Establishing and Diversifying Perennial Pastures

0:00 Welcome all of you guys that are with us. I'm sure we'll have quite a few people join us this evening. We have a couple hundred signed up so that's exciting. Thanks for inviting you guys as friends and sharing the word tonight.

0:15 We're gonna be talking about perennial pastures. If you guys have tuned in to the first two webinars, this one's going to be a little bit different. We have decided there are so many questions about establishing pasture that we're going to let Dale kind of take the reins on this and I've kind of asked him a set of questions that I receive a lot. So we tried to tailor this presentation to answer a lot of those questions but we will be taking your questions in the Q&A. You can type those questions out there and then we're gonna let Dale kind of go for about 45 minutes. If you have questions after that, at around 6:10 6:15, we're gonna open it up to the audience. If you want to ask your question, you can raise your hand and then I'll unmute you. Otherwise you can just type it right in the Q&A box any time during his presentation.

1:08 So we are gonna get started a little bit faster here this week just because we've got a lot to cover. I'm gonna introduce Dale. He has his degree from Kansas State, his bachelor's degree and his master's in agronomy with an emphasis in rangeland management and has been with Green Cover Seed as our agronomist and sales rep for the last five years. So with that, Dale, do you want to go ahead and kind of get started on why people should be establishing pasture?

1:40 Well, the first thing is this is the question I get most often. It's like, what should I plant for pasture? That's the question I honestly can't answer until I get some more information. Some of that information I ask for, for example, what's your time frame? Are you looking for pasture for this year only, in which case we'd go with an annual pasture? Or are you looking for a pasture for five years? Are you looking for a pasture that's gonna last forever? As what my answer is going to be is going to be completely different depending on your answer to do one annual, a five-year, or a 50-year pasture. And then people would say, well, why would I plant a pasture for five years? Why would I plant a pasture for four years? That's actually getting to be a very popular practice because the fastest way to rebuild the soil is by planting a pasture and grazing it.

2:50 If you look at these two corn plants, these two corn plants are the same hybrid planted the same day within minutes of each other through adjacent planter passes, both irrigated, both fully fertilized, soil tests say why is one twice the size of the other one? On the right was planted into a newly terminated pasture sod. The other one was planted on soybean stubble. They'd been farmed for a hundred years. If you think that purpose of soil is solely to provide water and nutrients, both of these plants had adequate water and adequate fertilizer. Why is the one on the right twice the size? Obviously there's things that soil is providing if it's good healthy soil like you get from pasture sod. The one on the right supplying things that the one on the left is not. And you know what, maybe it's just something as simple as organic matter.

3:49 You can see from this study that the graph at the right, look at how the organic matter in the pasture soil is higher than under conservation tillage and even higher than it was under conventional tillage. And how does that affect yields? Well, this is a study that measured peanuts down in Florida and you can see that varied continuous peanut without any inputs and very poor yields. Now you can grow continuous peanut if you are putting on a whole bunch of chemical inputs, you know, the things fungicides and nematocides and herbicides. But look at where you, the very bottom of that, the peanut cotton Bahia grass pasture rotation where two years of pasture were inserted in this crop rotation, look at how high the yields of the peanut were without fungicide, without nematocide and look.

4:55 The bottom there, that's the real kicker. The profit was four to twenty-seven times higher on the rotation that included the pasture. Higher yields, fewer inputs—a good recipe for profit. And it took only two hundred and fifty acres to raise a family with that rotation compared to ten times as much area. What is that? When you get ten times more farmers out on the land, more farm families out on the land, what does that do for your rural economy and your rural sociology? Maybe we wouldn't have small towns dying.

5:35 I think this, inserting a short-term pasture into the rotation, has tremendous potential not only for rebuilding soil but for rebuilding communities. Another question I ask is: are you starting from an existing pasture that's just not satisfactory and you need some additional species, or are you starting from bare cropland that you're planning everything?

6:06 Another thing is: when do you need grazing? Do you need more winter grazing? Do you need it in early spring? Do you need it in the heat of summer? Here in Missouri, if you've got old cool-season grasses, maybe you need summer grazing. Need more grazing in the fall. And there really is no one species that provides good year-round grazing, especially grasses.

6:35 You can see this picture is a clump of green fescue surrounded by Bermuda grass. This was taken April 9th in Pratt, Kansas. You can see the fescue is a cool-season grass and is growing fine, it's ready to graze. The Bermuda grass has an even green depth. Now, if you were to take this same picture in the same location in the middle of July, the fescue would be brown and the Bermuda grass would be green. Cool-season grasses and warm-season grasses are fundamentally different. They do not grow the same. They photosynthesize differently. They have different requirements. So it's difficult to have one or the other that's going to provide year-round grazing. You need a sequence or a mixture of the two. And I prefer sequence.

7:30 We'll get into that a little later why I prefer a sequence over mixing warm and cool season grasses. Another thing is, if you are planning—and I will focus primarily on cool-season grasses in this conversation because most of the orders we get are for planting cool-season grasses. They're cheaper to plant and they're faster to establish. But I will save warm-season grass establishment for another webinar.

8:03 There are two basic windows for establishing cool-season pastures: spring and fall. In the Kansas-Nebraska general area, we're usually looking at the first couple weeks of April as being kind of the optimum time, with some leeway in there. The second window is in late summer, kind of centered around September 1st. If you plant in the spring, you tend to have more moisture, but you also have more weed pressure. If you plant in late summer, you have very little weed pressure at that time, but you tend to have a bigger chance of hot, dry weather affecting your seedlings.

8:45 So whether you prefer to plant in spring or fall depends a lot on your individual situation: your weed pressure, your rainfall, if you have irrigation, what is your crop rotation, do you have an open window at either of those times, and of course what's your climate. Obviously, something that I'm going to recommend for Eastern Wyoming is not going to be the same as what it is for Southwest Texas or Louisiana or the Corn Belt. They're all going to be completely different. So we need to know what your climate is and what's your grazing management. Are you rotationally grazing or are you continuous grazing? If you're rotational grazing, that opens up the possibility of a lot more productive species. A lot of good grazing species just do not tolerate continuous grazing. And really we need to be a little sharper on grazing management if we really want to optimize some of these species at their best value.

9:54 And then, what livestock species are using? There are some plants that are perfectly acceptable to cattle that are toxic to—

10:04 Horses, there are some things that sheep and goats will eat that cattle do not. It's important to know what species are going to be out there, and then also quite importantly, what is your soil? Is it sandy? Is it well-drained? What's the pH? The soil pH is really an important aspect. We don't really need to know nutrient levels in most cases, but we need to know the pH and we need to know whether it's sandy or clay and whether it's well-drained, doesn't hold water, is it excessively drained, or does it stay longer?

10:49 Some of the timing depends on whether you are drilling or broadcasting seed, especially an interseeding. If you broadcast seed, that works best in the middle of winter because freezing and thawing incorporates that seed and gets you seed-soil contact. If you're doing the April or August timeframe, you're better off drilling because you're really not in the time of freezing and thawing. Some species broadcast well, others don't. Most of the clovers, chicory, plantain broadcast very well. Alfalfa, not so much. Most grasses don't broadcast well, an exception would be the ryegrass, and I know people that broadcast annual ryegrass into their pastures every winter and have good success with that.

11:47 Another consideration is how complex do you want the mixture? The idea, what I was taught in college, is that the reason you plant a single species is because it's easier to manage. I would disagree. I think it's simpler to manage if you're willing to write checks for fertilizer and herbicide. Nature does not like monocultures. If you fail to plant diversity, nature will provide diversity for you in the form of weeds. Because there are unfilled ecological niches out there, there's resources to exploit that you're not exploiting. I much prefer the situation on the left versus the situation on the right. I want every ecological niche filled with something that I put there, and I don't want weeds. If you put a nice complex mixture out there with all the different ecological niches filled with grasses, legumes, and forbs, you really don't have weed problems and you don't usually need to fertilize. So to me, a complex mixture is easier to manage than a monoculture. You don't have to spray, you don't have to fertilize, you can eliminate those inputs.

13:19 As far as what to plant, maybe we start with what not to plant. There's no such thing as a bad grass, but there are grasses that are not as well suited as others. This is a picture of Kentucky 31 fescue, and that Kentucky 31 fescue is the most widely planted grass in the United States still with 1931 genetics, the number one planted grass in the US, and it is probably the single worst choice for pasture that I can imagine if you're actually going to plant a pasture grass. The reason fescue is one of the best grasses there is: it will do something that virtually no other grass will do, and that is keep its quality well into the winter. Fescue can be 16 percent protein and 65 percent digestibility in the dead of winter. No other grass does that. Fescue has some really unique qualities that no other grass shares, which makes it very popular. The problem with fescue is not the fescue itself. This is a scanning electron microscope photo of the end of the fight fungus within a fescue plant. It's this fungus that lives within the leaf that causes the plant to produce toxins. Now, the same toxins and the same process actually make the plant heat and drought tolerant, which is what made Kentucky 31 fescue so popular. It was tough, but it also made it mildly toxic to the animals. You can see from this the difference in animal performance between the toxic endophyte and these either endophyte-free or novel endophyte fescues. You can see that the animal performance was two or three times better where you did not have the endophyte. Now the problem is when they took the endophyte-free fescue.

15:39 Didn't live, didn't survive it, didn't have the toughness that the endophyte fescue had. So we went through the endophyte-free phase and found out that grass died. So they went back to the drawing board and now we have novel endophyte or friendly endophyte fescue. And it, it's those are really, really good products. I mean the Estancia fescue that we carry now, phenomenal product. It combines the toughness. In fact, I think it's a little tougher than K31, but you get the good animal performance of endophyte-free. It's really the best of both worlds.

16:21 If you're looking for a pasture for dedicated winter use, I would start with a novel endophyte fescue. It really is the best grass for that purpose. Now if you have endophyte fescue, you say, 'Oh gosh, I've got a problem. What do I do about it?' Well, a couple of options. You can either kill it and replace it or you can deal with it and we'll talk about each of those.

16:45 How do you kill it and replace it? Not, I have a lot of people say, 'Well, I killed my fescue and replant it and it just became toxic fescue all over again. It's a waste of money.' And I say, 'Well, how did you do it?' They say, 'Well, I sprayed it and planted new fescue.' And I said, 'Wrong. That's not the way you do it.' Because what you did, he might have planted. You killed the fescue that was there. He planted new fescue. And just a few months earlier, the toxic fescue that you had put four hundred pounds of seed maker out there and you planted 20 of the new stuff. Did you really expect success?

17:29 If you want to replace toxic fescue, you kill that stand and then you plant annual pastures for two years. People say, 'Well, I can't afford to be without pasture for two years.' You're not without pasture because what you do after you kill that pasture, and there's magic. I'm going to back up a little bit here. There's magic in the two years. Fescue has a maximum longevity of two years. If you are fescue-free, if you are free of fescue plants, you kill all the new seedlings for two years, the seed will lose its viability and the endophyte lasts really about a year at maximum. So not only will virtually no fescue come up, if by chance one does come up it will be endophyte-free.

18:24 In the meantime, what you do when you spray that fescue out, you go in and immediately plant annual pastures. You graze those annual pastures. Now this is in the middle of summer during the heat of summer. You have a summer annual mix here. You look at a fescue pasture in the middle of summer and it's brown and crispy. It's a cool season grass. It just does not grow well in the summer. People say, 'I can't be without pasture.' Well, don't kill your entire pastures. Start with ten, fifteen, twenty percent of your pasture. Spray it out. Plant this. And your productivity will go up. This conversion process does not have to be a financial sacrifice. It works just great and it increases your production year one. It's not just a long-term project. Your productivity goes up in year one. And it is amazing how much that can do for your profitability just right away.

19:29 The other thing you can do is dilute it with anything you put in there that's not endophyte fescue. It's going to help you out whether that's crabgrass or whatever you put out there, clover, anything you put out there that's not infected fescue. And you can either put in different forages or you can haul in and feed. If you were feeding hay, try not to feed infected fescue hay on infected fescue pasture or feed them grain, anything to dilute that down. And then there are ways to neutralize it. Now there's, you know, I've got a picture of kelp in here. There's some animal genetics like Senepol. It's pretty famous for not being affected by fescue toxicity. Oatmeal or Tasco or pepper extract, cinnamon, those are all feed additives that you can put in mineral that reduce fescue. But my favorite way is by putting in plants that contain tannins. Tannins, the toxic factor in fescue is an alkaloid and alkaloids are complexed in.

20:36 The rumen by tannin source opponents. Saponin czar found in clover and alfalfa but the most effective neutralization comes from tannins and some high tannin plants would be things like sand fine, which is the pretty plant that's pictured there. Korean lespedeza is high in tannins, bird's foot trefoil, chicory and Burnett are all high tannin plants or have tannin-like substances. So those are really your best fescue neutralizing plants and when we go to intercede and to toxic fescue, I think those plants should be fairly significant contributors to that mix.

21:24 Other grass that I'm not a big huge fan of, at least in this area, is Timothy. Seems like anybody with horses wants Timothy. It's really a very poor grazing grass for this area. It lacks heat tolerance, lacks drought tolerance and doesn't tolerate grazing very well. It does well in the Northeast United States, does not do well out here in the plains states at all. I believe it completely, leave it out.

21:56 Kentucky bluegrass is another one. Just lacks the heat and drought tolerance that we really need. It does tolerate horse grazing very well among cool season grasses. So if it's a horse pasture, well they tends to get grazed closely. I might throw a pound of bluegrass in the mix. It does spread and thicken up over time and fill in, which is valuable. It's going to be the last grass standing under severe grazing.

22:25 Now this is a picture, this is a smooth brown pasture during a drought and that big clump of big tall vigorous grass you see right in the middle there, that is reed canarygrass. And as you can tell, reed canarygrass is extremely productive. It's got a massive root system. I've seen studies where it had four to five times the roots per acre that broom grass had. It's just incredible root system that's deep, expansive. It forms a dense sod that'll hold a vehicle up even in standing water. And reed canarygrass its claim to fame is that it can grow in completely saturated soils. It's a very, very flood tolerant and tolerant of poor drainage, very productive. There's only one thing wrong with it is, like endophyte fescue, it contains alkaloids.

23:26 Now most wild canary grass is very high in alkaloids, makes a bitter and unpalatable. The reed canarygrass we sell is a low alkaloid variety, makes it much more palatable. And just like the fescue endophyte that produces an alkaloid, the same plants that help neutralize fescue toxicity will neutralize the reed canarygrass unpalatable issue. So I never plant canary grass by itself. Always put in plants with saponin, sand and even more importantly, plants with tannins.

24:07 Now one interesting thing about reed canarygrass is that when you bale it up, the alkaloids break down over time. So the longer you store that hay, the more palatable it becomes.

24:19 Smooth brom is basically the state flower of eastern Nebraska. It is the predominant pasture grass in northeast Kansas and eastern Nebraska and that's both good and bad. It's very palatable grass but it really only produces for a couple months in the spring and then just disappears the rest of the year. Its drought tolerant but it's not drought productive. It survives through droughts by simply just hunkering down and doing nothing. It does spread aggressively, which can be a benefit for erosion control, it's also a problem because kind of chokes out other species. I tend to not use a lot of smooth brom. I usually in a cool season grass mix I'll put in one pound an acre because I want something that's going to spread and fill in when other components disappear but I think there's better species than broom base for a cool season pasture mix around.

25:35 And one of those is a meadow broom. I love meadow brom. I mean it looks almost exactly like smooth broom, at least from a distance, but it's a bunch grass rather than a sod former. In meadow brom, I retains its palatability much better. It grows better throughout the year. It'll regrow better. It grows better in the fall, keeps its.

25:58 Quality into the winter. Better, and in almost all respects it's a better pasture grass than smooth broom. One thing it doesn't do is spread aggressively like smooth broom does. It tends to stay put. That's good sometimes, that's bad sometimes. That's why I put the one pound of smooth broom in a mix with meadow broom to fill in the gaps where you don't get a good stand.

26:26 Similar to meadow broom is orchard grass. Between the two, orchard grass needs a little more moisture, and it loses its quality when it gets mature a little more so. I really prefer meadow broom to orchard grass. Orchard grass is a very common component in pastures as you go east. If you're planting orchard grass, I strongly recommend that you stick to newer varieties. The older varieties like Potomac that came out in the 50s and 60s have no rust resistance and no drought resistance. The new varieties of grass varieties are far more successful way farther west and produce better and survive longer.

27:15 Of course there's a reason for Persist having that name. It just lasts longer. Another species that I really like and I've come to really enjoy is Intermediate Wheatgrass. Very drought tolerant. This is one of the few grasses that combine extreme drought tolerance with really good palatability and really good productivity.

27:43 As far as grasses, we know that grasses respond well to nitrogen. We have from left to right these four plots: 0, 100, 200, and 300 pounds of nitrogen. You say, well, obviously the 2 and 300 are the best here. They're dark green, they're productive. So let's just put 200 pounds of nitrogen out there. And obviously it works. The more nitrogen you put out there, the more grass you get. The problem is you got to pay for that nitrogen. And if you look at this—I apologize for the poor picture quality, I took this many years ago—this is where an alfalfa plot butted up against an orchard grass plot. You can see that little strip where they overlap. Look at how much bigger and more vigorous the orchard grass is rather than fertilizer we can apply. We can supply nitrogen with legumes.

28:40 The most productive legume, the most commonly planted legume, but seldom pastured legume is alfalfa. And alfalfa is really by far the most productive legume. So why don't we pasture it? It's because we're scared. We're going to go out in the morning, we're going to see this, we're going to seep out and see all of our cattle dead from bloat. Bloat is a very serious risk with alfalfa. So why do we do it? Why would we pasture alfalfa when you know I tell people that without its best pasture plant there is except for two problems? It kills your animals and your animals kill it. So why do we bother? Well, if you look at it, the second most productive legume we're going to talk about is red clover. And you look at this—alfalfa just blows red clover away in terms of productivity. The productivity of alfalfa is just simply unmatched.

29:37 So how do you deal with the bloat? There's several ways, and I have an entire paper on controlling bloat in pasturing alfalfa. You're interested, email me. I'll send you the entire paper. But it revolves around dilution. Get enough grass so the bulk of the diet is grass rather than alfalfa. And also the bloat-causing protein in alfalfa—it seems like all problems are solved by tannin-containing plants, and bloat is another one of those problems solved by incorporating tannin-containing plants into the stand: your lespedeza, your trefoil, your sainfoin, and we'll talk about some of those plants now.

30:22 One thing: not all varieties of alfalfa are the same. As your fall dormancy score gets higher, your productivity goes up. And you can see the difference between the fall dormant 3 and a fall dormant 5 here. In the fall we have a fall dormant 7 variety that I'm really excited about. It's also recessed crown. Recessed crown puts the crown below ground where it's not as susceptible to traffic. You don't get the damage to the plant from hoof traffic like other alfalfas.

31:02 I'm very excited about its potential. The problem with long fall dormancy scores is usually a trade-off and winter hardiness. Usually in Kansas, Nebraska, we'd be looking at a fall dormant score, and if you get higher than that you have winter kill. Well, the nice thing about the Aussie alfalfa is that because of that recessed crown I think you get better winter protection of that crown.

31:28 Now the second most popular legume and most productively is red clover. Red clover is really easy to establish, germinates very well, broadcast. And so if you're broadcasting into clover or fescue, this is my number one choice. A lot of people call and say I've seeded clover and I didn't get anything. You know what's the problem? Well, there could be a number of problems.

31:57 One problem is you just might be putting your nitrogen on too heavy. If you are putting legumes into a pasture, do not fertilize with nitrogen. You're going to make your grass too competitive and you're going to delay nodulation on the legumes, which makes them a lot less vigorous. So if you need the productivity, if you are locked into needing that productivity from that pasture that year, the legumes you plant really won't contribute a lot til next year.

32:34 What I like to do is I like to seed lentils, drill lentils in early spring. With sixty days, those lentils will make a really nice abundant crop of high-protein legume forage that'll give you an immediate boost in productivity and immediate boosted nitrogen.

32:56 Another problem is that when you apply monoculture grasses—something that we have historically fertilized with nitrogen—every pound of nitrogen fertilizer, rule of thumb, requires two pounds of limestone to neutralize. So if you've put a hundred pounds of nitrogen out for forty years, do the math—you need eight thousand pounds of lime. And all that acidity is concentrated in the top inch of soil. That's where your seedlings are trying to develop. I've seen brownfields that test at pH four—nothing's going to establish in that. So take a pH test right in the surface inch of soil before you go to renovate a pasture. You might have to spread some lime.

33:52 Another problem that I've found—and this actually is my number one issue with establishing legumes in the arid—is that there's usually just fields loaded with crickets, crickets and grasshoppers. Crickets in the spring, both crickets and grasshoppers in the fall. They just annihilate any new seedling that's coming up. Easiest way to see if you have crickets is take a handful of any grain product—whether it's cracked corn or breakfast cereal, bread—get it wet, put it on the ground, put a board over it, come back a day later and see if there's crickets under it.

34:30 If you have crickets, one thing you can do to remove the cricket habitat is to just burn your field off. I've seen side-by-side fields that have been burned off prior to seeding and complete beautiful stands of clover, and right to the line where they didn't burn—zero—and it's because of cricket predation. Another thing you can do, of course, is use insecticides. My preference is to spread a bait, a brand-based cricket bait like a nolo or semaphore bait that contains a protozoan parasite of crickets that kills them. Doesn't affect beneficial predators.

35:16 Another thing you should do is rotationally graze your tall-growing legumes. Like alfalfa and red clover absolutely need to be rotationally grazed. The only legume that really does well with continuous grazing is white clover, and it's going to disappear soon as you come to your first drought. It grows when it's moist and just dries up and disappears when it's not.

35:42 So to reiterate here: don't apply nitrogen in the year you seed legumes. You shouldn't have to apply afterwards either. Manage your grazing, manage crickets and grasshoppers, and I will address this later in more depth. Inoculate with mycorrhizal fungi. I think that anytime you're starting a new pasture, get the mycorrhizae out there.

41:12 In the room and it acts a lot like romancin or boat attack. It's an ion ofor. It actually improves the room and fermentation makes it more efficient. Animals belch less methane and when they belch methane that's an energy loss. They retain that energy in the room and they'll produce about 10%. It's really a neat plant that I think we need to be using more of. I try to put plantain in every pasture mix, every perennial pasture.

41:41 It's another one, this is small Burnett, and small Burnett is another one of those tannin containing plants. I told you at the first there's no grass that will be green and productive year-round. There is a form that is green year-round and good any time of year, and that's small Burnett. This stuff will be green in the middle of winter, it'll be green in the middle of summer. Very deep-rooted. This has a good reputation among people who are pasture based dairy producers because it really increases the butterfat content of milk, which is important whether you're a dairy producer or producing meat from suckling calves or lambs. This helps neutralize bloat. It's got some really nice attributes. Another one of those I think really ought to be in every pasture mix.

42:39 We're not going to talk a lot today about warm season grasses. This is a whole topic in and of itself, but I did want to show you this. That previous picture was actually this same pasture, eastern gamagrass pasture that I established. What I wanted to show you was this. You see the line going right down the center. To the left of that line was inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi. To the right was not. Look at the difference it made. This is why I recommend mycorrhizal fungi. I don't recommend it just so I can sell a mycorrhizal fungi inoculant to you. I recommend it because it works. It really does increase the rate of pasture development.

43:30 This is a close-up of mycorrhizal fungi. You can see the root with all the little hyphae coming out of it. This helps access water and nutrients and bring it back to the plant. Little grass seedlings really don't have much of a root system. They can build this fungal hypha network much faster and explore a lot more soil than they can grow their own roots. This is why I recommend mycorrhizal fungi. It works.

44:03 This is a research project that was published in the journal Range Management. Look at the difference in biomass at 14 weeks. This would be like at the end of the growing season. You're looking at 30 to 40 times as much growth with mycorrhizal inoculation. I think it is that important.

44:27 So I kind of blew through all that. I tried to fit 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5 pound sack here today. But if you're interested in more of this pasture stuff, I do have a book out there. Just send me an email if you're interested in obtaining a copy of the book. I know some of you people listening already have a copy, so thank you for that.

44:56 I'll turn it over to Noah. Yeah, well, just to kind of highlight that book again, you guys, this was like he said kind of a fast approach to this, and there's a wealth of knowledge in this book that he's got. So if that is something you guys are interested in learning more about these pastures, there's a ton of answers in this book. You can email Dale directly to purchase that, and he is also given us permission to give out his email and cell number if you guys want to get in touch with him.

45:24 We're going to open it up to questions here. His email is Dale, that's D-E-A-L-E at greencoverseed.com, and then his cell number is 785-614-2031.

45:42 With that, we're going to kind of open this up again to questions. I do have a couple questions that were emailed to me and want to get to those first. This was from Tucker Breakfast. Dale has a video on YouTube where you mentioned the 30 to 40 percent biomass of plantain was effective way to mitigate drought effects. So his question is how do you determine how many pounds per acre of seed do you need to apply on a field?

46:09 Of Bermuda grass to hit that threshold and should that be drilled or broadcast? Okay, that was actually chicory and there was a study done, and I believe in New York State by Cornell, that indicated that if you had 30 to 40% of your pasture biomass as chicory, the deep tap roots—I forget the name—they call it the green pump effect. There's a more scientific term for it, but the green pump effect is basically these deep taproot of plants bring water up from transpiration through the day. Because the warm air during the day pulls moisture up and into the plant, and then at night that pull is no longer there. When you hit the dew point, that moisture will go back down in the plant, and it'll basically collide with the water coming up, and then it leaks out of the plant right at the soil surface. So it actually irrigates the plants around it. And chicory is not the only plant that does that, but it seems to be one of the best at that green pump effect.

47:30 So when I'm into Bermuda grass, I prefer to drill chicory in the fall, right before the Bermuda grass is going dormant, you know, really kind of stops growing there about the first of September or so. That's a good time to get that chicory out there. As far as what it takes to get 30, 40 percent biomass, I don't know that there's any sort of magic number. I think any amount is going to be helpful, but it doesn't take a lot of pounds of chicory to get that effect. Somewhere in that two to three pounds—I've heard as high as five, but I've seen seven pounds as a pure seating rate. I think that two or three pounds is more than enough. And if you can get some plantain, alfalfa, and the burnett seemed to have somewhat of that same effect. And I know alfalfa pairs well with Bermuda grass if you are rotationally grazing. I like to get all these species out there. They're very complementary.

48:44 So Brian Bryce, along with that Bermuda pasture, is asking: 'Will sainfoin survive in Bermuda?' I don't have enough track record with it. The chicory, the plantain, and the burnett seem to work just fine. They almost seem to be universal plants. I've seen burnett growing up in the Rocky Mountains. I know it grows well in France and England and in these states, and I think it's definitely worth looking at. It seems to be a very wide area of adaptation. I think it'd be a good addition.

49:26 Okay, this one is from Clinton Ed: 'Could you please send a short time on the impact trees could have in our pastures? Many of my pastures need more trees for shade alone, but am I missing out on an opportunity to feed my cows as well?' This is actually an area of big interest to me. I think we have always looked at trees as being the enemy of pasture, and I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think trees can be very complementary. We've always seen trees as competition to pasture instead of that just another forage. There are actually some trees that are nitrogen fixers. Black locust is a nitrogen fixer. Honey locust, they think may fix nitrogen. Of course, you don't want the thorny honey locust out there, and that is a weed in my book. But willows and cottonwoods are actually nitrogen-fixing plants. They're not legumes. They don't nodulate, but they fix nitrogen in the green or the twigs. There are actually nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the vascular system of those plants.

50:44 And willows in particular—willow bark was the original source of aspirin—so willow foliage is a blood thinner. It actually reduces heat stress in late summer, very high in protein. There's been a lot of research that's been done around the world on using willows as cattle, especially dairy cattle, because it tends to really stimulate milk flow in late summer when the pasture grasses are really kind of becoming mature. Some really good research from around the globe, and again, if that's something you're interested in, I can send you some of those research articles if you email me. Dean Kroll says I had smooth brown—

51:36 Pasture, what would you suggest interceding to? If you're broadcasting mid-winter, if you're drilling now is good, or late August. What I like is I kind of have what I call a brown Roman fescue fixed ham mix, and in the fixing mix is red clover about five pounds an acre, red clover, a couple pounds of chicory, and a pound each of a bur lasting clover, Korean lespedeza, crabgrass, and plantain. Again, if you want that recipe, I should have put it in my presentation. I apologize for omitting to put that in there. But again, that's five pounds an acre red clover, two of chicory, and one pound each of plantain, crabgrass, Red River crabgrass, Korean lespedeza. And those two species will recede and thicken up and would not miss their everlasting clover. If you go farther south, I would switch that a burr lasting to stamina.

53:00 April Barker is in west central Illinois and she is planning on establishing a crop field back into pasture this brain by broadcasting. So she's wondering, will rolling the field after broadcast improve my stand or will I be wasting my time? Absolutely not, it should be rolled. You need good seed soil contact. If you broadcast in winter, freezing and thawing will give you that seed to soil contact. The best pasture stand I ever got was from broadcasting onto a shallow lake tilled field and then rolled afterwards. I've also got my worst stands that way because it didn't rain for sixty days and the wind and the dust blew. No-till stands are definitely more effective or more consistent than what I've been able to achieve with tillage. Tillage seems to be either a spectacular success or spectacular failure, and a lot of it depends on if you get a gentle rain. It's a home run. If you get a big rain, seed all washes along with your soil. If you don't get any rain, you get no germination. I much prefer to no-till if I can, but yes, broadcast following by rolling or harrowing to get just a little bit of loose soil and then rolling out works very well.

54:35 Brian Rice again is in Arizona. He says the soil temps are above 65 degrees. So is there anything he can be planting now into Bermuda? I really don't like planning this time of year in Bermuda because Bermuda is just so competitive. That's probably the person who has done more work with interceding into Bermuda than anybody I know is Jim Johnson down for Nobel Research Foundation or Research Institute. He has really done more work. I'd have to defer to him on that. Almost all my Bermuda grass seeding experiences done in the fall. It's hard to do anything this time of year because Bermuda grass is very competitive. Things that I've seen that do work—some of your large, really big seeded summer legumes and broad leaves like cow peas, okra, and some hemp seem to work about as well as anything this time of year. And it's nice to have a legume or a form like okra out there to provide those components that Bermuda grass is lacking.

56:00 Fernando says Burstein and clover. Alexandre nom, is there any experience? We do use some of it in for different purposes in different areas. Some of the real advantages of Burstein clover is it's an annual—at least in my experience, it works as an annual. There may be some areas where it's perennial in the southern US. It's a very productive, very palatable, non-bloating legume that's used as a winter annual down south. In the northern states, it's used as a summer annual. In the northern areas and also in the Rocky Mountains, it's mostly used when alfalfa—a stand of alfalfa winter kills or is killed by flood and we need something that we can thicken that alfalfa stand. Of course, alfalfa is most, you know, is autotoxic. You have an old alfalfa stand that thins out, you cannot successfully put more alfalfa into it. Alfalfa's toxic to its own seedlings. So we need something else to put in there, and Burstein clover looks like alfalfa in the field. It dries in the bale like alfalfa, looks like alfalfa in the bales, same feed value. So it's like a

57:34 Temporary rapid establishing alfalfa. That's a great application of Versine clover. You're gonna want to make sure you use the Frosty Brew same type because it is a multi-cut, most diverse. Seems like the ballet tea are pretty much a single cut, and so you can get some of the benefits but you're not gonna get the regrowth. So if you're looking to spruce up an alfalfa stand or do a multiple grazing type situation, you want the Frosty, and it's also much more cold tolerant so you can go out earlier in the spring with it than you could with the lady type as well.

58:16 Yeah, and I've been disappointed with using the Blade II in that role. Originally I thought maybe the Blade II would be a little better than the Frosty because we're growing it in the summer, but I've been more impressed with the Frosty. And seems it works over a wider range of conditions.

58:42 This will be the last question here before we wrap up. For Mike McDonald, how do you best gauge the nutrient needs to fertilize your paddocks? You utilize much of your suggested grasses, forbs, and legumes after the first year of establishment?

59:00 The this obviously a matter of controversy because you know there's a lot of people say you don't ever need to fertilize, and if you have the right microbial population and you got your soil in shape, really you should be able to coast because the vast majority of your fertility cycles back from your pasture foliage, take it into the animal, and defecated back out. You know, 85, 90% of your phosphorus and potassium should go right back on to your field in the form of manure and urine. Your nitrogen you will have nitrogen losses from the system, but if you have good legume percentage and possibly some free-living nitrogen fixers, your nitrogen supply should get better and better every year, and a lot of that depends on how you manage your grazing.

1:00:03 If you are continuous grazing, the animals have access to the whole pasture, you will see a migration of your fertility towards your water source, towards shade. Animals go and they bed down in the shade, and they lay down, and then when they stand up, the first thing they do, there goes your fertility in the shade where nothing grows. So a good rotational grazing system where you are ensuring that animal distribution is uniform over the pasture will reduce your fertility needs. And one surprising thing, just not grazing your pasture too hard. Make sure you have adequate rest periods. If you maintain good plant vigor through grazing management, you'll have deeper roots that enable the plants to access more fertility, and you'll have higher levels of root exudates that nourish free-living nitrogen fixers, also microbes that can extract fertility from the soil.

1:01:15 So you, I like when I establish a pasture, I want to have my pasture to be very fertile. I mean, I want to have good levels of some mineral fertility when I start out with the hope that that's the last time I ever have to apply fertilizer to that pasture. And so if I'm starting with the normal degraded cropland soil when I establish a pasture, or you know, the normal overgrazed pasture with poor root systems that I think is probably typical all across the country, I will be very aggressive about providing fertilizer to it, and then my hope is that that's the last time I ever have to do that. Get the biology in, and once you get the biology rolling, you should be able to coast from that point on. And mycorrhizal fungus, very important in that equation. It will enable the plants to access a lot of otherwise bound-up fertility sources.

1:02:28 Well, with that, we're gonna wrap things up here. Dale, I really appreciate your time. Again, if you guys have any questions that didn't get answered, you can feel free to email him. That's Dale, D-A-L-E, at greencoverseed.com, and his number is 785-614-2031. Thank you guys for tuning in. Next week we are going to have Buddy and Armand Miller on to talk about biological products, some things like that. Dale, appreciate it. Keith, thanks for tuning in, and thank you all for being with us this evening. Thanks everybody, have a good week.