Corn as a Grazing Crop: BMR and Popcorn Varieties for Fall Pasture

0:12 Another couple of cover crops that I think are really highly underutilized we could be using a lot more of them as we figure out more and more roles that they can play for us. Let's the corns of.

0:25 Of course we're used to growing corn as a field crop and or a silage crop but very rarely do we plant corn as a grazing crop and it really has a lot of ability to do some neat things as a grazing crop. Here's a couple of our course we have.

0:41 Our BMR 90, which is a brown midrib corn, which means that this corn is absolute candy to a grazing element. This is one of the, if not the highest energy summer forage that you can grow. Brown midrib, just like the brown midrib.

1:02 Sorghum's means it's extremely digestible and you can see the brownish coloration along that midrib there as opposed to a white midrib like we would see in regular field corn. It's not as big, not as vigorous this field corn, but.

1:23 The seed is so cheap that you can plant this extremely thick and make up for it, pick up a lot of tenants just through high seeding rates.

1:35 Another option is popcorn and you don't think about popcorn as a grazing plant.

1:41 Except for humans but this has some utility as well. It's a little longer maturity than the BMR corn. One of the great advantages of it is these little hard seeds will go through a drill really easy, sometimes the large.

2:02 Kernels of the other corn types get cracked as they go through a drill. We fail to get good stands with that popcorn. This is the same popcorn we've heard scenes that go through it's real really.

2:39 Annual plant right now my temperature coming in today it was 51 degrees Warren will grow today sorghum will not sorghum needs about sixty to sixty-five degrees temperature so this corn still adding dry matter today the

3:00 Sorghum's pretty well done and so if you're planning very late in the season you can gain a lot of additional dry matter production with corn / sorghum in a fall grazing mix. Another advantage that corn has compared to sorghum at

3:17 This time of year, we are probably within a week or two you're going to get a frost. When sorghum gets hit by a frost, it can develop prussic acid problems, so you don't want animals grazing out there during prussic acid risk. Neither of our—

3:35 Cores have any press ik acid you can graze them right through a frost. You can graze them the day after frost. You don't have a press of gas at risk, so I think in situations where people are planning things for fall pasture specifically for this time of year in October where we have a frost risk, you can get more dry matter, higher energy content, and more safety.

4:02 Everything is about more than the alert one at this during your August and early September plantings for grazing at this time of year.