively it hasn't shot a seed head and it's not going to shoot a seed head yet because it's a biennial it needs to go through a dormant wise go dormant and then it would look like this next story.

2:15 If you're looking at annual ryegrass spring planted forage we would really encourage you to look at the Italian.

2:21 That they'll white, white dry grass. Such a powerful forage grass. Well, and we have of course that the name causes a lot of confusion here. We have cereal rye and here we have annual rye grass, and as you can tell, they are two completely different plants. And this is a grassy type, this is their—this is a cigarette out of cereal. This is cereal, this large seed, and not only are they different in appearance and use and plant family, also different chemically. Almost all your—

3:10 Cool season grasses as soon as the glucose is produced during photosynthesis it's converted into fructose ants which gives it a degree of cold tolerance and some tolerance to different environmental conditions with the annual ryegrass.

3:31 The glucose remains as glucose so as far as the room is concerned this is almost like grain sugar grass in fact it's so high that sometimes forced grazing rye grass just.

4:44 Chemically hardened clay layer in the soil that prevents root growth. They found that every year you grow annual rye grass as a cover crop it will dissolve about one inch of that hardpan layer and that's really a huge, huge development. And it's a very deep-rooted crop. You know, there's been studies shown, especially fall planted annual ryegrass 18 inches high, it may have roots down four feet deep already, so it's very, very deep-rooted.

5:18 Aggressively entry system and it holler eights clay soil and wet soils better than any of the cereal. Right, yeah, so if you've got, you know, like some of these prevented plant guys, they've got some really wet air, maybe this Italian ryegrass because it would grow another place where the Italian ryegrass is used a lot is coming in the spring. Get out the swather, take the first kind of alfalfa and say, oh, I've had a lot of ground down this is.

6:00 Something that you can establish rye grasses do establish pretty easily. Broadcast so you don't necessarily have to drag a drill out. You can broadcast the seed, it'll come up with a rain, and it's very very good quality. People in the livestock industry who understand that, never rye grass, understand what kind of quality they're dealing with. One of the real benefits of including annual ryegrass in a grazing mix is just how rapid rye grasses can recover for.

6:39 Grazing. I've turned cattle on to a blend of rye and rye grass in the first to April and it looked like it was a hundred percent rye. Cattle off in May it looks like it was a hundred percent rye grass because the growing points are very low on rye grass and you can tell pounces back incredibly well for grazing. This was two weeks ago, this is two weeks.

7:13 Arena. We razed again very short recovery period from rye grasses, very excellent forage quality, just a really good place.