Extending the Grazing Season with Cover Crops and Winter Pasture

0:09 Thank you Keith. Can everybody hear me? Okay. I appreciate the opportunity to come in and talk to you a little bit about a couple of grazing experiments that I've got going on here at the Noble Foundation. I'll run quickly through that.

0:31 This is a Landsat imagery of the Southern Great Plains and the red circle there is a 100 mile radius of Ardmore. And then if you can see the star there is north of the Red River, that's Ardmore where we're sitting now.

0:46 So this is a crop data layer that we took a couple years ago or downloaded a couple years ago. So you can see the type of farming activities that we do in our part of the world.

0:59 So the dark areas are Dallas Fort Worth metroplex down in the south, Oklahoma City to the north. You see the Red River moving along there. The green is the wheat belt in the western part of the state. The red areas, it's kind of in the southwestern corner of the state, cotton area. As Lisa mentioned earlier this morning, kind of the light greenish areas, that's pasture and rangeland or forages. So that's what we do in our part of the world—we grow forages and we run cattle.

1:34 On our wheat acres our rotation is typically wheat. We rotate till next year and plant wheat, and we rotate till next year and we plant wheat. That's our typical rotation here in our part of the world. So that gets us interested in the possibility and use of cover crops and how we can incorporate cover crops into grazing situations or into grazing systems.

2:04 Another thing that we do in our part of the world. How many of you know the great composer Ray Stevens? How many of you have heard of him? You know, he's had classics like 'Everything Is Beautiful' and 'The Mississippi Squirrel Revival,' 'The Streak,' things like that. How many of you remember the haircut song? Remember that by Ray Stevens, the haircut song?

2:36 I don't know why this popped into my head while I was sitting here listening to talks earlier this morning. I don't know why things like that pop into my head, but they do. And I remember part of that song. The character of the song winds up in Montana somewhere, and he's getting a haircut. The barber grabs him, throws him in the chair, spins him around, slaps him a couple times, and says 'What do you do for a living?' He said, 'I'm a logger,' because he wanted to sound tough.

3:02 I think a lot of our producers in our part of the world, and especially down in North Texas—if you travel down in that area—if they were grabbed, thrown in that barber's chair, spun around a couple times, slapped a couple times, and said 'What do you do for a living?' they'd say 'I plow.'

3:19 And we like to plow too. I like to plow, I enjoy plowing, but I'm trying to limit my plowing activities to my garden. But how can we incorporate cover crops into our grazing systems that we have here? So what we've—I'm going to talk to you about two studies that we've got going on. One I call the summer cropper crop study. And the history of this is we have a 100-acre...

3:47 Field at one of the noble foundation farms west of ardmore about seven miles west of where we are right now.

3:56 The history is for the past 12 years you can see that this area is broken into paddocks, each one of those paddocks is 10 acres a piece. So we have 10 10-acre paddocks. Half of those paddocks about 12 years ago were randomly assigned to either a tillage or a no-till treatment.

4:16 So for the past 10 or 12 years we've planted winter pasture out there, which has typically been rye, mixture of rye ryegrass, using conventional methods or no-till methods. And it's been summer followed so we have a good history of the cropping activities that have occurred on this area.

4:38 The soil type is it's a loam silt loan type soil. And typically we'll summer follow that. We don't grow anything out there during the summer so our tillage areas will go in and plow them during the summer. Our no-till areas will chemically follow and then we'll come in sometime in September, plant our winter pasture and we'll graze with stocker cattle.

5:05 So the objective of this study is we won't measure the impact of a summer cover crop on our winter pasture production because that's the livelihood of a lot of our producers here is we grow wheat pasture, we graze it with stocker cattle. If we grow a summer cover crop we want to know what impact is that going to have on our winter pasture production, on our grazing days and in the forage mass. We also have an interest in knowing what the incorporation of

5:36 That summer cover crop is going to have on our soil health characteristics and water use. How much water is this summer cover crop actually going to use during the summer and what impact is that going to have on the establishment and growth of our winter pasture.

5:52 Finally, economics are the main driver of everything that we do. We want to understand what the economic impact of incorporating that cover crop into our existing winter pasture system is going to have. Is it going to be profitable? Is it going to increase our overall profitability? Is it not going to change it or is it going to decrease it?

6:18 We look at this area a little bit closer and this was supposed to be an animated slide but I don't think it's going to animate. We originally had 10-acre paddocks. We've now split those in half, so now we have 25-acre paddocks. Half are in tillage, half are in no-till. Half of those, all those paddocks, will have 25-acre paddocks that are going to get a cover crop. The other half will not, so we'll have kind of a factorial design where we'll have no-till, till, cover crop, no cover crop.

6:58 The little blue dots to measure our soil moisture. We're actually going to go out there and we're going to put in soil moisture sensors at three different depths. Those sensors are going to be collecting moisture information or moisture readings about every two hours, so over a season we're going to amass quite a large data set of soil moisture.

7:26 The cover crop mixture that we're going to use is what's shown here, mixture of.

7:31 Cow peas, soy beans, sun hemp, pearl millet, a couple pearl mullets, there grazing corn and buckwheat. We kind of base this on a Haney soil test. We got those results back, looked at what it said and the recommendations, and then kind of built this mixture based off of that.

7:53 Currently for the last year we've kind of been taking some baseline information out there so we'll know where we're starting. One of the things that we did is we went out and we did soil tests. This is just kind of where we're at, just looking at average of those no-till paddocks and teal paddocks, looking at organic matter, the Haney soil test nitrogen, a traditional nitrogen test, the carbon burst, and a soil health reading. I think what's interesting is you can see a little bit of difference there in organic matter between the till and the no-till areas. Of course that relates to our nitrogen availability in the soil, a little bit of difference there between those two.

8:40 Carbon fairly good carbon content of those soils. I was relatively pleased and somewhat surprised that they are that high. And then we have a base soil test health measurement score there though, and we're going to be monitoring that over time. Every year we're going to do that at least once or twice per year.

9:06 Right now we're grazing winter pasture. We have a seating we've seeded 100 pounds per acre. We seeded 90 pounds per acre of wheat, then another 25 pounds per acre of cereal rye.

9:20 This is an unusual year for us here. We had a tremendous amount of rain the first part of the year and then it turned off hot and dry. I think we had something like 60 inches of rain by the first of July, and then it quit absolutely quit for the next three months and turned off hot and dry.

9:42 Normally we like to get our winter pasture planted in September, maybe late August. We were literally, despite all the rainfall that we had, we were sitting there waiting to rain enough that we could get a disc to run in the ground. So we didn't get our pasture planted until very late September, early October. So we're about a month behind where we normally would be.

10:05 But we've been taking monthly pasture reading forage mass readings out there monitoring the development of that pasture. You can see we started those readings early November. The red is no-till mass and the blue is tillage mass. So we have a little bit of separation that began sometime in that late November where we're getting just to take more production off our no-till than we are tillage.

10:34 I don't have any statistics on this yet, but I will say that we might, we measured almost the exact same pattern last year that our no-till began to separate from our till, produced a little bit more forage for us.

10:49 We turned stocker cattle in the 15th of December and we're continuing to weekly monitor that forage mass every week and we'll continue to do that through the grazing season.

11:05 Another thing that we did late fall right prior to planting is we went out and we actually put a soil structure score on all these paddocks, till and no-till. I don't have those scores but this is what you do is you go out and actually do some shovellomics out there. You do a lot of digging and looking, and then you'll put a score on the soil structure based on the peat patio head size and some other factors there.

11:39 But I just wanted to show you that we have no-till soil structure. Each one of these blade fulls of shovel on the nose hill is from a different paddock, and then this is kind of what the tillage soil structure looked like after we had plowed it. So it's kind of hard to score that after you plow it, but you can see some differences there on our no-till soil structure compared to our tillage.

12:04 The tillage doesn't show up very well. Typically our tillages we'll run an offset, a heavy offset disc at least twice, and then follow that up with a field cultivator on the very bottom edge of that tillage. You can go in there and we do have a plow pan layer and it comes up here. It doesn't show up very well, but we do have a plow pan layer that's very evident when you go and do a little bit of digging.

12:34 Kind of our timeline that we're going to be going by for this study. This year our winter pasture was planted in October, it's a month late. Normally we'll plant it by the September 15th. We'll hope to hopefully this year will be a little bit more of a normal year, whatever that means.

14:45 Foundation where we're going to be monitoring the soil microbial activity over time and see how what the effect of tillage and the cover crop is going to have on those communities.

14:58 Another study that we have going on that we just started this past fall is a cow calf winter forage system study. If you're a producer and you have cows and calves you know that the big cost of keeping that cow through a year is feed costs during the fall and winter. For most of us that's tied up in hay and hay is expensive. We can find methods if we can find systems to extend our grazing period longer or to reduce or eliminate that we should be able to increase our margins.

15:34 So that's what this experiment is about is putting together those systems that we can evaluate to help us reduce those hay feeding costs. So we have three systems that we're trying to evaluate and in our part of the world our main introduced grass or forage is bermuda grass so this is all based on bermuda grass.

15:56 Our first one is just a control got to have something to compare these things to and it's typical of best management practice on bermuda grass pasture. We'll soil test we'll fertilize wheat spray we'll do all those things that we normally do. We'll run those cows till we run out of grass and then we'll hay and we'll supplement through the winter.

16:18 The other one is a stockpile intercede. We're allocating one cow one acre per cow for bermuda grass stockpile what that means is in the late fall.

16:32 Excuse me, in the late summer, early fall we'll come into our stockpile area, graze that down as tight as we can get it, apply some nitrogen and then let it grow until frost. And what that does for us is we'll have fresh bermuda grass forage, typically that's pretty good quality forage at that point.

16:55 We measured the quality of our stockpile areas this fall prior to turning our cows out and it was averaging about 14 protein. Now many times that's a whole lot better than hay we can put up. We also have rye grass in those stockpile areas.

17:12 And then we're also allocating one acre per cow that we're interceding with wheat. So we have bermuda grass pastures that we're actually going out and we're interceding with wheat.

17:23 So the idea with the stockpile interseed treatment is that we'll run bermuda grass pastures. When that's depleted we'll move to our stockpile. When that's depleted we'll go to our interseed. When we use that up, back to our stockpiler that's got rye grass. When that's done we should be back on bermuda grass, hopefully.

17:44 The third one is a stockpile winter pasture cover crop. Really it mimics the stockpile interseed except interceding a winter annual. We're not interceding the winter annual into bermuda grass. We're actually planting that into a crop area that's been traditionally cropped.

18:06 And we're also incorporating a summer cover crop into that stockpile area, I mean into that winter pasture area, clean tail area. So we want our objectives of this work is we want to evaluate forage systems to

18:22 Extend the grazing season and reduce hay and supplemental feeding. So we'll be tracking the amount of hay and feed that we have in each treatment.

18:34 We want to measure the animal response, so we're looking at cow body weights, cow body condition scores, reproductive efficiency, calf weaning weights, things like that.

18:41 And we want to evaluate the economics of each one of these systems.

18:51 The way this study is set up we've got ninety head and the entire study group. Our treatments are replicated three times. We've got 10 head per replicate. Our cows we started the cows on treatment after we weaned the spring-born calves in October.

19:09 We had a little bit of a snow event a couple weeks ago, so we turned our cows that were assigned to stockpile treatments onto those stockpile treatments, and the rest of our cows, our controls, they began hay feeding on the same day, December 28th.

19:48 This is kind of a map of our treatment areas so you can kind of see how things are laid out. Each of the different colors is a different type of one of the three treatments there. So we're allocating four acres per cow, so this covers a little over close to 400 acres out there on this one farm.

20:14 A few pictures to show you of some of the activities that we had going on this past fall. On the left is where we're

20:22 Interceding our wheat rye mixture into bermuda grass pasture. We grew a lot of forage this year with the rain and the spring, so this pasture didn't look exactly like I wanted it to when we interceded. But on the right is the stands of wheat and rye that we have coming up following that seeding, so I'm pretty well pleased with how that seeding looks. We haven't grazed it yet, but we will have grazeable forage on it later this winter.

20:57 This is the cover crop that we'll be using in our cow study. This is the same mixture that I showed you that we're going to use in our calf stalker study. We planted this in late July, which was the first opportunity that we had after all the rains came through. I mean, we wanted to get it in earlier, but it just rained and rained and rained, and we couldn't. We went ahead and got it planted. This is 22 acres and this is how it looked after we had 120 cows plus calves grazed it for a two-week time period. So about all that's left standing is some millets out there.

21:45 These are some pictures that were taken last week. The upper left corner there is our cows out on our stockpile bermuda grass. Down in that we have a lot of rye grass coming up through there and our cows are really maintaining good body condition very well out there on that stockpile pasture. They've been real content. A couple more pictures of wheat pasture. The one on the right, that's wheat following the cover crop that was planted, and then the one on the bottom left, that's wheat that was interceded into bermuda grass.

22:27 So I don't have a lot of data to share with you right now, but that's what we're up to. That's what we're going to be doing. This time next year, come back and maybe we'll have a little bit more data and more updates to give you.