Fix Fescue Pastures: Managing Endophyte Toxicity with Better Genetics and Plants

0:21 You know, yep.

0:28 So the coded, hold on a second, I needed me of my webinar here.

3:16 Howdy Doug, yeah, how are we doing today? Not too bad. I like all the African decor behind you. Have you been there, is that just a inspiration? Yeah, we've been there. Okay, those are actually pictures we took. That's cool. Is that a painting in the frame or is that a picture as well? That's actually, okay, that's cool. Did your whole family get to go or just you and your wife? Just me and my wife. Awesome. Dale should be joining us. He can tell the story how he almost got stuck in Africa before the virus hit.

4:25 Yeah, what was the highlight? Say someone was going there for the first time, wants something that they have to be. Oh boy, I would another week doing it again. We did two weeks and I wish we just went ahead and spent another, another week at least. I saw her country.

4:45 There's a lot to see. Yeah, what part of, I mean, where were you at? We were in South Africa for the most part. Yeah, yeah, we didn't, we didn't get up north to any of that stuff. I would, I would have done that if I was doing it again. We would have taken another week and went up there. Was it just a vacation or was there any work involved as well? It was both. I did a week's worth of meetings and then with Jill Clapperton and then then a week, a week long hunting trip. So now I would have done a, I would added a week of sightseeing to that.

5:24 What were you able to hunt when you were there? Oh, we did empower blessbuck.

5:36 Is that all like one, one hunt and you're just wait, Mrs. Myers are very specific towards what you want. They know different things are in different areas. Yeah, oh, that's cool. Yeah, it was a fun time. We really enjoyed it.

5:57 You went to Africa to get up, how long ago? Oh man, that's that's very been five years ago now. Okay, I'm ready to go back. A little bit, yeah.

6:16 No, goes the cheaper just to get the picture of the giraffe and the rhino instead of actually having the taxidermy and it brought back, so I'm sure the tree bag does. Yeah, I didn't do a drop in a rhino. Those were a little out of my price range. I had to, I had beg, beg and plead my wife. Just did you get what I, what I did yet? So I, my uncle's done several hunts over there and he's pretty much shot everything you can shoot and he said the giraffe was his least favorite. Said it was no fun to watch such an amazing creature go down. He's like, I didn't really care for it that much. Yeah.

7:04 Oh no, you should. There's 20 people on. You should tell people how much rain you guys got at your house here in the last four days. Well, the weather, weather reporter, whatever came out, at least they said nine inches, but I know that's not true because I know in my rain gauge of my neighbors, we corroborated, we've got at least 11 inches in the last four days. So I was taking fact, I was a little late to work. I had to take three, just three detours, but every road that possibly gets me down south, I had to at least go through some water and around a couple, couple road closed signs, but it's been our neighbor actually had to, he's about two miles from us, had to get rescued from an airboat, game and parts had to come get him Sunday night, like three in the morning. That's crazy.

8:04 If you see any good opportunities for pictures of contrast between cover crop fields and especially tilled fields without cover crops. So it's actually funny to say that I, I got home Friday afternoon, Friday night and said hi to the wife and I said I got to go out and she said why and I said I have just I gotta go out, I gotta go take pictures. And about 10 minutes later, I call her, I said I'm in the ditch because I was trying to take pictures of comparison photos. And she's like, I told you not to go out and do that. So I tried bail. It didn't go very well because I appreciate, I appreciate that effort.

8:54 Yeah, it's been, you didn't have the drone there that you could just send out and get the pictures? I should, I should bring the drone home tonight actually and get some because it we look like Minnesota, the amount of little lakes we've got. Unfortunately, they're all cornfields. So for the farmers, Dale was Mark Thomas still planning on joining? Well, last I knew he was. Betty, I'll resend him the link just in case he's having trouble getting on, but I'll shoot him a text to it. It is 5:30.

9:39 So we're probably going to get started here. Thank you all for joining us as always. You guys should all be muted but we will take your questions in the chat or the Q&A portion. We're going to let Dale, Doug and Mark go ahead and kind of give us a presentation but we'll open it up to questions right around 6:15. So if you have questions that are specific towards what they're talking about the presentation, go ahead and type those out in the chat or in the Q&A portion.

10:09 Well we're going to go ahead and get started here. This week we've got kind of panelists as well as a presentation from Dale but I want to welcome Doug Peterson here with us. He's been an NRCS employee for over 32 years. He started his career as a soil scientist but is currently a regional soil health specialist for Missouri and Iowa teaching NRCS staff and producers around the Midwest about soil health. He attended college at Missouri Western State University graduating in 1986 with his bachelor's degree in agriculture with an emphasis in economics and agronomy. He grew up on a crop and livestock farm near Newtown in northern Missouri and today he operates a cow calf and contract grazing operation with his father Steve. Currently they run about 250 cows and they utilize adaptive multi-paddock grazing to deal with fescue, improved soil health and eliminate the need for most purchased fertilizer and limited need to about 1 bale per cow per winter. Doug's NRCS training coupled with his real-world hands-on experience makes him a unique speaker that is relatable to both agency personnel and producers. So we're rather privileged to have him on here tonight with us.

11:27 Mark Thomas should be joining us. We're working on getting him on board. He lives in Enid, Oklahoma and grew up in East Texas and graduated with his degree in agriculture from Louisiana Tech University. He spent the last 30 years in the seed industry which has given him the opportunity to travel to Europe, Australia and Mexico within his profession. Today he is the director of business development for Mountain View Seeds, a division of Pratt him Co-op in Salem, Oregon and he is the current president of the Southern Seed Association, a regional trade association that covers 14 states. Along with other personal responsibilities to his family, he owns and operates a farm in Oklahoma with his wife where they produce seed and grass-fed beef. So hopefully we'll work on getting him in.

12:18 We also have Dale. Many of you are familiar with him. He's done several of our webinars here that you guys can all watch. Those are on our website. Dale, if you want to introduce yourself in a little bit, otherwise I'll let you go ahead. If you're able to share your screen, I think I got that available. If not, I might have to do a little workaround but see if you can share your screen and kind of says I cannot, okay. Are you able to? Why don't you go ahead and email that to me. Maybe I'll just go ahead and share in the meantime. Doug, why don't you just tell us kind of your experience with fescue pastures and what you've seen in your area.

13:01 You bet. There's a lot of ways to try and tackle the fescue problem. I think it's going to take a really multi-faceted approach. It's going to take selecting livestock that are somewhat adapted to your environment. It's also going to take managing the fescue that you do have in a lot of cases and then converting some acres. I think you'll hear about some of that tonight as well. So I think it's going to take all three of those things to really make it work. I don't think and I've tried all of those and I utilize all of those in our operation. I think once we've got fescue, I don't think we'll ever be rid of it, you know. Even if you convert a field to something else, you've still got it in your fencerows, you still got it in your ditches, you've still got it around your trees. The livestock are going to move it around. The cattle are going to move it around everywhere over time. So I think that there's times to do all of those things. I think for specific classes of livestock, you know, finishing animals, breeding heifers, I think probably conversion is a good opportunity. But I have a lot of rented acres and convincing a landowner to either give me a long enough lease or to have them spend the money to birth those acres from fescue to something else is going to be a pretty tough sell. So on those areas, I think that's

14:54 Where just management and adapting animals are gonna work the best. Yeah, pretty close yet. Dale, did we're able to send that to me? It is uploading, I've got about 80% there.

15:18 While we wait for that, I guess bail, I don't know how much multi-testing you can do, but maybe talk about the importance of why we're tackling fescue tonight. And the biggest reason it is just simply the endophyte toxin. It's a blood vessel constrictor, makes the animal unable to get rid of body heat in the summertime. It makes it so that you can't get body heat to extremities during the wintertime.

16:01 I think those are great points there, Dale. You know, there's no doubt it causes a lot of issues, particularly with animals that are in a growing condition that need that extra blood flow for nutrient flow for growth. And I think that's a big reason to work through some of it, get rid of some of it, and select animals for it.

16:36 Of course, the biggest impact is on animal performance, and the biggest question on everybody's mind is if I spend the money to do something about this fescue, will that pay it back? Well, how long before I get a payback on this? And from what I have seen, the economic loss on an acre of fescue in a cow-calf operation compared to a non-endophyte-infected field is usually around a hundred dollars an acre. Would you say that's fairly accurate when you look at lowered calving percentage and lowered animal performance over the course of a year?

17:21 Well, I think it depends on the class of livestock, whether your spring calving or fall calving, whether your animals are adapted to it. You know, talking about ways to evaluate the economics of that, Missouri Natural Resources Conservation Service on their website actually has an Excel file that you can walk through and plug in your costs, plug in estimated changes in conception rates, and it will give you an estimated time of payback. Or if you're a stocker operator, you can put in a different rate of gain and it will give you an estimated time of payback. So that's a great tool to help somebody figure out that economic turnover.

18:15 And you mentioned a very important strategy. One of the things that people I think overlooked with fescue is that it's a cool season grass. It really doesn't grow in the summertime anyway. In the heat of summer, it really does not grow very well. And if people ask me, if all I have is fescue, what can I do different? I think you mentioned one of the biggest changes is simply moving to a fall calving operation. It makes a lot of sense in fescue country. The toxicity of the fescue is highest during the seed head elongation, which is May, mid-May to mid-June basically. That's the most toxic time for that fescue. And then the fescue stops growing, so for about two months you get very limited growth on that fescue. So what they're eating for the next two months in the hottest time of summer is the most toxic part of the plant, and it's also dormant and low nutritional quality at that time. It's already seeded out. So summer-strong fescue is really detrimental to animal performance, even if it's endophyte-free. It's not very good in the summer.

19:49 And one thing we'll talk about is incorporating more warm season forages into the rotation, the pasture rotation, to help alleviate that. And we'll talk about that more as we move along here. I got it. So if you want to go ahead and try sharing your screen now, I think you should share that. If you want to start, you can share yours that way you can control it from there.

20:26 I'm not seeing it here. It's not here. I can go ahead and try. In the meantime, welcome, Mark. I gave through your introduction. Sorry, we were working on getting you a link for that.

20:46 All right, thank you guys. Enjoying the appointments and that you guys were sharing earlier. I mean, think keep in mind is that it's not fescue, it's the toxic alkaloids in the endophyte, the ergot alkaloid that is about one step away from LSD. And so as long as cattle are grazing it, they're gonna feel the effects. They're gonna feel that the vasal constriction. And obviously we're going to talk more about all those negative impacts and how that affects. But you know, fescue as a crop as a grass has actually made Missouri the

21:30 Beef cattle producer. The truth is that if it wasn't such good grass, with the negative effects of toxic endophytes, what a train wreck it would have been.

21:47 I'm on the screen but you should be able to click. I don't know if you want to, but I tried to give you. We're dealing with some different technology this week so Dale, you should be able to control that.

22:07 Well, we've already talked a lot about what's wrong with fescue and it's essentially. It's not clicking for me, Noah.

22:19 Says waiting for you to control your screen. I might just go ahead here and I'll control it. Might be a little clunky but I think we can make it work.

22:28 And of course the reason, just like Mark said, for the poor animal performance is the endophyte fungus. Go ahead and click and you can see the fungus right there in between the plant vascular tissue there. Go ahead and click again and it's not just practical experience where we see this. Research has confirmed this. We all know that fescue with the endophyte has some real negative effects. This is just one trial down in Arkansas: 44% calving rate versus 80% on the endophyte-free fescue. The weaning weights were 82 pounds less and depending on your stocking rate and what the calves in each scenario weigh, you can tell there's a huge economic loss in this situation. Now that doesn't mean you will experience the same economic loss if you have endophyte fescue. A lot of variables enter into this, but bottom line is that endophyte fescue costs you. That was a spring calving trial. Yellow and fall calving, and we'll talk about that a little later. We mentioned that a little bit earlier. Fall calving much less detrimental. They kept conception rates. So next screen.

24:12 And this is just more of the same thing. Steer gains on toxic endophyte were about half of what they were before. And part of that is compounded by again, fescue is a cool season grass and just really does not grow well in summertime. So you might. Next screen.

24:39 Fescue, like the other cool season grasses, needs additional nitrogen fertility for optimum growth. One of the holes in the bucket for fescue landowners is that they have a hard time growing anything with the fescue as far as legumes because of the grazing practices and some other factors that we tend to get monoculture fescue. Then in order for it to produce we have to fertilize it. We'll talk about how to get around that as well. Next slide. This just shows the response of cool season grasses to nitrogen. This is perennial ryegrass, which is closely related to fescue. The far-left plot is 0 pounds of nitrogen, the one to the right is 100, then the third one is 200 and the fourth one is 300 pounds of nitrogen. And in case you didn't know, nitrogen fertilizer makes grass grow and particularly cool season grasses. They need that extra nitrogen. Next slide.

25:56 This is just reiterating what I already said. Smooth brome, cool fescue have similar growth response curves to nitrogen. The more nitrogen you put out there, the more growth you get. It starts to plateau off around 100, 200, 150 pounds of nitrogen in our environment. Next.

26:23 So why do we have so much fescue if it's so bad? Kentucky 31 fescue is still the most widely planted pasture grass in the United States. Why do we have so much fescue? Just keep clicking through these if you would, Noah. One thing is it's tough. It survives our management. It will handle overgrazing, it'll handle drought. When some other grasses like orchard grass alone, and even when we try to kill it, oftentimes it comes right back. And for some purposes, fescue is the single best grass there is. But I think a lot of people have heard that well, you can't ever get rid of fescue. It'll in two years be all back the way it was. In some cases that's the case. In other cases, I've seen conversions that were 100% effective with no return of fescue. So it can be done. Not every time but often. We'll talk about some strategies how you can manage to keep that endophyte fescue from reinvesting. Let's go on the next slide. The purpose for which fescue is just way better than everything else is winter pasture. If you stockpile fescue and allow it to accumulate growth or a dedicated winter pasture use, there is no better grass to stockpile fescue. Let's go on the next slide.

28:12 Basically the stockpile, you stop your grazing somewhere during midsummer from July 1st to August 1st, somewhere in that time frame, remove.

28:28 Animals from the fescue, let it grow up, stockpile you give it a shot of nitrogen fertilizer sometime there in August you can really increase the yield of that. But a lot of times stockpiled fescue in middle of January, February, even underneath snow, 14–16 percent protein and more digestible than good alfalfa hay. And like if we manage our fescue we can have better winter feed than the hay we're paying through the nose to move to those cattle. That's where fescue really shines and no other grass really does it that well.

29:11 So what do you do about fescue if you have in to fight fescue? Well you can learn to manage it to minimize the problems or we can kill and replace it. We'll discuss both options here but we'll start with managing it. And we talked about the peak toxicity—it's the toxicity is far worse in the summertime. The effects are far worse in the summertime and during other times the year. And so simply finding alternative pasture sources to in to fight fescue in the summertime and eliminate most of the issues with fescue, just use them fescue in the cool part of the year—spring and fall or winter—eliminates most of the problems. And then we can dilute it or neutralize it.

30:07 And as summer breeding on fescues, particularly Dettman, but as far as management, I think I'll let Doug talk on the next slide here.

30:22 Doug, you want to talk a little bit about high density non-selective grazing on these next three slides here? Well, it's just it's using a very intensive grazing management strategy. You know, helps overcome the natural tendencies of the animals to be very selective. You know, if you have if you have a pasture that has the fescue component to it and you allow a very relaxed continuous grazing method, the fescue will be the last thing that the animals eat every time you graze that pasture. And so if you have this very relaxed grazing scenario where they don't raise the fescue, it's going to get more rest than anything else. And so over time you will end up with a more fescue-dominated pasture. This non-selective that he's got a picture of it here—basically what we're going to do is require those animals to eat the fescue that's there along with all the other species of grass in that field. That way they don't show favoritism and the fescue doesn't get thicker and thicker.

31:40 There's another slide I think next here that that is another example of that. So this is actually a field of mine from several years ago. We took this field over and it was heavy fescue. It had some trefoil in it, which was kind of the redeeming quality of this field. Had a tremendous amount of iron weed in it as well. And so we came in—this was a set of fall-calving cows, so this was in July, probably sixty days prior to calving. So we weren't right up against calving, so these animals had very low nutritional requirements. And so we came in and graze across this field, making sure that all the fescue was grazed very uniformly, as well as the iron weed in it.

32:30 And so now as a result you can see there that that was post-grazing, and that was a daily moves. It wasn't crazy high density like the first slide you saw, but basically we required them to eat all the fescue along with all the other beneficial plants. And so now many years later—and we don't have a picture of it in here, but now many years later—that field is really a very diverse field. It's got orchard grass. It doesn't really have any natives in it yet. It was farmed for too many years decades ago, but that's that's what we mean by using stock density. And I think it has to be in a fairly intensive manner to help reduce that selectivity of those animals. It's a pretty fine line, Dale, between reducing selectivity enough to get the forage grazed that you want but yet allowing enough selectivity so you get the animal performance that you want. And I think that's the tricky part.

33:32 Yeah, and I think this actually works better with fall-calving you can do that than the summertime with dry cows and not have near the detrimental effect on, you know, animal performance that you would have if there were milking cows during this. Right? But but one one thing I will I will tell you is if if you have we have both the spring herd in the fall herd. And so that gives me two different groups of cattle at two different times of the year with a with a lower or at least a different nutritional requirement to be able to use that reduce selectivity a little bit.

34:17 Yeah, let's move on the next slide, Noah, and hay. And so the first thing we're

34:23 Going to talk about as far as dilution is what else, what other plants can we get in. Now the grazing management can bring back some more diversity or you can see some diversity in there, especially in the short term. Last summer a lot of people had really turned up pastures, really plugged up pastures as the hoofing from roof traffic during really wet spring we had a year ago really tore pastures up. We encouraged a lot of people to put teff grass out in those pastures to increase their summer productivity and that was really pretty effective.

35:01 Another grass, next one that kind of the next slide we'll look at crabgrass. Crabgrass, one of the differences between teff grass and crabgrass, they're both summer annual fine-stemmed leafy grasses. Teff grass usually will not reseed in a grazing situation. Crabgrass always seeds, almost always seeds, precedes itself in a grazing situation. So depending on whether you want a one-year fix or multiple year fix, teff or crabgrass can both work. And the next slide is putting in some large-seeded summer annuals, and this would involve drilling, taking the drill out there. The crabgrass and teff both work fairly well broadcast.

35:56 This slide is bromegrass without any summer annuals in it. This was taken in September after a fairly rainy summer and you can see there's not a lot of growth out there. But the next slide will show you what it looks like where we drilled summer annuals out there. We put a big complex blend of summer annuals out there. There's sunn hemp, there's cowpeas, there's pearl millet, sorghum, there's sunflowers or buckwheat, there's forage soybeans. The sunn hemp, the millet and the forage, and the cowpeas seem to be the most successful at this.

36:33 In order for this to work, you need timing. Needs to work well. You want to put it in late enough that the cool season grass is no longer competitive, but you want to put it in early enough that you're still getting your June rains. In my experience, about the last half of June is when this works the best. It doesn't work like this every year. Some years it's a complete failure. But when it does, you can imagine how much feed you would have coming back into a field like this for fall grazing.

37:12 This field did sit from when it was planted. The bromegrass was headed off and this was drilled about June 20th. And this picture was taken in mid-September and the cattle could be turned in there for a really high carrying capacity bale grazing. Now that the next slide shows some other strategies for dealing with fescue toxicity just showing us what the dilution effects do. And this was from Arkansas where the diluted fescue and Bermuda grass increased gains of stocker steers. But fescue plus is dilution, not elimination of the toxicity. It's still there, but it's diluted. It's really diluted about an exact percentage as what you're diluting.

38:08 We got a question: did the bromegrass come back after the summer annuals were drilled into it? Yes, actually it grew better. You probably noticed that bromegrass grows better in October than it does in July, even though October has half the sunlight and usually lower rainfall than what July does. But bromegrass grows better in October unless moisture and less sunlight because it's cooler. And by putting those summer annuals out there, you create a cooler microclimate and the cool season grass actually seems to grow better. And the hay yield the next year on that half of the field was 700 pounds an acre more hay than the field without the summer annuals the year before.

39:00 Now some of that was maybe due to increased vigor of the bromegrass, maybe some of it was due to nitrogen fixation from the legumes or the higher amount of manure that extra biomass created. Whatever reason, it actually seemed to stimulate the bromegrass underneath rather than hurt it. So and question, you had a grazed off bromegrass. I'm not sure when it was grazed, by what time it was grazed off. If it was grazed off fairly high capacity over a short period of time, and that's what I'd recommend, getting that canopy off so that the underneath grass can start getting the sunlight. Once you get in the shorter days of fall, then next slide.

39:49 Doug mentioned animal genetics and some animals do quite fine on fescue, others do not. One breed of animal, one breed of cattle that seems to be very tolerant of fescue endophyte is Senepol or a Red Pole, which is a composite breed that has a fair percentage of Senepol in it. Senepol originated in the Caribbean islands. One of the parent breeds was from the N'Dama breed from Senegal.

40:21 West Africa and just has a waxy substance that tends to reflect infrared light so animals don't absorb heat standing out in the sunlight. They just don't have as high a body temperature on fescue as other breeds. So genetic selection, it doesn't have to necessarily be this breed. There are animals within every breed that are more tolerant than fescue and you can select for that over time. And whether on purpose or accidentally, producers have done that over time in Missouri. A lot of times Missouri cattlemen have a train wreck when they bring in good-looking cattle from other areas that have never had exposure to fescue.

41:10 Down the next slide, there are some feed additives that you can add that can help reduce the effects of fescue ergot alkaloid. And because the ergot alkaloid causes blood vessels to constrict, feed additives like kelp is one of them. Kelp can open up the blood vessels. Capsaicin, which is basically chili powder, hot pepper extract, opens up the blood vessels as well. That's why you sweat when you eat peppers. Cinnamon has a similar effect. So there are some additives that you can add to feed. Even willow leaves have been known to open up blood vessels because of the salicylic acid content. So allowing animals to browse on willows can reduce heat stress among animals.

42:10 And then the next slide, there are some plants that we can put into fescue pastures. Red clover is one of the better ones. The red clover contains some isoflavones that if you can pronounce that, better than I am, but that is a compound that helps like the pepper extract, helps open up the blood flow. And there's some other plants that contain varying amounts of this. The next slide is white clover, which contains it. And then we have a couple slides of some of the different other clovers that if you want to click ahead to the other clovers here, this is what research has shown of what clovers do. Add clover to Kentucky 31, you get four tenths of a pound per day. Replacing the K-31 with the novel ergot alkaloid-free version increased average daily gain by 1.1. And then when you put them two together, you got about 90% of the best of both of them together. You get a very good additive effect. So adding clover can really help, replacing it, and then adding clovers is better yet.

43:41 So other clovers have this same effect. The next slide is white clover and Ladino clover. And then we have a couple new clovers in our lineup. Burr Lasting is a hybrid between Kura clover and white clover, much deeper rooted, spreads by rhizomes, more productive than white clover. And then the next slide is a Stamina white clover, which is developed to be more heat and drought tolerant than other white clovers. Mark, you want to jump in and intermediate white clover? So basically the benefits of an intermediate over Ladino is that you get that stolon necklace very dense. And in grazing trials in Kentucky, it had about as much through years of intense grazing as some of the smaller leaf white clovers. So the smaller white leaf white clovers had the stolon density. Larger leaf Ladino types typically very showy, very productive but lacked that stolon density. And so in grazing they don't persist as well. But it makes it a nice balance, good combination clover works very well with top fescue as red clover or alfalfa or whatever legume you want to add.

45:32 There's Stamina and then the next slide is alfalfa. I think alfalfa is a highly underutilized grazing plant. It's the best grazing plant in the world, I like to say, except for problems. It kills your animals and your animals kill the alfalfa. But other than that, it's great. Of course, bloat is the problem with alfalfa. And one of the ways you prevent bloat is by having plants that contain tannin in the mix. And luckily, tannin also will complex with alkaloids, which is the toxins. The toxins in fescue are alkaloids. If you have tannin-containing plants in your grazing mix, tannin will bind up with that alkaloid and neutralize it. So your most powerful plants for eliminating fescue toxicity are your tannin-containing plants like annual lespedeza.

46:37 The next plant is Sainfoin. And then another plant that contains a polyphenol similar to tannin is chicory, which is the next slide. And chicory, we've talked several times on here before about the wonders of chicory as a grazing plant. A very high mineral content.

53:26 Each year start with the annuals and then after two years of annuals then start replanting. What do you replant? One option would be novel fescue. Another option would be warm season grasses. We've got some pictures coming up of different warm season grass possibilities and there's some of Doug's big bluestem.

53:50 Look at that beautiful stand of big bluestem and I mean this is in the heat of summer. Why do we recommend warm season grasses? Warm season grasses have some really good qualities. I don't like it as a hundred percent of your acreage but I do like it definitely as part of your acreage or part of your mix.

54:12 The next slide is actually my favorite pasture grass. That's eastern gamagrass and this is a field behind my house. At one time this was established on former cropland and you can see just how productive this was. Just to show you why I like warm season grasses so much, click onto the next slide.

54:37 This is gamagrass actually being established at the same time they're growing a corn crop, so just splitting the row middles with gamagrass and getting it off. You don't necessarily have to let it sit out of here. One secret you know, people say it takes three years to establish warm season grasses, not necessarily.

55:03 You can see the line right down the center of this slide. To the left of that, that was gamagrass inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi. To the right you see that six foot strip of nothing but cheatgrass. That gamagrass was not inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi, all planted at the same time. The mycorrhizal fungi really makes a big difference in grass establishment and warm season grass establishment.

55:31 One of the advantages of warm season grass on the next slide. I took this slide and the next slide on the very same day. This is orchard grass pasture taken in June of 2018 during our 13 month drought with 12 inches of rain. You know, Dale, I hate to cut you off but I also want to make sure that we get to some questions. I think I've got two slides.

56:07 The next couple slides here fairly quickly. Basically if you look at the bottom line on having a rotation between warm season and cool season, the pounds of gain that you can get per acre by having that seasonal rotation or a mixture of the two plants within the same pasture can really increase. If you look at 250 versus 450 pounds of beef, if you can get 200 additional pounds of beef per acre every single year, makes that conversion process really easy to swallow.

56:48 During the conversion process if you can see clovers, legumes, other things into your existing fescue as you're converting this pasture slowly over, then eventually I mean this process doesn't take two years before you make money. You make money during the conversion process. I think that's what a lot of people don't understand is there is an immediate payback.

57:17 This got a couple slides here on the stands. Yeah, and there's my books there if anybody's interested. So guys, Mark, Doug, questions Noah? You want me to answer questions as they come on the screen?

57:37 Yeah, so I think at this point we will open it up. There was a question here from Dean that said how did the brown grass come back after the summer? I think you had answered that one. Tucker Griffith said would planting a novel and if I fescue along with little blue stem and crabgrass be a good idea? Did you address that at all? No, not really.

58:02 We're all products of our own experience. In my experience, novel fescue basically takes over warm season grasses and you end up with solid fescue over time. Almost all my experience has been starting with good native grass and the fescue moved in and it was in novel fescue under completely unmanaged grazing, just continuous grazing. Doug, I know you have some different experiences on managing a balance. You want to explain a little bit on keeping a balance of warm and cool season species and how that can be accomplished?

58:44 Yeah, you know I don't think there's any doubt that I would prefer a very diverse mixture of both warm and cool. It is going to take some pretty good management. And so unless somebody had a really good management system in place or was willing to really do a lot of rotating, I probably wouldn't necessarily recommend a diverse cool and warm mix to everybody. So it kind of depends on their management level. But for example, the last conversion I did seeded a year and a half ago was 70 acres of it was a 50 specie mix and it had native cool seasons in it, Virginia rye, Canada rye, and several others.

59:35 Others River oats it also had native warm seasons like Eastern Gamma the Dale mentioned I love Eastern Gamma big blue Indian had a little bit of little blue for us little blue is not a huge huge component of our prairies in Missouri but I know Tucker had asked about it specifically he's from southwest Oklahoma so I'm a believer in mixtures but it's going to take really good management.

1:00:07 If we talk about our soil health principles you know diversity is one of our primary soil health principles and I just don't think we can overstate the importance of diversity. It's tougher management no doubt about it. Monoculture is single more simple. Mixtures are easier to manage in the short term but long term from a soil regeneration standpoint I think that diverse mixtures are a little more beneficial.

1:00:40 If you have warm season grasses and you're concerned about cool season taking over late April burning will those cool season grasses. If all else fails also grazing very heavily in May and June will shift more towards warm season.

1:01:04 You can hit it with roundup in November after the warm seasons have already gone dormant and take out fescue then roundup clef Adam if you really want to pull out the chemical guns. If you want more cool-season component and less warm season graze hard in September and put out nitrogen fertilizer or a lot of legumes. Nitrogen warm season grasses need less nitrogen than cool season grasses so if you shift the nitrogen fertility you can shift the competitive balance between cool and warm season.

1:01:42 Continuous grazing though you will tend to get monocultures of the least palatable plant on the stand. And oftentimes that send to fight fescue degree do not plant a blend if you're going to continue a screens that agree you want to get that palatable that to take over. That's why your recommendation has to evaluate their management level and their management skill.

1:02:11 Mark did you have something to add? You know I was going to say yeah we've talked a lot about warm season and cool season but there's also the difference between native grasses and introduced or improved grasses and so typically reduced grasses are going to be a little higher in inputs they can tolerate more abuses versus what you can do with typically your native grasses require pure inputs which is beauty of native grasses but they don't tolerate some of the abuses that you can get away with when you're talking about Bermuda grass and tall fescue. So I just want to make that differentiation there that yes there's a difference between warm season and cool season annuals perennials but also a big difference between natives and introduced grasses.

1:03:05 A few things tolerate abuse as well as Bermuda grass and tall fescue and that's why they are the two most popular pasture grasses in the United States as most people abuse their pastures and that's just being honest.

1:03:21 Carol's asking can you oversee Bermuda with gamagrass and you guys have any experience doing that? I'd be pretty doubtful that you'd have much success with that. The gamagrass does not like early C you're talking about interceding a warm season into a warm season so they've got the gamagrass is going to be at a big competitive disadvantage against the Bermuda it's also a lot more palatable and so animals are going to the gamagrass out. If you want gamagrass instead of Bermuda grass I would say you probably need to do a complete conversion in that case or establish gamagrass in a separate pasture.

1:04:11 I could be wrong I've seen gamagrass come up in a lot of situations I would have never expected it. I've seen it volunteering in the forum I've seen cattle eat the seed heads and then the next paddock they move into yama grass comes up everywhere so I'm not going to say it can't be done but I'd be hesitant to spend a lot of money. Gamma grass seed is expensive really expensive and I don't want to throw it out. I'm never going to recommend someone throw it out in the situation with a low probability of success.

1:04:49 That kind of comes back to what I was trying to point out is you know the way I utilize native grasses is that you know I'm hard but you know I'm very conscientious about how much pressure up how long I picked up you know how long I let them rest recover versus a Bermuda grass. So I mean because if you have Bermuda grass I mean it is Bermuda grass when you establish Bermuda grass you signed a lifelong contract with fertilizer company.

1:05:26 Animals up there and you can, you know, abuse it but you know, hey, when you get the rainfall you fertilize it. I mean, it's gonna fix itself. And so yeah, typically when you start kind of mixing those grasses, you're almost better off to say, you know what, I'm gonna set aside some acres in the farm, we almost sacrificed acres so that I can go park cattle on it, you know, for a period of time. I need to, and those are your Bermuda grass acres versus what you're gonna do with some of your other grasses.

1:06:01 Yeah, yeah, so that kind of goes. Michael asked the question: what percent of warm season grasses would you recommend? 20 to 30 percent total acres. I think it depends on where you're located. You know, if you're in the Corn Belt, I think that, and Doug, you're in the Corn Belt so correct me if I'm wrong here, I like to see a third of your acres, and some of it depends on whether you want to have year-round grazing or not.

1:06:26 The, you know, in the Corn Belt a reseeded native grass stand is going to be far more productive than a wild native grass stand in the Flint Hills of Kansas, and that's not because the grasses are different but the soil is different. I mean, wild native grass exists because that soil was too rocky, too shallow, to something plow. Now, if you're taking good I awoke rhop ground, putting them back to native grass, it might produce five or six times the biomass of a native grass field in central Kansas or the Nebraska Sandhills or someplace like that. And in my area, the most productive ground is farm ground, and that's what gets planted to cool season grasses.

1:07:25 So we have this perception that cool season grasses are more productive than our native nests, and they are. It's not the grass, it's the soil that they're put on. Now, if you go to Missouri where you've got fescue growing and all the rocky and rough pasture and the crop land, if you take cropland, put it to warm season grass, it completely blow away productivity of the fescue pastures. It's on better soil. And so it's hard to make a blanket statement of that until you know what the soil productivity is that you're putting each of those on.

1:08:02 But in general, warm season grasses need less water, less nitrogen. It can be more productive on less water and less nitrogen and the cool season grasses, but they have a short growing season. Warm season grass might produce 200 pounds a day in mid-July per acre. Cool season grass maybe 80, but it does it for a short period of time, whereas the cool season grasses might have an 8-month growing season instead of a 4 or 5. So it's a lot of it depends on the season.

1:08:48 But in general, I like if I'm in the Corn Belt, I like about 1/3 warm season, 2/3 cool season. And that's enough to get you because you're grazing the warm season for about four months and the cool season for about eight. Doug, you're there.

1:09:02 Well, yeah, one of the things that I guess that I have kind of changed in my opinion a little bit on is that percentage. I think we can get by, particularly if we're talking a cow-calf operation, I think we can get by on a much higher percentage of native, of warm season than that. And here's why: you know, we know that some of our cool season grasses are way, way too high in protein for our beef cows. Now, you know, stalkers, it's a whole different ballgame, but particularly for our beef cows, we've got probably a lot of excess protein for a substantial part of the year, and that causes, I think, quite a few health issues.

1:09:45 So that's where we can come in with, with even during that fall in winter. You mentioned earlier that fescue can have a really high protein even in the winter, and so it doesn't take very much cool season grass mixed in with some of those dormant native warm seasons to provide enough protein to digest those warm season grasses.

1:10:10 You know, that's exactly what they do in the West is provide a protein supplement to digest the dormant native rangeland, the native warm-season rangeland. We can do it back here in our part of the world simply by growing a cool season component to that mixture of native warm seasons. Let those animals select their own, select their own protein to go along with that dormant warm season grass. And I think we've got several examples of people doing that.

1:10:45 And basically, if you can do that, then it comes down to which ones are gonna produce more volume. Most all the stuff that I have seen in our CSS stuff shows that the natives, on a per-year basis, will the warm seasons: big blue, Indian, Eastern Gama, that you mentioned, will, for the most part, on a particular soil type, will produce more pounds per acre than any of the.

1:11:13 Cool seasons, it's a much narrower growing season. That's where we have to learn to graze those dormant forages throughout the year, not just when they're green. And I think that's one of the tricks to spreading that use out over the year. Again, it does depend—you know, I wouldn't expect to get the performance of stockers on something like that, but just a different trick to it.

1:11:43 One of the things that I was picking up on is he's talking about how the grasslands were formed with these herds of bison that would move up, raising intensely on these native grasses all the way from Texas to the Dakotas and how that was developed. But when you break that down on a farm basis, it's kind of you can take those animals around, but I mean you still have seasons of the year where you have animals stuck on that same property. So that's the reason why this implementation of cool season grasses, warm season grasses, annuals, annual rotations of winter, warm and cool season grasses seems to work because we have fences, so those animals don't leave the farm.

1:12:42 I mean, if we're running a stocker operation, I think that's when those animals are there first that time and you can move them on. Well, if you're keeping a cow herd for a longer period, so you have different classes of animals with different nutritional requirements, that's when it starts to make a lot of sense to have warm season perennials, those cool season perennials, those warm and cool annual rotations versus just having grass on your farm.

1:13:23 I think like Mark raises grass-finished beef, and one of the real bottlenecks in raising grass-finished beef is having a high quality pasture source available midwinter, and novel endophyte tall fescue—I don't know any other grass that can touch the quality in the dead of winter at this latitude, that's Kansas, Nebraska, even into Oklahoma. The high quality of stockpiled novel endophyte tall fescue. And that's one of the things that you were speaking about earlier—the days of grazing, how many days of grazing do you plan? Yes, it does have a summer slump. You do have that dead of winter slump, but it's not like it goes completely dormant during the winter. And that's why tall fescue is so good in the winter first—it doesn't go completely dormant because your warm seasons are gonna go completely dormant during the winter. So your nutritional requirements can be pretty high during that period of time, and that's reason why it's important to have that as part of the mix.

1:14:44 Yeah, and I have in the past weaned my calves in December and the calves go on to stockpile novel endophyte fescue and the cows go back on to dormant native range. That's the cheapest bulk feed I can find for a dry cow in midwinter—dormant native range with a little bit of protein in it. And like Doug said, if you can eat, there's two ways to provide protein: you can buy it and bring it, or you can grow it right and mix it with the other grass. So I like, like Doug said, having that cool season component with the warm season dominance and then having a separate pasture where I can use summer annuals on the cool season dominant pasture while my entire herd is on the warm season from May to whether it's warm season annuals or perennials, May to first of September. I can be stockpiling crabgrass, or oats, or sunhemp, or cowpeas, or sorghum Sudan for use in September when I pull off of that native. I've got a huge accumulated volume there that they can go into and extend my fall grazing period out considerably.

1:16:13 Well, that was all great information. There's definitely a few questions here that we did not get to. If you guys have those questions, feel free to email them either to Dale—that's Dale at greencover dot com—or if it's a question for Mark or Doug, you can email myself, that's Noah at greencoverseed dot com. We'll get those dispersed to those guys.

1:16:40 I guess real quick before we wrap up, is there anything that we did not touch on from any of our panelists here? You guys have any final thoughts?

1:16:53 With that, we will probably conclude here. Thank you guys so much for being a part of this, for taking the time out of your day to help us out and share your knowledge and expertise. Next week we're gonna have Dale back—he's gonna be talking about winter stockpile mixes. So excited to see that. You've kind of got a teaser already with the native side of things, but we'll probably be talking about annuals specifically. So thank you guys very much. Again, if you've got those questions, you can email them to Dale at greencoverseed dot com or Noah at greencoverseed dot com. Thank you guys, and we'll see you all next week.

1:17:27 Thanks Doug, thanks Mark. Thank you. Thank you, guys.